Our Story

Origin of Mythos

Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller: 

It was 2010, and I was leading a print and data services business. One of our clients wanted help producing an endowment report.

I remember thinking,
“What’s an endowment report, and how hard can this be?”
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Very hard, it turned out. The process of gift reporting had many moving parts and no tools to manage them. Great ideas often start as great questions. “How can we manage this better?” was the question that launched Mythos.

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_{Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller, and Frank Strube, Chief Architect, tell the story of Mythos starting as a prototype for George Washington University envisioned on a cocktail napkin and brought to life at a beach Hackathon.}

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The Early Days

Robb Hoffheins, Head of Product: 

The first version of Mythos was a straightforward tool to organize all of the variable content that went into an impact report.

Right from the beginning, we realized that the tool had potential to grow into something much larger—a platform of tools that streamlined donor communications.
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My job was to help everyone on the development team see where we were going.

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_{Robb Hoffheins, Head of Product, Frank Strube, Chief Architect and Ed Rozeski, Technical Services Manager, talk about the strategic and technical aspects of taking Mythos from a simple web app to the sophisticated platform it is today.}

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Scaling as a Platform

Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller: 

As the product grew, it became clear that the problem we were solving would help a broad cohort of institutions. We needed to commit to becoming a product focused company, and this would be a dramatic departure from our traditional service business model. Robb’s prior experience with online products made him the perfect person to help assemble a product team.

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_{Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller and Robb Hoffheins, Head of Product, discuss how Robb joined to lead the Mythos team and how the team was built with diverse talents who share a commitment to listening to users.}

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Embracing Our Service Culture

Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller: 

As the business grew, we learned that not all of our clients were the same. They had different internal resources, unique reporting requirements, and an endless list of data formats and needs. Bundling all of this into a powerful online platform wasn’t going to be easy.

Then I remembered—
“Hey, we know how to run as a service organization.”
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_{Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller, Andrea Dreusicke, Head of Customer Success, and Ed Rozeski, Technical Services Manager, talk about the importance of client onboarding and ongoing support tailored to each client's unique needs.}

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Realizing the Storytelling Potential

Robb Hoffheins, Head of Product: 

Our commitment to stewardship began with simplifying the restricted gift reporting process. But almost immediately, our clients started looking for other ways to use the product.

We realized the core value of relevance and storytelling worked for any type of gift reporting.
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_{Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller and Robb Hoffheins, Head of Product, talk about the evolving opportunities for stewardship storytelling with Mythos.}

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Efficiency Gives Time Back

Andrea Dreusicke, Head of Customer Success: 

As our user base grew, so did our collective understanding of the stewardship process. We realized how important our tool had become in our client’s daily work. The feedback we received was humbling—the tool was becoming theirs.

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_{Andrea Dreusicke, Head of Customer Success, Ezra Schwartz, Junior Software Engineer and Frank Strube, Chief Architect, talk about how Mythos gives users time back with its efficiency and how that motivates them to make Mythos the very best platform.}

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Users Shape Mythos

Andrea Dreusicke, Head of Customer Success: 

In 2022, we hosted our first Mythos User meeting. We held a dinner at ADRP’s International Conference, and we asked our users for their best ideas for the product. The feedback was fantastic. All of the ideas made it into our product roadmap, at which point, we realized this was the most efficient way to build the product.

Client input is now the largest driver of product roadmap planning.
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_{Jon Budington, Chief Storyteller, Andrea Dreusicke, Head of Customer Success, Frank Strube, Chief Architect and Ed Rozeski, Technical Services Manager, talk about how user feedback provided in one-on-one discussions and the Mythos User Community Meetings and Forum directly shapes the Mythos development roadmap.}

Mythos Into the Future

As we continue to listen to our customers and integrate their ideas into Mythos, we see endless opportunities for Mythos to help our customers engage their donors in new and exciting ways.
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