The SaaS Podcast: Founder Interviews - Page 8

Benn Stancil, Mode

No One Knew What Mode Was - Then Positioning Created a Category

In 2013, Benn Stancil and his co-founders Derek and Josh left Microsoft after Yammer's acquisition to build Mode, a collaborative analytics platform for data professionals. They had seen every major tech company - Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, Pinterest - building the same internal query tools for analysts. The market signal was obvious. What wasn't obvious was how to explain the product to buyers. Mode fell between two established categories. It wasn't a BI dashboarding tool. It wasn't a Jupyter notebook or RStudio replacement. It lived in the gap between them, and that SaaS positioning challenge haunted Mode's early sales conversations. Prospects kept asking: "Is this a BI tool?" When the answer was no, they didn't know what box to put it in. The three founders launched the product in just nine months, but Benn admits they underinvested in market research and positioning before launch. That meant years of confusing conversations with potential customers who needed a noun - a simple category name - before they would buy. To attract their ideal audience, Benn took an unconventional content marketing approach. Instead of writing dry product posts, he published data-driven analyses of pop culture topics like Miley Cyrus at the VMAs and sports analytics. The strategy worked because it spoke to data professionals as people, not prospects. Mode's first tagline - "by analysts, for analysts" - helped narrow the buyer profile, and calling the product a "collaborative analytics platform" gave customers a label they could repeat, even when the product had no actual collaboration features yet. Eight years later, Mode has grown into an 8-figure SaaS business with over 150 employees and $81 million in funding, serving enterprise customers like Anheuser Busch, Bloomberg, Conde Nast, Lyft, DoorDash, and Zillow. Benn shares the SaaS positioning lessons that took years to learn, why committed decisions beat perfect ones, and how to stay motivated when the hard moments never stop coming.

Jordan Gal, Rally

Tripling SaaS Prices Cut Churn from 15% to 2%

Jordan Gal is the co-founder of Rally, a headless checkout that gives e-commerce merchants more control over their checkout experience. In 2014, after running his own e-commerce business for years, Jordan launched a simple abandoned cart app which eventually became a customizable checkout for Shopify merchants. He landed his first customers through cold email and a no-brainer pricing offer: pay 10% of recovered revenue, capped at $99 per month. Within two years, CartHook was processing hundreds of millions in GMV and pulling in 400 free trial signups per month. But underneath the growth, Jordan spotted a serious problem. Monthly churn was stuck between 10% and 15%, and the company was attracting the wrong merchants. His SaaS pricing instinct told him the fix was counterintuitive: raise prices, not lower them. Jordan tripled the price from $100 to $300, switched from self-serve to required demos, and positioned CartHook as the premium checkout for serious merchants. Demand barely changed. Then he raised SaaS pricing again to $500 per month plus a 0.5% transaction fee - and even increased prices on existing customers. The result was dramatic. Monthly churn dropped to 1-2%, MRR doubled from $250K to $500K in one year, and the entire team was happier working with better-fit customers. By 2020, CartHook had processed $2.5 billion in total GMV, with $300 million coming from post-purchase upsells alone - a 12% revenue lift that merchants could not get from Shopify's native checkout. Jordan and his co-founder had found product-market fit, built a product people loved, and were generating about $6M in ARR. And then everything fell apart. Shopify decided CartHook had grown too large and was processing too much revenue outside their ecosystem. CartHook was forced to stop taking new checkout customers and pivot to a post-purchase upsell app that worked inside Shopify's checkout. Jordan lost his appetite for building on someone else's platform, put a new CEO in place, and left to start Rally with his CTO.

The SaaS Podcast

How to Use Product Hunt as a SaaS Go-to-Market Channel

She Gave Her SaaS Away Free for 18 Months. Here's What Changed.

6 Months Without Code Then Enterprise Sales Changed Everything

7-Figure ARR With 3 People Using Product-Led Growth

From $15K MRR to a Year-Long Revenue Plateau

From $50/mo to 8 Figures With SaaS Content Marketing

How 10 SaaS Partnerships Drove More Growth Than Inbound

7 Years Bootstrapped Then Enterprise SaaS Breakout

$60K Lost on 2 Failed SaaS Acquisitions Then He Found the Formula

How to Calculate CAC, LTV, Retention and Churn

10 Failed Products Then Finally Finding Product-Market Fit

From Handwritten Letters to $9M ARR in Vertical SaaS

3 Years of Zero Traction Then Finding Product-Market Fit

From 2% Survey Response to Owning the SaaS Churn Flow

5 Customer Interview Tactics for Finding Product-Market Fit

No One Knew What Mode Was - Then Positioning Created a Category

From Vanity Project to $1M ARR with Freemium SaaS

5 Capital Raising Mistakes That Kill SaaS Fundraising

4 Years to Crack Data Quality, Then Enterprise Sales Took Off

From Agency Spreadsheets to $1M ARR With Founder-Led Sales

Tripling SaaS Prices Cut Churn from 15% to 2%

From $4M ARR Exit to a SaaS Acquisition Factory

8 Early-Stage SaaS Founders Share What They Learned

SaaS Content Marketing: The Link Building Playbook