We don't make software that is terrible.

We have all used software that’s terrible, software with ugly design, or software that is slow. Painfully, ridiculously slow. At Ethos we don’t want to make software that’s terrible, there is already enough of it in the world, and we don’t want to add to it. This is especially true in the non-profit sector. Part of the reason we started this business was because the non-profit sector is so underserved and is usually forced to use slow, terrible software. We’ve baked this philosophy right in our mission in the engineering department at Ethos -

We want to build a great product that is easy to use and makes us all proud. This means having opinions, having discussions, and focusing on constant improvement.

We want to have the best user experience we can. This means making sure our system is robust and reliable. This means starting from the user experience and working backward to the technology, not starting with a technology and trying to shoehorn it into a user experience.

As engineers we have all worked on products that are terrible too. There are few things worse than putting in a hard day's work, stepping back and thinking “nope, this thing is still bad”. We don’t want to do that at Ethos. We make it our mission to build software that we love, and more importantly that our customers love, and that makes the world better, not that it just makes money. So how are we doing this? How are we making software we can be proud of?

All of us come from different walks of life, this is part of what makes us unique and valuable to the team. These different experiences mean we each have skills that are slightly different from one another. We also have different perspectives, different personalities, different strengths and weaknesses. At Ethos all of this uniqueness is critical to achieving our goals, it is the special sauce that makes us great as a team. It is also what allows us to make a great product and make something we are all proud of.

We also love our customers and we want our customers to love our product, to us this means having a user centered design approach. It means having lots of ideas, validating those ideas through user testing, using data to make decisions, and focusing on customer feedback. It also means making real changes based on all of this incoming information, then rinse and repeat. The better we do, the more our customers love us, the better we do, the more customers love us, and on and on it goes.