Omer (00:09.280)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Ben Stancil, the co founder and chief analytics officer of Mode, a collaborative data science platform for analysts and data scientists to analyze, visualize and share data.
In 2013, Ben and his co founders Derek and Josh were working for the same company where they had built an internal tool to help them do their jobs.
They discovered that a lot of companies were building similar tools and figured that there might be an opportunity for them to launch a startup.
So the three of them decided to take the leap.
In the last eight years, they've grown MOAD into an eight figure SaaS business with over 150 employees and have raised $81 million in funding.
In this episode I talked to Ben about how they got started and acquired early customers while overcoming the challenges of all three of them being first time founders.
The struggles they faced with positioning a product that didn't fit well into any existing product category and often confused customers.
How the founders learned to overcome analysis paralysis and make faster decisions without continuously second guessing themselves.
How they use content marketing to attract new customers and create engaging and shareable content for a topic that's pretty dry.
And we talk about lessons Ben has learned about the best ways for founders to stay motivated so they can get through some of the hard times.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Ben, welcome to the show.
Benn Stancil (01:57.660)
Great to be here.
Omer (01:59.020)
So do you have a favorite quote?
Something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed that you can share with us?
Benn Stancil (02:04.700)
I don't know that this is necessarily like a motivational quote, but it's a quote that's I think helped me through a lot of the things that I do now and have done in my time at Mode.
So it's a quote from an author.
She's a writer for the New Yorker.
She wrote a book book that got a lot of press I think a year ago called Trick Mirror.
Gia Tolentino, she was talking through about her writing process and she said the thing that she does is she reads it over and over again until she can stand it.
And I think as someone who has nail, does a fair amount of writing on, on data topics and things like that.
That's a, it's a really good motivator for me to remind me of like this is how you, you know, when Something is good is basically keep doing it until you like it.
And like, you will be your harshest critic.
Get it to a point when you like it and when you like it, it's probably far enough along.
And I think it's also, there's something about like, it's not read it over and over until you like it, it's read it over and over until you can stand it.
Which to me is also like a reflection of even if you don't feel like this is great, that's probably actually much better than you think it is.
And so it's sort of a reminder in some ways to push it to a point that you don't hate it, but don't give yourself too much of a hard time if you don't think it's the greatest thing ever.
Because nothing you create you're ever going to think is the greatest thing ever.
Omer (03:14.240)
Yeah, right.
I love it.
So tell us about Mode.
What does the product do?
Who is it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Benn Stancil (03:23.040)
For sure, so Mode is a analytics and data science platform for analysts and data scientists, though also for the rest of the business.
So the main problem that we try to solve is companies now have a lot of data.
They want to make decisions with that data.
They have kind of a collection of tools that help them do that, but they often do it in a fairly disjointed way and don't help the kind of data professionals do it in the way that they want.
So for instance, companies will have BI tools for kind of dashboarding and reporting, and analysts and data scientists will have more technical tools for doing deeper analysis.
But those two things are often very disconnected.
The tools that analysts and data scientists have things like Jupyter notebooks and RStudio and those kinds of things.
Desktop SQL editors aren't easy to share.
They're not easy to communicate with other people around their business.
And so as a result, what happens is analysts could ask questions based on what happened in a dashboard.
They have to recreate that work in some other tool that's more suitable for them.
They then figure out some answer.
They have to share it by taking a screenshot, sending it over to email.
There's kind of a very difficult back and forth between that analyst and whoever the business stakeholder is they're trying to work with.
It really slows down the process of how they're answering those questions.
And then once they answer it, those answers kind of get forgotten and lost in emails and slack threads.
And those Kinds of things.
So what MO does is it really streamlines that entire process where you can build out dashboards and reports that you need.
When you have questions about them, it's very easy to open those up into more technical tools where analysts can explore them further with SQL and Python and R. And then when they have new answers that answer these deeper questions, they can just copy and paste URLs, send it back and forth to their stakeholders and have a much more streamlined collaboration process with those folks to be able to answer questions much faster.
So really our aim is to help businesses understand their data better, to answer their questions faster.
And we do that by helping the analysts and data professionals really do their jobs more effectively.
Omer (05:16.410)
Got it.
Great.
And give us a sense of the size of the business in terms of revenue, size of team.
Benn Stancil (05:23.490)
Sure.
So Mode is about 150 to 200 people.
So we're in that range in terms of revenue.
It's an eight figure business.
And we've been around now for about eight years and have raised around $80 million over the course of a year.
Omer (05:39.790)
And in terms of your customers, I don't know the number of customers, but I know that you've got a number of enterprise customers like Anheuser Busch and Bloomberg.
And who else is working with you guys?
Benn Stancil (05:51.710)
Yeah, so we have a range of different customers as you mentioned, Anheuser Busch, Bloomberg, some other big, big name customers that folks have probably heard of.
Conde Nast, Lyft, Doordash, Zillow or all, all customers.
We, so we sell to, to anybody who's kind of forward thinking about data that one of the things we see is a lot of companies see data as, or used to see data as a tool for reporting.
It was the sort of thing that you put into binders to send to execs once a quarter for their, their board meetings and things like that.
Now people are increasingly using data for driving day to day decisions, for being more operational.
And so Mode is a tool that really helps with that process.
And so any company, big or small, new industry, old industry that is thinking about data in that way is a company that we work with.
So that obviously includes a lot of tech companies, but it also includes a lot of media companies that are thinking this way.
It also includes some hundreds of year old companies like Anheuser Busch that are trying to modernize the way they operate and are seeing their businesses now, data businesses, as much as they are sort of the traditional operations and you know, package good businesses.
Omer (07:02.540)
Awesome.
Now you founded the business in 2013 with your co founders, Derek and Josh, and none of you guys had ever founded a business before.
So I think this is an interesting experience in terms of first time founders and where you've taken this business over the last seven, eight years.
So why don't we stop there and talk a little bit about what were you guys doing at the time and how did you come up with the idea for Mode?
Benn Stancil (07:31.450)
Yeah, so we, the three of us were working together on a data team at a company called Yammer.
Yammer was an early version of Microsoft Teams basically, or similar to Microsoft Teams or Slack or any new ways of communicating at work products.
So Yammer was acquired by Microsoft.
It did not become teams, but it again, sort of inspired by similar ideas.
We were on the data team there and as a part of that data team, we had to serve people around the business to answer these questions that they were trying to answer about how people were using our products.
And so Yammer was a kind of forward thinking company in this regard.
It modeled the way that they built their products and marketed it after the way that social gaming companies actually did at the time, where a lot of it is, all right, let's launch a feature, let's ab test it, let's see how people use it, let's understand what drives more usage and then make decisions that way.
And that's now become sort of fairly conventional in the way that a lot of products get developed, but it wasn't at the time.
And so Yammer had a fairly robust data team that was responsible for helping people around the business make those decisions.
And to do that, we had built a series of internal tools that enabled us as analysts to very quickly answer questions to share those answers with other folks.
It was essentially the tools that we lived in to do our jobs.
And so once we got acquired, a couple things happened where we saw one, that tool started, so Yammer got acquired by Microsoft.
That tool started to spread around Microsoft where we realized, hey, this is actually a valuable thing for not just us.
We weren't like some special data team.
There was a pretty wide demand for this kind of tool within Microsoft.
And it was also something, once we started talking to other companies around Silicon Valley, we realized a lot of people had built similar products internally.
So Uber had a version of this and Airbnb had a version and Facebook had a version and Spotify and Pinterest and LinkedIn, all these companies had built these kind of query tools for analysts to do their work and then send results to people they were working with.
And so in seeing both of those things, we basically realized, hey, if, like, everybody's building the same thing, then maybe there's a market for this.
And there's a market.
You know, as analytics and data science becomes more prevalent, we don't really have any tools that are designed for those specific folks.
Why don't we build a sort of dedicated suite of tools for those people?
And so that's.
That's really what we set out to do.
Omer (09:47.930)
So this tool that you'd built internally, was that basically like the first iteration of Mode or a very similar product?
Benn Stancil (09:56.890)
Yeah, you can.
I mean, it was.
It was the version of Mode that you would imagine being built in a quarter of the time by an internal team.
As an internal tool that's got plenty of rough edges and tons of things, you're like, it'd be cool if we could do this, but we're never going to actually do it.
And so I think the bones of it were similar.
It was.
It was structurally kind of the same idea, but.
But, you know, implemented in a very different way.
Much less robust about this kind of thing.
Omer (10:21.550)
And.
And so you were at Microsoft for about a year?
Benn Stancil (10:25.230)
Yeah, just about.
Omer (10:26.430)
I think I was at Microsoft at the time as well.
Benn Stancil (10:28.990)
Oh, nice.
Omer (10:29.870)
This was back in.
Yeah.
So this was.
The acquisition was around 2013.
Benn Stancil (10:34.510)
Yeah, the AC.
So the acquisition was a 2012, I think it was announced in the spring of 2012, and then.
And then closed in the fall and we joined.
Yammer was a part of the Office division.
So we joined with the intent of being a kind of social layer around O365, which is their online Word and Excel and things like that, kind of their Google Docs competitors.
Yammer was that for a bit.
And then I think shortly after the acquisition was actually when Slack started to blow up.
And so Microsoft turned to developing Teams as kind of their social layer instead of.
Instead of using Yammer.
And Teams was modeled more after Slack.
And now I think, obviously Teams is doing quite well.
And Yammer exists, I think, but in a sort of diminished form.
Omer (11:21.770)
Okay, so you guys have got the idea.
You've kind of seen a proof of concept working internally with Teams and this.
How did you go about starting the business?
Benn Stancil (11:29.770)
Yeah, I mean, so we were fortunate in that way that we.
Coming out of an acquisition that you get.
There's a lot of coattails to ride in that.
In that process.
Like, I joined shortly before.
I joined Yammer, shortly before it got acquired.
I. I had no material impact on that acquisition whatsoever.
However, when you leave a company that has a successful Exit like that.
A lot of people see it as like, oh, you came from a successful company, therefore you must know what you're doing.
Not necessarily the case, but, but you were able to, at least in Silicon Valley, kind of ride some of that, that momentum.
And so we essentially went out and, you know, we had the idea for the business.
We knew what we wanted to build.
There were a bunch of people we knew through the acquisition and stuff that, that were interested in putting a little bit of like angel money into it just to help us get the thing off the ground.
Also through the acquisition, we've, you know, worked with a bunch of people that we knew were good.
And so a handful of the, the yammer folks that we had worked with that knew us and we knew them ultimately came over to join to help build the very first versions of it.
And so the company kind of grew from there.
But that was, that was, in a lot of ways the seed of it was sort of using the network that we'd already had and building from that.
So, you know, I think it speaks a little bit to how Silicon Valley works, that it's much easier if you have that network.
And I understand, you know, we're very sort of fortunate and privileged to be able to do that.
But if you have it, then, then there's certainly a lot of avenues for being able to start something or at least sort of get the initial idea off the ground and see how it might go.
Omer (12:55.540)
And how long did it take you to build the product?
And were you guys also going out and doing some customer development and doing any more validation of this as a product, or did you kind of feel like, well, we've seen this work, we understand this enough.
From what we saw internally and from what we've seen in some of the organizations, we know what we need to go and build.
Benn Stancil (13:20.900)
So in terms of the timing, we launched it, we launched the first version of Mode pretty quickly.
We launched it, I believe, in April of 2014 after founding the company in August of 2013.
So it was about a nine month period between when we went from starting the company to when we went from publicly launching the product.
Frankly, I think we probably did that too quickly.
I think we sort of were anxious to get the product out there.
We liked what we had built and we're like, let's go show it to people.
And so, you know, I think you could probably take a little more time than we did, but, but, you know, so it is in, in terms of doing the customer research and things like that.
I think this is an area where we actually underinvested.
I, we, we understood the customer very well for a particular type of customer.
Like we knew analysts, we knew data scientists, we knew the problems that we had had really well because we had been solving them for, for a few years between the three of us at at Yammer and we'd talk to a bunch of people while we were there just like we had lived that, that life.
I think we under invested in understanding the dynamics of the market and I think it's easy to do that when you're, you're excited about a company, excited about an idea.
It's easy to think like I've got this great idea and I just want to go out and do it.
And the, the kind of market research feels kind of like a grind and I think we, we should have done more of it frankly.
Like we should have had a little better sense of exactly where we thought we would be positioned in the market.
Exactly what other tools people were out there working on, what problems they were solving with those tools, where were their gaps in that, that set of tools?
You know, we had some intuitive sense of this and would do some customer development to help validate it or, or prove it wrong.
But I think that's something that, that if I were to do it all over again you can do for a fairly long amount of time and just learn a ton about.
And the more that you have more of that foundation you have, the much better you'll make decisions in building the product and figure out who to sell it to and things like that.
So, so we did some of it but, but I think you can almost never do enough.
Omer (15:19.160)
Yeah.
Give me an example of why that was something you look back and feel like you should have done differently.
What was the outcome or the challenge of underinvesting in that?
Benn Stancil (15:29.000)
So I think one of the things that that mode was a product that fell to some extent between existing products that we.
There were bi tools and dashboards which are kind of the things that people put on TV screens.
Here's a chart of our number of signups or active users or revenue or orders or whatever that are kind of static reporting.
And then there are these set of tools that are the jupyters in rstudios and sort of the deep dive analytical products.
And we knew that mode fit between those two things and we knew we could talk to some customers and describe that and they would see it and they would get it.
One of the things though I don't think we did enough of was figuring out exactly.
Like what to call that that, that the industry had defined terms for the dashboarding stuff.
They defined terms for the, the analytics and data science products.
Mode fit into a thing that wasn't really defined yet.
And so in some ways I think we were like, well, the product will work.
We don't need to worry about it.
We don't need to figure out exactly how to talk about it.
That'll be fine.
And, and for some customers, that was the case.
For other customers, they needed to know what they were buying.
Like, they just, they just needed a noun for it.
And I don't think we, when we talked to those folks and we didn't have an answer, it made it a much harder sell or a much harder in the early days just to get them to try it because they're like, well, is it a BI tool?
It doesn't look like a BI tool.
Is it a data science tool?
And the way that I think of these other tools doesn't look like that either.
And so I think that had we done more kind of upfront research and things like that, we would have had a lot better language to talk to those folks, a lot easier time describing what exactly we're building.
And so that's the sort of thing where not to say we would necessarily solve that problem exactly, but we kind of under anticipated some of the dynamics in that market and it led us to having a bunch of conversations with early customers that I'm sure could have gone better.
People would have been more interested in what we're building if we just had sort of the terms to describe it in a cleaner way.
Omer (17:19.880)
Did you ever find that noun?
So like, how long did it take?
Benn Stancil (17:23.480)
So not really.
Actually, no.
I think that is changing in that the.
There is, there is now.
And I was actually just talking to someone yesterday in the, in the diagram of the, the data tooling in the world, there is now a box that is kind of Mode's box.
It doesn't have a clean name.
It's sort of analytics tools is what, what I think they named it.
But Mode has created a bit of a box there because I don't think we, we sold that well up front.
It took us longer to get there than, than we would have, but it's still a thing.
I think that the noun is missing a little bit.
And there are, there are times when I think that's appropriate.
Not like it's easy for every company when you start it to be like, we're going to define our own category.
That's a really steep Hill to climb moat has over the course of eight years carved out a category in some senses, but, but it's difficult to say like we are a new category of tool.
People are going to come to you with a lot of pre existing sort of notions of how things work and they're going to very strongly want to put you in one of those boxes.
Omer (18:22.750)
Yeah.
Okay, great.
So you've got that challenge while you, you guys are building the product and trying to go out and find customers.
Once you launch the product, what was the reaction apart from people having to figure out where mode actually fit, what happened when they started to use the product?
Benn Stancil (18:41.350)
If, if you're in the very early stages of, of building a company or a product, there, there are sort of two phases to your company's life.
There's the phase before you have customers and the phase after.
As soon as you have customers, a lot of things change.
So both for, for better and worse, really for on the good side, obviously it's great to have customers.
You get a lot of feedback, you hear what people like.
You know, you, you actually, there's a lot of validation in that when you're, you're seeing someone use it and you see how they, how they enjoy it or, or what it is they're frustrated by and you know, kind of you're working on the right things or you can adjust.
So a lot of that is the entire dynamic changes there where it's no longer you having to kind of conjure stuff up in your head, but instead you can follow the pull of what it is people are asking for.
The not downside, but the other kind of side of that is you now have customers you have to support.
Which means not only you've got to keep the service up and you've got to make sure everything works and bugs are suddenly no longer kind of a thing to get to, but are things that are, that are issues that need to be addressed because you're affecting how well somebody can do their job.
But you also start having commitments, you also start having customers who are coming to you with the expectation of what it is you're going to do next.
And so especially in the early days, like nobody's buying a product that was just launched because of the thing that product does.
You know, they're buying it for a seed of something that it does and the sense that it's going to grow into something that's really exciting and that they want to influence that and things like that.
And so each customer you add has a new expectation now of like, okay, what are they?
What's the future that they are investing in when they buy your product?
And so that now starts to, starts to pull you towards those futures.
You start to get tied to that kind of thing.
And so, you know, I think that changes a lot too where your roadmaps are again no longer your ideas, but are the ideas that are, that are in your customers heads as well.
And so you've gotta, you've gotta kind of make sure you're following the pull in that direction.
Omer (20:36.570)
Yeah, Give me one example of that.
Because I know one of the things that you guys struggled with was you were getting all kinds of random requests from people.
Benn Stancil (20:44.810)
Yeah, I mean, so part of that I think, you know, I mentioned that we fell between, we were positioned between the kind of traditional BI tooling world and the data science world.
That meant that if you look at sort of the distribution of customers, there are a number of customers who would be right in the middle of that who are like, we're looking for something that combines these things.
Exactly what you do is exactly right.
We have no complaints.
But then you'd also have some customers that come in on the tail end.
One who's largely looking for a dashboarding tool, but is a little bit frustrated with how the other ones work and wants something that's got a few of the features that you have, or somebody who's mostly looking for a tool for their analysts and data scientists, you know that, that they like the fact that it's got some dashboarding bits to it, but mostly they're just looking for a workflow for the way those folks work.
And so those two customers on either end of that distribution would pull us towards the other where they're like, I mostly want a dashboarding tool so give me the features that help me enhance that.
And the people on the data science side would say, great, the dashboarding stuff is more than enough.
Give me the things that help my data science.
And so the thing that you have to be disciplined about, it's not to say like 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.
That you don't want the dashboarding company to think, okay, the next thing you're going to build is a great way for me to put this on a TV so that I can put it up in my office and the data science people to think, great, the next thing you're going to build is an integration with the aws machine learning infrastructure so that I can start deploying these models to that.
And if they believe that either explicitly because you told them or kind of implicitly in the way that you sold them and your alignment of your vision with theirs, then that's how you end up in a place where it gets really tricky.
And so it's fine to sell to different types of customers, as long as they just understand the direction we're going is here.
And if they're good with that, great.
If they're not, then, then I think early on you have to be willing to recognize that some customers aren't fit.
So over the long term will sort of end up costing more than they pay you by how much they kind of dictate what it is that they want.
Omer (22:46.690)
So how did you guys decide what you would build into the product and what you wouldn't?
Getting any customer is, is attractive in the early days, and if they want this random feature, doesn't seem like that much of a big deal.
But then multiply that by 25, 50 customers and you could end up going in lots of different directions.
So how did you guys manage that and decide what you were going to build and what you were.
Benn Stancil (23:16.170)
So certainly, yeah, that's certainly the problem.
And it's almost a problem a step further, because Even if those 25 features are easy to build or are relatively simple things to add, there's a lot of signal in that when they ask for it, it's, oh, you took one step.
I'm assuming you're now going to take the next 10.
You try to address it in a numbers of ways.
I think you, you address it by, by basically you have to make a decision and really aggressively pursue people that, that look like the folks that you want to sell to.
I think the thing that makes it difficult is if you're just kind of taking the customers as they come, you're going to get that very mixed set of folks.
The easiest way, especially early, to identify, is who is the buyer.
And so we tried to address it through whatever means we could, making it very clear who it is that we wanted to sell to.
So that way, even if the product didn't exactly fit their needs, there was always kind of a brand sense behind what it is that mode was for.
And so I think the very first tagline we ever had was by analysts for analysts, which is a little bit of a cliche construction and these sorts of things, but it worked.
And it pretty succinctly said who we were and who we were looking for.
And so I think like we, we wanted to early avoid a lot of references to bi, to dashboards, those kinds of things because we knew those might draw customers, but they also might draw us in like the expectation of what it is that we're going to build.
We also did a lot of marketing that was affinity marketing for analysts where we for instance, would publish content that wasn't selling them a product, but was just kind of talking to them as analysts and in the subjects they might be interested in.
And so that helped kind of establish again the brand of what Mode was for this particular type of buyer.
It wasn't a sort of perfect sieve by any means to prevent some of these things I was talking about.
But, but it helped at least narrow the conversations.
We were talking to the point where most people who came to us and were interested in Node were people who kind of understood what we were and understood this is probably who, who we were and what we're going to build.
Omer (25:13.780)
And I think it goes back to that point you made earlier about having a noun that you can, I mean it is basically a positioning that you got to be so careful about the words you use because BI or dashboard or any of these other things could set.
It's like a domino effect of what goes on in the prospects minds when they hear that first and then they have a whole bunch of expectations on what your product is going to do before they've even seen it.
Benn Stancil (25:39.800)
Yeah, and it's both.
This was something I think we were to some degree surprised by.
It's both easier and harder to do that than you think.
It's easier in that people will believe what you tell them, that if you label your product as this, people will say it as this.
And so back in one of the very first sort of taglines we had about what the product was.
So we had this buy analyst for analyst to kind of that like our sort of brand and what the tagline for what the product was was.
Collaborative analytics platform.
And so, you know, the first thing we launched for Mode was basically like a SaaS app with a query tool in it with some charts.
And we'd ask our customers like why did you buy it?
And they'd be like, well, it was collaborative and there wasn't really anything in it that made it collaborative.
It didn't have collaborative features in a particular way.
But we just said that and that was something like, okay, customers were kind of just parroting back to us that oh yeah, said it was collaborative.
I guess it's collaborative.
And so like, I think it's easier in some ways to get people to, to brand your product with those things.
If you just call it that.
It's harder in that the word they remembered was collaborative.
And that's about the extent of it.
What anybody will remember is like two or three words.
If you can't do it in two or three words, you've kind of already lost the battle.
You can't be like, well, let me tell you, it's this and this and this.
People need to know what it is and you know, what two or three words to attach to it.
And that's one of the reasons why I think the category creation thing can be very difficult and in the beginning is people need a box to put it in and they have kind of their, their pre existing boxes and, and they're going to do their best to, to put it in one of those boxes.
Omer (27:07.750)
Yeah.
How, how did you get your first 10 customers?
Who was going and doing the sales?
Was this outbound?
Were you relying on other kind of marketing channels?
But where did those first 10 customers come from?
And, and who was driving that?
Benn Stancil (27:23.110)
So we, we got customers, you know, no idea about the first 10 specifically, but we got customers in the early days from basically three channels.
One was the, the I mentioned before, we had kind of a content blog.
So back when Mode was first getting started, there were three of us.
Josh, who was our technical co founder, was building the product.
Derek, who's our CEO, was out doing kind of customer development, talking to investors, kind of being the face of the company.
And he's, he's the likable one.
So, so that was his job.
And my background is as an analyst.
And I like nothing to do.
There's no data for me to analyze.
Basically.
It's not clear what you do on day one as an analyst of a company with no, no product and no data, no customers.
So while, you know, as part of that founding team, we'll never know.
But the thing that I did was I wrote basically blog posts that were about things that were related to data and they were kind of in the.
This was before FiveThirtyEight had been launched as a separate site.
But they were kind of in the vein of that sort of stuff where it was like pop culture and sports and politics topics from a, from kind of a data angle.
So the very first blog we ever wrote, which is the first thing that's published on Node's blog and it's still there, actually was a post about Miley cyrus and the VMAs.
I mean, it was like this data driven look at the VMAs or whatever.
And so that those sort of, that sort of content started to get some attention from just like data people because they're like, this is interesting.
I have no idea.
This product does.
And I'm not really here for the product, but it's cool they're talking to me in this kind of way.
And so we got some customers through that, through.
They were just like aware of mode.
We talked to them as to who they were.
We didn't market to them.
We just talked to them in a way that they wanted to be talked to.
We got some customers through traditional kind of launch stuff.
When you first launch a product, there's going to be a lot of people who are just like, cool, a new thing, I want to poke at it.
And then we got a handful of customers from people we knew coming from like the analytics space ourselves.
We knew people in the analytics market, we knew people we could talk to that were at different teams.
Those were like a lot of cases, the early customer research we did, we're talking to those folks.
And once we had a product out, in some ways we had built it for them where they were like, these are the things they said they wanted and we went out and built them.
And so I think that was the.
Using your own kind of personal network for a customer base initially is often going to be the easiest way to go.
Omer (29:40.760)
So one of the things we talked about before we started recording and this kind of stuck out for me, was when you said, even though all of us come from an analytics background, making decisions quickly is really important for us.
And, and more importantly, I guess is like committing to that decision.
Tell me a little bit about that because it's probably an unfair stereotype.
But when you think about founders with analytics backgrounds building an analytic product, you could be forgiven for thinking you guys are sitting there with spreadsheets and mode or whatever to, to make a lot of these decisions.
And, and what's, what's the reality of, of how you guys have been approaching how you make decisions?
Benn Stancil (30:14.450)
I mean that's, that's not an unfair characterization.
We, in spirit, I think that is a, the way that we would think essentially.
Like there, there is an analytical tendency to describe problems in, in shades of gray, in terms of probabilities, in terms of things that, that may be true or are likely to be true.
You know, you read the way an analyst writes or the way that's like, it's the way that an economist writes, which is this thing suggests this and this implies that.
And this is now likely to happen and there's, there's a lot of caveating and hedging.
Omer (30:47.820)
Yeah.
Benn Stancil (30:48.300)
And while I think that can be appropriate for sort of describing the way that the world works when you're running a business, it's not like you don't want to run a business on, on caveats and hedges.
And so, you know, I think we, we had sort of a constitutional tendency to do that more than we should have.
And I think, you know, for, for companies that are, that are in the position we were in or, you know, any company really, but early stages, especially my view now after having gone through this is the best decision is essentially the one that you make quickly and the one that you stick to.
And it sure, like think about it for a bit, don't make a terrible one.
But in a lot of cases, what matters more than the actual decision you make is, is your commitment to it and, and the speed with which you make it.
So I was talking to another customer, another company that's actually in sort of a similar position with as Mode was, where it's kind of balanced between two markets and they were trying to make a decision.
It's a smaller company, it's a fairly early stage thing.
I think they're sort of like pre Series A or in the process of raising a Series A.
And they were saying like, hey, we realized we could go this direction, we could go this direction.
You know, we're really giving a lot of thinking.
Do you have any advice on what we should do?
And my answer to them was, if you've thought about it this far and you don't have an answer yet, it doesn't matter that, that if you spent two months trying to consider this and there's no clear direction, the thing that matters is you choose one and you stick to it.
That, that you could probably make both work.
Both are, you know, at this point they seem relatively equal on balance.
Just choose the one that you're kind of more excited about, choose the one that sounds more fun, choose the one that, that you could stick to and just stick to it.
And you know, there's a lot of ways for companies to be successful.
A lot of different products you could build, a lot of different ways you can market it.
The thing that will make it successful is a commitment to it.
Not like you doing the analysis to such a degree that you know this is going to get it right.
Even if you make the right decision, the right decision sort of made in an incomplete or waffling way.
Is much less likely to be successful than a worse decision that you are fully committed to.
Omer (32:50.760)
Yeah, that's great.
All right, so you talked about these three channels that you acquired the early customers from through the content you were writing.
Which by the way, I think is taking that approach with like my ESAU and the VMAs and some of the other content that I've seen you write.
If you're a non analytics person, it's a pretty dry topic and when you can write it in a way where you connect it with real world things, I think it, it makes it a lot more interesting for the rest of us to go and engage and read that type of content.
Benn Stancil (33:23.500)
One other thing I would say about that, and this is a bit of a philosophy in general that I think a lot of people underestimate, is how valuable just something that can be entertaining is, whether or not it's content, whether or not it's the way that talks get put together, whether or not it's the sort of brand of your product, whether or not it's honestly the sort of in some ways the way the product interacts.
There's a lot of things that people think like it needs to be smart, it needs to work really well.
I need to say clever things.
People are drawn to things that they, they enjoy that are, that are entertaining.
And so a lot of the stuff that we try to do or like I try to do and content and things like that is, do I want it to make like what is the talk that you remember at a conference?
You don't necessarily remember the one who had like the most novel ideas on their slides.
In a lot of cases you remember the one that was just made you where you didn't look at your phone for half an hour.
And so I think, I think there's, there is a underappreciation a lot of cases and how companies think about what it is they're doing by not recognizing that your customers are people.
And people will respond to things that are attaining or things that are emotional or those kinds of things much more strongly than they'll respond to, you know, the most clever ideas.
Omer (34:32.880)
It's a good lesson for founders who want to do content marketing, but either they feel like I don't know what to write about or they are in a space where they feel like, well, whatever I'm going to write is going to be pretty dry content.
It's not going to be that interesting.
And I think what you've done is shown them that you can take a whole bunch of stuff and mash it together and create something interesting.
I know you still do a lot of writing.
How do you come up with ideas to make them interesting?
Benn Stancil (35:00.050)
Like, I mean, so how do you.
So part of it is it's sort of the ideas for the things in general.
Um, like, you know, what is the subject of the post?
You have to talk to people that ideas come from having conversations with people, from participating in.
In sort of the community conversation.
Like, basically you.
As you do that, you start to have sort of seeds of ideas and things like that in your head.
And in every conversation you have, you start to realize, like, oh, I can connect this and connect that.
Like, ideas have to form from other people, not just from yourself.
So I think.
I think a big part of it is sort of keeping stuff loaded in the back of your head a lot of times and just kind of seeing where you can start to tie those ideas to other things you've seen.
In terms of, like, how do you tell the stories around it and stuff like that, I think.
I don't know.
I think part of that is like, trying to do something that is entertaining to yourself.
Omer (35:47.710)
That.
Benn Stancil (35:48.030)
To go back to the.
To the Gia Tolentino quote I had at the beginning, that that's kind of where I try to do this is like, what is it that I wouldn't hate to read?
You know, like, what.
What sort of stories do I want to tell?
What sort of things would be kind of interesting?
What sort of things do I have fun writing?
Because it's telling something that I think is interesting.
Like, if you hate writing it, people are going to hate reading it.
And so I think you got to kind of approach it a little bit of, like, let yourself have some fun.
And then hopefully that translates into it being fun for the people who are seeing it.
I'm sure there's some sort of version of this.
This idea.
And like, I am not an actor or anything by any means or performers, but the people who are musicians or actors.
I'm sure there's some version of do it for a way where you're enjoying it and the audience can tell if you're having fun versus if you're up there, because you have to be.
And I think you have to search for some of that in writing and giving talks and whatever else.
Omer (36:45.140)
Yeah.
And I don't think it's just about writing from when we were talking.
I think this is the way you also think about choosing what to work on.
Benn Stancil (36:51.560)
Yeah, for sure.
There's.
And there is a big part of one of the Kind of, I think underappreciated questions in deciding what project to work on or which role you want to, you want to do within a startup when it's really small and you can kind of pull a lot of directions or even if you start up, should start a company at all.
Is, does it sound fun?
Like in any of these things that you're committing a lot of work to, it needs to be kind of fun because there's going to be times when it's not.
There's going to be times when it feels like you're losing.
There's going to be times when it's a grind.
There's going to be times when like you just aren't motivated to get up in the morning to do it.
And, and if you don't like it, if there's nothing about it that's fun, you're going to really struggle in those moments.
And if you do think it's fun, kind of the opposite is true.
Where you're like, even in those times it's hard, you're going to be excited to do it, you're going to do a better job of it.
It's like finding something that you enjoy.
And this isn't, this isn't just like a sort of cliche like do a job that you enjoy type of thing.
It's more finding something that you can find that kind of internal motivation in is really important in any of these kind of longer term endeavors.
I think it's particularly true in starting a company which is there are dark moments in that process and if you can't tie it to something sort of intrinsic about what you're doing, whether or not it's because you enjoy the day to day or whether or not it's because you're just really motivated to try to solve the problem even if it doesn't work, those dark moments are just sort of all the dark.
Omer (38:13.220)
I think many of us end up working on projects or businesses that we think lead to happiness.
If you're miserable along the way then, and I think it's also this, this idea of if you're going to be building a startup, it's a marathon, right.
And if you really don't care that much about it and it's not something that raises your energy, it's going to be really hard to keep doing that day in, day out, year after year.
Benn Stancil (38:37.460)
Yeah, and this is actually I was just talking to someone recently about this, that there's this, there's this like meme or something that I've seen That, that says something along the lines of being an adult is, is telling yourself it'll calm down next week, every day until the day you die.
And, and that's, that's kind of a startup is this sense of all right nails the crazy moment.
Like, once we finally get through this quarter or once we launch this feature, or once we close this round, or once we hire this person, like, all right, that's, that's the moment that'll.
It'll start to come and it's sort of this series of mirages that each one of those things leads to the next where it never really calms down.
But it's easy, I think, to tell yourself that.
It's easy to think, like, I just need to push through this last little bit and then it'll happen.
And I think it honestly has taken me a really long time to kind of internalize that.
And one of the things that changed that is now, as you mentioned, I do basically more like back to the roots of what I did at Melod, where I was doing more writing and stuff.
And so I write a thing that I try to publish once a week, and that's now like an indefinite commitment that makes it obvious that, no, the thing I did this week, I'm going to do it next week.
I'm going to do the following week.
The following week.
This isn't a sort of hill to get over where it's like, once I finish this, then it'll calm down.
It's.
It's.
No, it's, it's.
Every week there's an ask for the same thing and I have to do it.
And I think, like, that is life at a startup.
It's an ask for something every week that you got to do.
They're not going to be the same ask by any means.
It's usually a totally different one every week, but.
But every week is going to have that, that hill to climb.
And, and so you have to be excited about the prospect of climbing the hill, not the view from the top, because you never really get.
Omer (40:15.710)
Yeah.
All right, great.
On that note, I think let's wrap up and move on to the lightning round.
So I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
Benn Stancil (40:23.150)
All right, let's do it.
Omer (40:24.190)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Benn Stancil (40:28.990)
Honestly, it's probably.
I don't know that I have a.
Have a, like, catchy version of it.
Probably something along the lines of these make decisions and sort of make a decision that you commit to versus the Right one or, you know, hang up on the right one.
You know, I think.
I think that's.
That's just such an easy thing to get stuck on and to internalize that, like it doesn't matter as much what we do and just let go of the difficult decision and move on with it.
Takes a lot, but I think that's.
That's a really, really viable thing to do if you can do it.
Omer (40:54.730)
Yeah.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Benn Stancil (40:57.620)
Let me come back to that one.
Omer (40:58.580)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Benn Stancil (41:03.380)
I think that it's like flexibility, really, and a willingness to recognize that sort of the terrain underneath you is always going to be changing and kind of comfort in that.
I think if you're too rigid in any kind of direction, the whole thing is going to fall apart.
And so I think founders who are very flexible, willing to kind of roll with the punches and be calm in those moments can really do a lot for.
For keeping the company calm, keeping the company stable.
Founders that freak out, make everybody freak out, or founders that are super chill about everything can make everything, everybody super chill about everything.
There's like a.
A flexibility in those sort of moments that nothing is too high, nothing is too low, that I think really sets the right tone.
Omer (41:40.990)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Benn Stancil (41:44.190)
Muting slack threads.
So, I mean, I have all sorts of beefs with slack.
I won't enumerate them here, but muting slack channels, to me is an extremely valuable thing that I strongly encourage anybody to do.
It's the only way to, like, actually get any sort of focus and pay attention to things you need to pay attention to instead of kind of just reading the.
The.
The noise of everything happening in the company all the time.
Omer (42:08.660)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Benn Stancil (42:13.460)
There's plenty of ideas in sort of like the data space.
These aren't really new or crazy.
This is like a small thing that is not the fun idea.
But there's a lot of.
A lot of data tools are out there today.
A lot of them basically kind of.
They drive up costs in all sorts of ways.
I think there's a lot of space for data tools that help you manage how much it costs to actually run other data tools.
We have basically spent no time figuring out how much data tooling costs.
And I think there's actually a pretty big opportunity for basically going in and saying, hey, you buy this tool and guess what will automatically save you X dollars a month?
The tool that everybody would just buy right off, right off the shelf.
Omer (42:50.090)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Benn Stancil (42:52.890)
I play a lot of baseball.
I don't know how much people know that.
I've basically played baseball my whole life.
Still playing baseball.
Gonna hang on from playing baseball and refuse to play softball until my arm falls off.
So looking forward to joining the geezer leagues at 70, still attempting to pretend to be an athlete.
Omer (43:12.730)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Benn Stancil (43:16.010)
Going back to that, actually.
Baseball, in a lot of ways, is a big part of.
It's been a big part of my life in a lot of ways.
I think for me, it's important to have a competitive outlet like that.
I think a lot of people actually kind of want that, but end up putting it on their work, which I think is kind of a detrimental thing.
It's good for me to have a place where you can go, you can compete, and sort of everybody's there for the same competition.
If you don't have that, I think you end up starting competing on sort of artificial fields, essentially, where you're competing with your coworkers about status, you're competing with peers about who's more successful, you're competing with friends about which jobs you have.
And I think having that kind of competitive outlet, to me, of a place where you can go, you can have the competition and you can leave it is a really healthy thing.
Omer (44:01.380)
Okay, are you ready to go back to the book recommendation?
Benn Stancil (44:04.100)
The answer that comes to mind is actually a book called why Are all the Black Children Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
It's kind of an academic book, but it's a book by, I believe she's a sociologist about sort of the dynamics of.
Of race in America in a way that isn't written and sort of the like.
There's obviously a lot of, like, conversation about race, especially over the last year and a half.
A lot of it's written.
It's good, but it's written in sort of, like, for a pop audience in mind.
It's written for sort of a mass market in mind.
And this book is a bit more of an academic dive into the dynamics that are in play in sort of the racial system in America or the dynamics in America.
And I think it's a really interesting and valuable read because it doesn't present this as trying to tell a story with a particular kind of emotional attachment to it.
It kind of tells it in just like these are the facts and this is how it is that I think is eye opening and it's candor and it's, it's sort of matter of factness that you don't get in some of the like books on, on race that you typically would read.
If, you know, you kind of follow the, the various like anti racism reading lists that people put together now that I think are, are, are good but, but tend to lean more on emotion than on kind of the, the historical nature of, of the very problematic system that we have built.
Omer (45:25.570)
Yeah, great.
Okay.
We'll include a link to that in the show notes.
So, Ben, thanks for joining me and sharing the story of Mode and some of the lessons you guys have learned along the way.
If people want to find out more about Mode, they can go to mode.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Benn Stancil (45:44.140)
Sure.
So you can.
Easiest ways.
You can email me.
My email address is just benmode.com and you can or reach out on Twitter, which my Twitter handle is Ben Stancil.
Ben with two N's.
And then most of the stuff we're talking about like the various writing and things like that, it's on Substack and so that's just at Ben Substack.
Com.
Great.
Omer (46:07.050)
Thank you.
And I wish you and the team the best of success.
Benn Stancil (46:09.850)
Thanks.
Thanks for having me.
This is great.
Omer (46:11.770)
Cheers.
