Mode introduces pre-built queries to track your app's user retention & churn

It’s one thing to throw data into Mode Analytics, a cloud service where analysts can run queries and share findings. It’s another thing entirely to be able to click a button and view helpful visualizations of the data in a snap.

Mode today is introducing playbooks: ready-to-use open-source SQL queries and sleek visualizations to help people track key metrics for cloud-based software, like retention and user behavior. Future playbooks will cover other areas, like growth, A/B testing, and finance for cloud software companies.

Mode is also announcing today a slew of connectors to services where data can live outside of Mode, including databases on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Heroku, as well as Segment’s web service.

The goal, Mode cofounder and chief executive Derek Steer told VentureBeat, is to “help make everybody more data-driven … and also enable them to be superheroes and champions of a data-driven culture within their own companies.”

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And helping employees transform into “superheroes” of data isn’t crazy. That’s the end goal of many startups looking to bring data analysis into more people’s hands, including Chartio and DataHero. Even big companies like Salesforce.com want to bring in serious revenue by helping non-technical employees access and analyze company data.

Mode has taken a unique approach by providing a powerful SQL interface, a free school for learning SQL, and methods for letting people take data into their own hands to query and visualize data as they see fit. With its playbooks, Mode is looking more like a software-analytics tool than it has in the past, but it is still widely applicable, which could save it from being pigeonholed early in its life.

San Francisco-based Mode started last year and came out of stealth in June.