Liquid Planner
Liquid Planner set out to offer a different kind of project management system. As CEO Liz Pierce described it, many people had used Microsoft Project, which required people to enter dates into the system and tell the software when work would get done. Liquid Planner's approach was to calculate those dates automatically, so teams could see what they could finish by a given point using the software.
The company was founded in 2007. Its beta launched in early 2008, and the commercial version followed about six months later. Pierce, a former project manager who had worked at Amazon, Google and PlayStation before consulting, joined as the marketing contractor and later became CEO. She said she was "hooked on what we were selling" and that she handled everything that wasn't writing code. The company raised about $3 million in an angel round and a $10 million Series B around 2014.
For a long time the company ran an inbound-driven model: it sold to anybody who walked in the door. Pierce said this produced many smaller deals, but it showed which customers were most likely to grow. Early adopters were tech companies, and the company later found traction in heavy industry and highly regulated industries as the market matured.
By the end of 2015 the company was on track for a $10 million run rate, and it had about 1,800 customers, with a few hundred considered enterprise accounts. Pricing was per user, with plans starting at $9 for small teams. Pierce said the company was working to move upmarket, since most of its revenue came from transactional sub-$10K annual deals, though many customers now paid above six figures per year. Churn was a few percent of named logos per month, offset by seat expansion. Pierce also said the company was still selling to SMBs and that its CAC to LTV ratio was where it wanted it to be.
As of the interview, Liquid Planner had about 65 employees, mostly in Seattle with some remote staff, and was nearing cash flow break-even. The company was spending over $100K per month on paid acquisition, alongside content marketing, and had chosen to skip most trade shows because the economics did not work.
- •Automatic date calculation addressed a clear weakness of the incumbent Microsoft Project, giving the product a sharp point of differentiation.
- •Starting with a broad inbound model let the company discover which customers and industries had the strongest product-market fit before concentrating spend on them.
- •Content marketing and paid acquisition were tied to measurable CAC and LTV economics, which kept growth efficient as the company scaled.
- •Seat-based expansion let existing customers grow revenue over time, offsetting the churn that came from one-project users.
- 1.Start with broad inbound sales to learn which customer segments naturally adopt the product, then focus outreach on the segments that stay and expand.
- 2.Build content that teaches the underlying problem, such as project management and portfolio management, to attract buyers already searching for a solution.
- 3.Track CAC against customer lifetime value and only expand paid acquisition or events when the unit economics support it.
- 4.Price per user with clear tiers so that customers can grow seats and upgrade features as they get more value.
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