How Mode Analytics CEO Gaurav Rewari grew Mode Analytics to $89.6M revenue and 750 customers in 2023.

all right uh let's see if this works okay cool uh so I'm Ben I'm gonna talk about finding products Market fit with data um a quick bit uh about myself so I uh if you want the sort of this talk is a lot of stuff drawn from a Blog this is kind of the vibe of that blog um but kind of more importantly for this talk I am one of the founders of a company called mode mode is a bi tool built for data teams it looks like this uh it also looks like this this is kind of the visualization draggy drop ebi stuff of our customers uh so uh these are some folks that use the product today but obviously this is not like what mode was like in the early days this has taken some time for us to build uh back in the early days this was actually Mode's first product it didn't look like all that fancy stuff it looked like this and instead of having any customers we had this these were the other two co-founders of mode one of whom is here and talking in like 40 minutes later so check them out um but anyway so the point here was generally like where mode is today obviously is not where we started uh and there were some like rough moments along the way that took us some time to to get there uh and so this is actually a message from the one of those other co-founders uh back when things weren't doing so great uh that said hey you know what I don't actually think things are looking so good uh I don't think that mode has product Market fit right now uh and so this was like this was like what the world was like uh back before some of the stuff that we built and some of these customers we had um and and this was like kind of that that world so this is kind of a very basic graph what product Market fit is like prior to product Market fit everything sucks you get message like this from Josh uh after product Market fit everything seems good um and so the question really to talk about here is how did things get better like what is it that that got us from the left side of that graph to the right side of that graph uh and how do we actually figure out where we were before uh to get to to where we are now um so let me talk about two main reasons uh and two kind of big things to think about as you're trying to do this uh one of those reasons is figuring out what people like this is kind of obvious but want to talk about like some ways that you can do this a little bit uh and second is figuring out when to actually start scaling um that finding product Market fit isn't just a matter of saying hey what do we need to build but it's also timing it right uh and so I want to talk about that a little bit too so uh to get things started we can talk about this Finding Traction bit uh and to talk about that actually I'm not going to talk about mode I'm going to talk about a different company that y'all are all probably familiar with but aren't necessarily aware that you're familiar with uh which is a company called the not um so they actually had an office I think in this building uh for some period of time um but what the knot is is it's a it's a website for building websites for your wedding so if you've had a friend get married uh and you go to websites like this like Danielle Love sharon.com or Whatever uh that are like your friends wedding websites uh the knot is the the vendor that hosts these uh and so when people want to be able to set up these websites they can go to the knot it helps them set up things like Registries it helps them set up you know here's how to rsap for all these things that kind of stuff uh and the nod is is the service that does that and so then that was one of Mode's early customers um when they first started using mode they actually recently just released a mobile app uh so they had this kind of main website builder but they also wanted to have a mobile app for people to be able to do the various things they they need to do to plan their wedding and that kind of stuff and that was that was this app the 133rd most popular app in the lifestyle section of the App Store um when they released it it didn't like do so hot uh it was something that was not terribly popular um it was a really important Initiative for them to figure out hey like this is what we think of as the future of our business we need to be able to figure out how to get people to to do this sort of stuff on mobile as well as on the website uh and so how do we build that and this app didn't did not have sort of product Market fit when they they initially launched it their first set of experiments were basically like build a bunch of features go look at how they're used on something like Google analytics see if they work if they don't try again and kind of like rinse and repeat that it was basically just iterative process of build features see what happens build features see what happens build features see what happens um it didn't really go anywhere that the app basically stayed stuck where it was and it never actually got popular and so what ended up happening was one of the the folks who was the the like head of their data team uh started poking around how people were actually using the existing app uh and he made this chart this was a chart that he made in mode uh the specifics here kind of don't matter that much but basically you can imagine each one of these kind of further out Rings is is people sort of progressing through different stages of of the website so the green bar might represent the home page the purple bar might represent the registry page whatever and so it sort of tracks the different patterns of how people are moving through through the site and so he made this chart just kind of see how this Behavior looked uh and the thing that he noticed was this down here uh which was this very kind of strange Brown Spike of like hey why are people continuing to come back to the same same page over and over and over again they're consistently doing it like what's the deal with what's going on here seems like there might be some pattern here to pay attention to and when it turns out that was this page it was a page that was like a countdown for your how long until your wedding uh that it was a single page that said hey you're going to get married in 86 days in 85 days in 84 days um and people kept coming back to it day in and day out like taking screenshots of it and then like sending it to their friends or posting social media on social media or whatever and this was like a kind of small thing that they built they didn't think it really mattered when they first built the app but and putting it together they realized like this was how people were actually using it this is the thing that people wanted to do and by looking at that that chart and kind of following the behavior of what users were doing they actually started leaning into this behavior and built out what is this which is where it looks better you can add these photos it was easy to share on social media and actually the app started to take off because of it they really leaned into the way that people were using it rather than trying to force them to do do the things they originally wanted to do another example of this is a company called bourbon um this may be an example some people are familiar with uh this was like Foursquare for bourbon you would go somewhere you would drink bourbon you would take a picture of it you would check in you say I had this bourbon I liked it um turns out nobody really wanted to do that uh the the people who like were doing this actually didn't really care about the check-in stuff they just like take pictures of their bourbon uh and so the app was like hey wait a minute maybe we'll just have more picture sharing stuff instead of bourbon chicken stuff so they changed their name from bourbon to Instagram uh and that's now like how Instagram actually got started was again this was not the point of the original product the point of the product was to I guess like have social networks around bourbon uh but they saw this other kind of latent behavior that they followed and so it ends up happening a lot of times in early stages of products and something like this uh we'll spend a whole bunch of time building these features and you'll have like some small gimmick in the corner and the small gimmick in the corner is the thing that people are actually excited about uh and so when you're like looking for product Market fit this is actually probably the best thing you can do is pay attention to like what are your girls in the red dress uh that everybody's actually distracted by when you're trying to get them to to build the thing or do the things you want them to do um the part of this though that's kind of important is that people have probably all seen this this is basically the same as this of like okay you can design a thing and people will do something else the thing is like in SAS apps there is no actual physical path that you can see you can't actually see like the worn down grass on the dirt um you have to be able to track this in some other way this is something that is...