Building an Analytics Company to $10M+ in Revenue: Mode Analytics CEO Derek Steer (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What use cases did you find the most success in? Were there dominant use cases? 

Derek Steer: Mode is a horizontal platform for analysis and so we are useful for whatever an analyst or data scientist wants to do with Mode. We get used for all kinds of stuff, for all kinds of companies of different sizes around the world.

We don’t have a vertical strategy like using a support team application that helps with call center metrics. We don’t do it that way. People use Mode the most for the non-standard business models.

Twitch is a good example of that. They are a three-sided marketplace where they have viewers, content creators, and video game manufacturers. The way they think about understanding all those audiences and their success metrics is challenging. Even two sided marketplaces like eBay, which is not our customer, can find a valid use case. Just the notion of buyers and sellers is a concept that breaks a lot of pre-packaged analytical tools.

You want to understand buyers and sellers on eBay in two different ways. To do that, you house analysts and data scientists and they use power tools to get specific about the behavior that they are looking at. Those are cases where Mode is great because we cater to the speed and flexibility that analysts and data scientists need.

Prepackaged tools, like Google Analytics, have a prescribed way of looking at the world that is great for most companies as they begin. If you need to understand your buyers and sellers coming in and you need to look at them separately, Google Analytics cannot do that for you.

The space is much more crowded than that. There are a lot more players in the space, so getting toward specific use cases depends on the stage of the business and what they are trying to do. There are a couple of examples that people have used Mode. 

Sramana Mitra: It is a very crowded space. Analytics today and especially in the last five years has been crowded. How have you positioned yourself to deal with that noise?

Derek Steer: We positioned ourselves with the audience that we know best which are people who do the job that I myself and my co-founders used to do. We mentioned that the decision to start Mode was around an understanding of what to make for this particular audience and that it was less about market research.

The thing we found is that as long as we make sure that we are the best thing for this audience, we are going to be successful. We expanded beyond that in part because our audience needs to look credible and to provide tools to the rest of the company.

We have gone broader than just analysts and data scientists in the last few years, but we always have been in service for that core audience. That is the thing that is always going to differentiate Mode. We don’t have a competitor who can say the same thing.

It’s a crowded market, but if you are an analyst or data scientist, you would be foolish to not check out Mode before making a decision about how to serve the analysis part for your company. We don’t win the marketing team. The marketing team picks something else because they don’t have the technical resources to get started on Mode. 

Sramana Mitra: Is there a size of company where you are seeing this behavior? Is it the large enterprises that you are finding those kinds of users the most? 

Derek Steer: It’s all over the place and for different reasons. We are successful in tiny startups like the 10 to 20 person companies because the person who makes that decision is often the technology officer or the head of product who values the way that Mode works. We are appealing to that audience because it maps to the stuff that they already know.

For the bigger size companies like Lyft, for example, we are successful because they have big investments in these data teams. They care about accelerating those teams to be able to work effectively and Mode is specifically made for them. 

Sramana Mitra: You are saying that most of these people who are making these buying decisions are finding you through your content marketing?

Derek Steer: A lot of people find us through content marketing. We do other stuff now too. We do all the standard online advertising. We work with industry analysts. We have really good ratings on the G2 Crowd and Capterra.

People who use Mode love working with our software and are happy to talk about it online. It’s heavily inbound driven in part because our core audience is not open to being cold-called. When we tried to do that in the past, the results were bad. 

Sramana Mitra: I think content marketing is a powerful way of marketing given how the industry is today in almost all domains. If you have good content about technology or a solution and are talking about the problem that they can resonate with, you have an opportunity to establish thought leadership and connection with that audience. That is a powerful way of selling.

Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building an Analytics Company to $10M+ in Revenue: Mode Analytics CEO Derek Steer
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