About Status Hero

Meet the Founder

Hi there, I’m Henry Poydar, founder and CEO of Status Hero. I live and work in New York. I’ve been writing software and leading both co-located and remote software teams for over twenty years.

The Problem

A few years ago, I was a co-founder and the CTO of an angel-backed web application startup, which was acquired by a publicly-traded software company.

As part of the acquisition, my team and I were trusted with swapping out a crucial piece of ten-year-old infrastructure without any disruption to the business.

Our small team quickly grew to more than 50 people across engineering, ops, product, marketing, execs, and more — all spread out over several time zones. Meeting requests and pings of all sorts were coming in, at all hours, across different channels.

And, in truth, only about 5% of these messages really deserved my attention. But because I didn’t know which 5% mattered, I had to triage them all.

I was both drowning in information but also didn’t have a read on what was actually getting built and how I could be most useful to my team. Chaos.

Searching for Signal

A few current and former Googlers turned me on to their solution for the madness: a process called “snippets.”

It’s remarkably simple: each week, team members respond to an automated email asking for accomplishments from the previous week and intentions for the upcoming one. I implemented this system and saw immediate results. These emails from direct reports became my “source of truth” for the project. But it still had drawbacks. Most notably, all the data had to flow through me.

Building a Company

The realization occurred to me that the same snippets-like system of check-ins could work for any size team or project. That’s how the product was born (with some key improvements).

To make the best product possible, I looked for other tech professionals who could not only understand the value of what I was building, but also tap into their own unique backgrounds and high-level acumen to create the most useful, robust software.

Status Hero has since grown into a small team of industry experts. Together we combine a wealth of experience from some of the world’s leading project management and software development companies, including Basecamp and GitLab. These giants were pioneers in the remote-working space (GitLab even authored the Remote Manifesto) and were built on some of the same core values that we share: empower workers with the tools needed to do their best work, wherever that may be, and streamline the process as much as possible.

With our team’s experience cemented in a deep-level understanding of and appreciation for independent remote work, we are able to refine and tune our product to improve your daily workflow at every stage.

We Use What We Build

At Status Hero, we use our product daily to manage our all-remote team’s workload. All support requests are answered by people who rely on Status Hero and know it inside and out. We don’t have a dedicated “support” person - we believe that’s just part of everyone’s job.

So we love critical feedback and are dedicated to continually improving Status Hero. After all, we are customers too. Please send us your thoughts!

Cheers,

Henry