Mode

In 2013, Ben Stancil, Derek, and Josh were working together as a data team at Yammer, an enterprise social network acquired by Microsoft. The three built an internal tool to help them quickly answer business questions about product usage and share those insights across the organization. What started as a solution to their own problem began spreading within Microsoft, and when they talked to founders across Silicon Valley, they discovered that Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Pinterest, and LinkedIn had all built nearly identical tools. "If everybody's building the same thing, then maybe there's a market for this," they realized. By August 2013, the three first-time founders decided to take the leap and start Mode.

Mode launched in April 2014—just nine months after founding. Looking back, Ben admits they probably moved too fast. "I think we probably did that too quickly," he reflects. "We were anxious to get the product out there." More importantly, they underinvested in customer research and market positioning. They understood their core customer—analysts and data scientists—incredibly well because they had lived that life. But they missed critical market dynamics. Mode fell awkwardly between two existing categories: traditional BI dashboarding tools and deep-dive data science tools like Jupyter notebooks. This positioning gap would haunt them early on. When customers asked "what is this?", Ben and the team had no clean answer. "We knew that mode fit between those two things," Ben says. "One of the things that I don't think we did enough of was figuring out exactly what to call that." The lack of a clear noun—or positioning category—made early sales conversations unnecessarily hard.

Mode acquired its first customers through three distinct channels. First, content marketing: Ben, coming from an analytics background but with nothing to analyze on day one, began writing entertaining, data-driven blog posts about pop culture, sports, and politics—pieces reminiscent of what FiveThirtyEight would later become famous for. The very first post was a data-driven analysis of Miley Cyrus and the VMAs. These posts attracted data professionals not looking to buy, but intrigued by how Mode was talking to them. Second, traditional product launch buzz brought early adopters curious about the new tool. Third, their personal network in the analytics community provided a steady stream of early customers. Ben emphasizes this: "Using your own kind of personal network for a customer base initially is often going to be the easiest way to go."

The biggest challenge Mode faced was that each new customer pulled them in different directions. A dashboarding-focused customer would ask for TV-screen visualization features. A data science customer would request machine learning integrations. Without discipline, Mode risked becoming an unfocused product trying to satisfy incompatible visions. Ben's solution was ruthless positioning. They created a tagline—"By Analysts, for Analysts"—and doubled down on content that spoke directly to analysts, not to BI teams or data science teams. They avoided language that might attract the wrong customers. "The thing that you have to be disciplined about is not to say don't take on those customers, but it's being saying the same things to both of them so that their expectations of where you're going is the same." This forced them to sometimes say no to customers or clearly manage expectations. Over time, this discipline paid off.

Ben also learned a crucial lesson about decision-making. With three analytical founders, the team had a tendency to hedge and caveat—to think in shades of gray. But running a startup demands speed and commitment. "The best decision is essentially the one that you make quickly and the one that you stick to," he says. He now advises founders: if you've thought about a decision this long and still don't have a clear answer, just choose one and commit. "You could probably make both work. Just choose the one that you're kind of more excited about... and just stick to it." The decision itself matters less than the commitment to it.

Mode has grown into an eight-figure SaaS business with 150-200 employees, raised approximately $81 million in funding, and serves enterprise customers including Anheuser-Busch, Bloomberg, Condé Nast, Lyft, DoorDash, and Zillow. The company ultimately did carve out its own category—what the industry now calls "analytics tools"—though it took years to get there. Ben continues writing, publishing content roughly weekly, which keeps him connected to his audience and reminds him that startup life is a marathon, not a series of finish lines. "Every week is going to have that hill to climb," he says. "You have to be excited about the prospect of climbing the hill, not the view from the top, because you never really get there."