Mode Analytics at Mid-8-Figure Revenue and 250 People: Derek Steer on the One Thing He Should Have Done More Of

Introduction and Derek Steer's Background

Derek Steer

00:00>> Okay. Hey, everyone. So my name is Derek Steer. I was the founder and CEO of Mode. I'm gonna be talking about really one thing, which is, the thing I think you need to focus on above all of the problems that you may see out there there in your businesses. But you know, I had the baity title, so so you're all here. My background really fast, so I started my career in economic consulting. I studied economics in

00:27>> school. Went on to work in tech at Facebook first and then at Yammer, both before and after the acquisition. And in those jobs, I was doing analytical jobs at those companies, and I noticed something, is that both of them were building internal tools. They kinda were fed up with the stuff that was, like, available out on the mass market, wanted to work in a different way, and so they built stuff on their own. And if you

The Origin of Mode: Building Tools for Analysts

Derek Steer

00:52>> looked around at, like, all the other companies, you know, Google, LinkedIn, the ones that were, like, really good in the way that they work with data, they were doing the same thing. They were building their own tools. And so my cofounders and I, you know, after having built these tools at Yammer, kinda scratched our heads and thought like, okay. That's weird. Maybe we should just go start something where we build these exact tools. Because we think

01:10>> everyone's gonna wanna work like Facebook, so let's go build those tools and give them out to our audience. Right? Let's be the people that enable the rest of the world to be as analytically competent as the best companies. So in 2013, we started Mode to do that. I did it with two other guys. One of them sitting in this room somewhere. He just gave a talk on another stage, on the on the CTO stage like forty

01:30>> minutes ago. So if you were lucky enough to have been in that room, you're getting a lot of Mode content today.

01:36>> And then another one was an engineer. So so Benn is my my co founder, my fellow economist. Neither one of us know how to code, and then we had one guy who did, which is gonna be kind of a theme of this conversation.

Nine Years as CEO and Stepping Down

Derek Steer

01:50>> So about four years ago oh, and last thing I should probably mention is, the reason I was former CEO is, I left Mode fairly recently. So I did a nine year run as a CEO, got the company to mid 8 figures in revenue, and then, you know, step down to head off and work on a new thing. But I want to talk about Mode because it's where I learned a lot. And about four years ago, I

Lessons Learned the Hard Way Document

Derek Steer

02:13>> started keeping this doc for myself. And this is a screenshot of the actual doc. This is the actual title, lessons learned the hard way. Kind of tells you a little bit about the place I was in when I made this document, or at least when I started. And I don't know if you can make any sense out of these notes. That's not really what I wanna talk about today. I really just wanted to bring this up

02:31>> to say, there's a lot of stuff that came to my mind. Like, once I started thinking about, like, all the different times where I had some, like, problem that felt existential that I really needed to go solve, you know, I I would go, like, write it down or refer to something on this list and use it as my mental check of, okay. Am I thinking about this the right way? And so, you know, as I was

02:50>> thinking about putting together this talk for today, it occurred to me I could talk about all of these things. You know? Like and these things probably many of them seem obvious like solve a real problem. Yeah. Okay. Of course. Right? Solve a real problem. Yeah. We got to solve real problems. Right? Vitamins, pain killers, all that stuff. You you want to be solving something that actually matters to people. Okay. Great. We know that. You're always selling.

03:14>> Good culture versus winning culture. I actually think the the previous talk about about remote, not remote to me. It really is about like what is the flavor of culture that you are creating? Remote, not remote? Is it good? Is it winning? Is it both? Those are different things in my mind. There's all of these sorts of things to keep track of, and I got to feeling like being a CEO was this really difficult balancing act where

03:37>> I was trying to keep 25 plates spinning. There's about 25 items in this document now, lessons that I learned the hard way. In reality, there are more lessons than that. But I I wanted to, you know, kinda keep this list for myself partially so that I could go reference it just to make sure I wasn't missing a plate that had to be spinning. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought like that doesn't

03:59>> matter. Like, this is actually an impossible task. You can't keep all of these things in your head all the time. You're destined to fail.

04:09>> And instead there is one thing. Alright? I thought about all these things. It's like, okay. If I keep all these plates spinning, what's the impact that that has? And for me as as an analyst by trade, my job for a long time was solving problems. You know, it like and and my boss, you know, the CEO of previous companies, would put me on the hard problems, and I got to go crank on them, and that was

The Core Lesson: Do More of What Works

Derek Steer

04:30>> what I got really into, and so that's where I naturally gravitate. But it turns out that this is actually what I should have been doing as CEO. Right? You can screw up a lot of things as long as you figure out what you're doing right and do more of it.

04:49>> And if you take one thing away from my talk today, this should be it. And so the rest of my talk, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna tell you an example of how I got this stuff wrong, and hopefully through that, some of you will be able to identify, oh, I'm making some of those mistakes. I should probably refocus my efforts on what's going right and go do more of that. And then before I get

05:10>> into this example, just as sort of like an internal test, I want you all to think about, you know, big successful companies you've worked at or your friends who've worked at some of these hyper growth companies and, you know, what you hear from them about what it's like internally. Alright. Because in the companies I've been in where I look around and two thirds of the people arrived at the company in the last year, it's an operational

Why Chaotic Hypergrowth Companies Still Win

Derek Steer

05:33>> horror show. It always is. Right? The fastest growing companies seem to always be in the news like, you know, now there's a WeWork show and there's an Uber show, like these companies were such horrific disasters internally that they had TV shows. It's like that good. And yet they're so successful. Really successful. These are like the most successful companies. So why? Well, it's that they found something that was really, really, really valuable and they just kept doing

06:05>> that thing at the expense of a lot of other things.

The Mode Blog: Early Days and Benn's Writing

Derek Steer

06:09>> The example I want to talk about today is blogging and actually I'm going to talk about my my cofounder, Benn, who is in this room, just coincidentally. These are two blog posts that he wrote. One, on the left, is the first post on the Mode blog ever, and you can see it was in September 2013, which is just after we started the company. So the founding date of the company was 08/23/2013, and then, you know, within,

06:34>> like, a couple weeks, Benn was cranking out blog posts. And this had to do a lot with, like, the roles of the founding crew. You know, we didn't really understand how valuable this would be, but we had this hunch since Josh was building the product, Benn and I were trying to find ways into the market. I worked on a SQL tutorial to teach people data analysis skills, and Benn started blogging. And this was back when people

06:56>> liked Nate Silver, and they were reading Freakonomics and stuff like that. And and so that's what he was producing was content that felt like that. It was high quality analytical content, and the goal was to get people to think Mode is a company that is associated with great analysis. These people understand what great data analysis looks like, and I could probably learn something from them. And maybe someday, I'll buy some software from them. That was the

07:23>> thinking. Right? So we were a long way from having a product in the market, and we were starting to build that up. And the way we did it is, you know, buzzy posts about the MTV Video Music Awards. This image on the right is is from Benn's it's from Benn's now blog, which he has rebooted. I'll get to that in a minute. You can see the real through line here is pop stars. I don't know how

07:48>> he don't know how he ended up with that, but but I'll I'll get to the old and the new blog and and how we ended up with this. So an interesting thing happened. So we got this really great feedback early on from analysts and data scientists that this blog was really valuable to them. Right? In a more of a fun way. It wasn't teaching them how to do their jobs. It was just like really great, and

08:12>> they would say, we we wanna read it. Right? We're looking forward to it. When is the next Mode blog post coming out? I can't wait to see what crazy subject Benn is gonna tackle next on this blog. And so we had him do more posts until mid twenty fourteen when we launched our product. And you know what happens when you have a product in the market is you need people to use it, and so you start

How Blog Strategy Shifted After Product Launch

Derek Steer

08:32>> thinking about that as one of your primary goals. Right? All of this stuff around, hey, the analysts really like us. We're doing a great job with our brand. It's kind of fuzzy. So how do we turn that into something that makes money? For us, right, it takes a lot of money to build data analysis software. It's really technically complex. We were raising money from VCs right from the beginning, and so we needed to show some appreciable

08:55>> growth in order to go and do that next round. So that's the pressure, and the pressure led us to start making different decisions. And you can see on this chart that Benn's blog production kinda leveled off. So this just shows cumulative posts. Right? Benn kinda leveled off, and other people wrote blogs. I wrote blogs. We had our marketing team write blogs. We had some guest people write blogs, and they were different kinds of things. Right? There

09:20>> were stuff like this, you know, 12 Python data visualization libraries. This is this is popular. So so these are the four in order from top to bottom of this slide, the four most popular Mode blog posts of all time terms of just the traffic to the posts. Shouldn't be too surprising. Right? It's for the same reason that the conference organizers asked me to stick a number in the title of my talk here. It's that people attend

09:45>> that. People view that. It gets them excited. Right? The other key feature of these posts is that they rank on search terms that we knew our audience was looking for. So there's a deliberate strategy here, very different from what the blog was originally doing, and it worked. We got that kind of evergreen content, but there were two issues with it. The first one is that the people who used to be excited to come to the Mode

10:10>> blog who would show up and read every single new article, you know, they would go one week, two week, maybe three weeks reading like product announcements or other stuff that just wasn't what they wanted. Right? They were there for the entertainment, and then they would just stop. You know? You take people away from the thing that they really want, they're going stop coming. And so that utility diminished pretty substantially and quickly. The other problem was it

The SQL Tutorial as a Traffic Engine

Derek Steer

10:38>> turned out that even though these things were driving traffic, it was kind of a drop in the bucket because we had this SQL tutorial that now does hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month. These blog posts are like a drop in the bucket compared to that and don't convert particularly well. So if anything, you could say, okay, the blog is helping us to get, you know, information about new products out to our existing customers, to

11:00>> some new customers, but we certainly lost that feel that we had early on.

Benn's Many Roles at Mode

Derek Steer

11:09>> Meanwhile, this is what Benn did. Okay? This is this is Benn's this is what Benn's LinkedIn should look like, but LinkedIn doesn't let you do it this way. So he started off as a blogger, which I think sort of betrays the real value. But he started as a blogger, then he ran support. And why would why would someone like Benn run support? For the same reason that he did all of these jobs, which is we needed

11:34>> someone to run support. Benn is the hardest working person alive, and he's also one of the smartest. He's basically the smartest person in every room. And so when you take those things into account, a lot of problems look like Benn shaped problems. Even though he doesn't necessarily have experience running a support team, my faith in Benn to succeed at a really high level doing that job, I had a 100% faith that for every single one of

11:59>> these jobs that I put him in, he was going to absolutely crush it. So he did that. We put him in analytics, was sort of natural fit because that's what he had been doing his whole career. We made him the head of product because as we grew our engineering team, we had this need for someone to run product. We had after we hired someone to do that, he became a product manager on one of the teams.

12:17>> And then in 2020, when I was raising money, we made him president, and he ran all internal operations at the company. And then after that marketing, and then eventually, he made his way back to Blogger, and then back to marketing, and then back to Blogger, and, you know, he's just been doing all these things.

12:33>> These look like the kinds of problems that don't need to get solved. Like, the way to to look at this slide for all of you, each one of these titles represents a place where Benn performed well and didn't have a big impact, Not on the scale of the blogging and being out there in the community. And this is the point that I really wanna get across. We felt like we just needed all of these things felt

12:57>> like crises at the time. We have to have someone to run support, and Benn is the only person at the company who could possibly do that job. I don't know if that was really true. I don't know if other than maybe president, I don't know if he even had to do any of these jobs.

13:13>> And so we have to weigh that against what would it have been like if he had just been doing the blog the whole time. So we get some sense of that actually because he started doing it again. Right? In that first, slide, I showed you the two side by side posts, old and new. Well, this yellow slice is new.

Returning to Blogging at 250 People

Derek Steer

13:32>> And we did an interesting thing. So Benn said, you know what? Finally, I think the company has grown. You know, we're 250 people. We think we can, we think we can afford for me to go and just do blog community and that kind of stuff, and that's gonna be really good for us. We're gonna get that benefit that we got way back in the early days. And so that's what we did. And he said, you know,

13:53>> I think the corporate blog is kinda gone. Right? People don't go there for, you know, analytical content anymore. They go there for the product announcements and that kind of thing. And so in order to do this right, I'm gonna start a new brand. I'm gonna do this on Substack instead, and it's gonna be brand new. And I supported him in that, and I think it was the right decision because what it did, you know, data scientists,

Why Community Is the Key to Reaching Data Scientists

Derek Steer

14:13>> we we were sort of cursed with a very difficult market. Analysts and data scientists don't have phones, you can't call them, don't do external work, they spend all the time on Slack, not email, so it's really hard to get in touch with them. Selling to them is hard. And it turns out that the way that you sell to them, and probably the reason we felt like the blog was working so much in the early days, is

14:33>> that community is the the one way in which they kinda organize externally. So we started doing that again, and the results were really good. So what you're looking at here is a mention in the analytics engineering roundup. This is a publication. If any of you spend your time on data Twitter, then you know this. Right? This is probably the most popular newsletter, among our market of data team leaders, analysts, data scientists. And once Benn started writing

14:59>> again, what you saw was was newsletters like this referencing Benn, quoting him, you know, and talking about, like, how brilliant and often controversial his writing is over and over and over. Right? It wasn't just that he was building a new audience, which he was and very fast, it's that every Friday when he posts a new post, data Twitter is lighting up with conversation about that specific thing and it's getting included in every other roundup. Benn speaks

Sales Impact of Founder Brand Content

Derek Steer

15:26>> at every conference he wants to speak at. He's on every podcast that he wants to do, and the result, what what comes back to us is in sales conversations, our reps tell us, well, I wasn't sure how we were doing in this deal, and then I heard from their VP of data that she reads Benn's blog and thinks he thinks about the world in exactly the right way and thinks, oh, well, if these people make a

15:50>> product that reflects these views on the data world, then it's a product that I'm gonna wanna buy. And that started happening pretty frequently. The challenge with this stuff is it's not as measurable as those, you know, listicles and clickbait blog posts. Right? There, we had a real clear sense of what the impact was. Here, it's a little fuzzier. Right? And so the question I think that everyone often has when they think about this particular thing, right,

16:14>> like figure out what you're doing right and do more of it, the question that I hear people ask is, how do you know? How do you know if you have product market fit? How do you know if this thing's good? How do you know if that thing's good? And there are a lot of ways in which you can use metrics, and in fact, the talk Benn gave forty minutes ago was about exactly how to do this

16:31>> with metrics. But what I'm gonna tell you is, in addition to that, you feel it. Every single person at Mode could have told you in the early days that the blog post that Benn was writing were extremely valuable and every single person today can tell you that the blog post that he is now writing are extremely valuable. And so when I look back on this and I think about what mistake we made as a company and

The Mistake: Spreading Effort Instead of Doubling Down

Derek Steer

16:54>> that's on me, I was the CEO, what mistake I made was instead of letting Benn do this thing that was so clearly valuable, I was running around trying to keep plates spinning, solve all of these other problems. And when I think about where the company would be today, had he just continued that the entire time because it really accrues, right, we lost a lot of the benefit and had to regain it, we would be in a

17:15>> totally different place. We'd probably be at the center of the data conversation at a much larger scale, than we are today. So that's my talk. Thank you very much. Again, Derek Steer. You can find me on Twitter, Derek Steer, or just email me directly if you have questions. But appreciate this, and good luck on your journeys finding the thing that you do well and doing more of it.

Nathan Latka

17:40>> Thanks very much. Thanks.