01
The number, not the deck
Dashboards die when they become slide factories. Everything we ship has to survive one test: would a district manager open it on a Monday at 8:40 with coffee in one hand? If it needs a training session, it goes back.
About Northkite
Built by people who closed the register.
Northkite started in 2023 when two retail operators got tired of learning Tuesday what the floor already knew Saturday. We build the live sales board we wished we'd had — and we're still small enough that the founders answer the demo emails.
2023
Founded in Portland, OR
42
Omnichannel retailers on board
11
People, three of them ex-floor managers
90s
Median time from signup to first sync
The story
From a printed Friday report to a live Monday board.
In late 2022, Mara Okonkwo was running fourteen stores and getting her numbers the way most district managers still do: a PDF every Friday, built Thursday night, describing a week that ended Wednesday. Daniel Kessler was the engineer who kept being asked to "just export it to Excel real quick."
The first version of Northkite was a single dark screen on a breakroom TV showing one thing — revenue by region, today, updating every five minutes. Floor leads started checking it before their shift. Nobody had asked them to. That was the whole product thesis: sales teams will watch a number that moves, and they will not read a report that doesn't.
Three years later that screen has become a customizable board — KPIs you choose, charts you can reshape, a forecast overlay you can actually inspect — used on the sales floors of 42 omnichannel retailers, from Verdant Home & Garden to Bellweather Beauty. The breakroom TV is still the deployment we're proudest of.
Principles
Three rules every feature has to pass.
02
No black boxes
Our forecast overlay is a trend-line projection you can inspect on hover — not a proprietary model we ask you to trust. When a number moves, you should always be able to answer "why" without a support ticket.
03
Honest defaults, easy exits
Read-only connector scopes. Full CSV export on any plan, including free. Data deleted 30 days after you cancel. We want retailers to stay because the board earns it, not because leaving is painful.
The team
Eleven people. No org chart worth drawing.
Six of us below; the other five would rather ship than pose. Every one of us does a support rotation — including the CEO.
Mara Okonkwo
Co-founder & CEO
Ran 14 stores for a Pacific Northwest outdoor chain before deciding the Friday report deserved to die.
Daniel Kessler
Co-founder & CTO
Built pricing systems at a grocery co-op; still reviews every connector's data mapping by hand.
Priya Raman
Head of Product
Former merchandising analyst. Owns the rule that no widget ships without a visible "last updated" pill.
Jonah Tran
Founding Engineer
Wrote the first CSV importer in a weekend after a customer mailed us a literal spreadsheet printout.
Sofia Lindgren
Sales Engineer
Runs every demo personally — the "two time slots and a prep checklist" email is hers.
Amos Hale
Support Lead
Ex-store keyholder. Answers same-business-day and refuses to hide behind a chatbot.