Northern Pixels
Market Shaping Our Work About Perspectives Book a Strategy Call

About

Founders who’ve been on your side of the table.

Northern Pixels is a two-person senior team with a specialist bench behind it. We’re not advisors who studied go-to-market from the outside. We built it three times, hit the same walls you’re hitting, got through them, and sold the companies.

Mark M.J. Scott

Mark M.J. Scott

President & Founder

Mark has built go-to-market from founding to acquisition three times, across three genuinely difficult markets: cryptography, industrial AI vision, and enterprise low-code. Zero-Knowledge Systems was acquired by AppDirect. OptoSecurity was acquired by Toyota. TrueContext was acquired by Battery Ventures.

In each case the hard part wasn’t the product. It was convincing enterprise buyers to trust a company they’d never heard of — and the way through was always the same: find the voices those buyers already trusted, and give them a real reason to speak. That pattern became the Market Shaping methodology.

He also serves as a GTM Advisor to a16z Speedrun, working with early-stage AI founders on exactly this problem.

Mark doesn’t advise from the sidelines. He becomes your CMO, runs the Market Shaping playbook himself, and deploys the specialist team around it. At least half of every engagement is his own time, directly — which is the reason we cap the client list.

Danika Weiss

Danika Weiss

VP, Market Strategy & Communications

Danika builds the narrative architecture that turns a good technology into a category position — and then earns the outside voices that make it credible.

She has done it through to an exit. At TrueContext she worked alongside Mark to build the category position that made an enterprise low-code company the default name in a crowded, better-funded market — through to acquisition by Battery Ventures.

On an engagement, that means owning the story: what category you’re in, why it exists, why you lead it, and how that argument holds up under analyst scrutiny. She then builds the relationships that get it told by others — tier-one media, industry analysts, the publications your buyers actually read.

The output isn’t coverage for its own sake. It’s recognition that shortens sales cycles, because buyers arrive already having heard of you from a source they trust, and it’s the market credibility that lifts valuation ceilings when it comes time to raise or sell.

What founders say

Acquired by Battery Ventures
“Mark and his team significantly boosted our brand awareness, trust and credibility. We became the leading enterprise solution in our category.”
Alvaro Pombo Alvaro PomboFounder & CEO, TrueContext

Case study →

Acquired by Toyota
“Northern Pixels was instrumental in shaping our foundational marketing strategy and catapulting us onto the global stage, firmly establishing our position as an emerging category leader.”
Eric Bergeron Eric BergeronFounder & CEO, OptoSecurity

Case study →

Three exits

The same problem, three times, in three different markets.

New category technology that enterprise buyers couldn’t evaluate on their own. In each case, the breakthrough came from outside voices, not louder ones.

TrueContext

Enterprise low-code · Acquired by Battery Ventures

A crowded category with far better-funded competitors. Winning meant becoming the name that industry voices, partners and analysts cited by default — the position no competitor could buy their way into quickly.

OptoSecurity

Industrial AI vision · Acquired by Toyota

AI-driven inspection for buyers who had every reason to be sceptical of an unproven vendor. Analyst validation and documented proof-of-concept work turned a category unknown into an emerging category leader.

Zero-Knowledge Systems

Cryptography · Acquired by AppDirect

A cryptography company selling into a market with no established category and no analysts covering it. Marketing and communications strategies building the credibility layer was crucial to helping the market define the problem before we could be positioned as the answer to it.

How we work

We work with four clients at a time.

This isn’t a positioning device. It’s arithmetic. At least half of every engagement is Mark’s own time, and there are only so many hours in which that can be true. Take a fifth client and the promise quietly becomes something else — a junior team, a weekly check-in, a strategy document.

It also means we turn down work that would suit us. If we’re at capacity when you call, we’ll tell you immediately rather than holding you in a pipeline. And when we do take an engagement, we’re in it — market shaping compounds over quarters, not weeks, and a firm juggling twenty accounts cannot stay in one long enough for that to happen.

What it costs

$15K/month and up

Engagements start at $15K/month: a senior, exit-proven CMO plus a specialist team, for less than the loaded cost of one mid-level marketing hire.

Start a conversation

If your deals are stalling, let’s find out why.

Bring one deal that should have closed and didn’t. In 30 minutes we’ll tell you where credibility broke down and what we’d do about it. No pitch deck, no price list ambush.

Book a Strategy Call →