Meeting Pulse

Aaron Liffchin launched Meeting Pulse in 2014 as a hackathon project. He and a few co-founders came together over a weekend to build an audience response system that could gather real-time sentiment and engagement data from meeting participants. The initial concept was simple but powerful—enable organizers to understand audience reactions in real-time through polls, Q&A, and sentiment analysis. The project caught the attention of early investors, who provided $50,000 in seed capital after seeing the potential of the real-time sentiment analysis capability.

What started as a weekend hackathon evolved into a bootstrapped business focused heavily on product development. Aaron took a deliberate approach, listening closely to customer feedback and expanding the product to meet emerging needs. Over time, the company developed close to 200 different features and ways to use the product. Rather than rushing to scale, Aaron prioritized product quality and customer satisfaction, ensuring that whenever a customer asked "can it do this?" the team could say yes. By May of this year (the interview year), they had accumulated between 100 and 200 customers but had only recently begun serious marketing efforts.

The initial traction came through multiple channels. The hackathon itself generated awareness, and a few influencers who saw the product early on became advocates. The company also launched at Launch Festival, gaining additional visibility. From there, organic search traffic began flowing naturally to their website—a sign Aaron identified as a positive signal worth betting on. This organic momentum, combined with referrals and repeat business from satisfied customers, formed the foundation of early growth. As the company expanded, Google AdWords became the primary paid acquisition channel, with a CAC of $400-$500 against $2,000 annual customer values, yielding a 4-5 month payback period.

The biggest challenge Aaron faced was the fundamental business model question: is this a SaaS product or a services play? Event-based use cases created high churn because many customers only needed the tool once per year. Aaron learned to distinguish between true SaaS customers (those with recurring regular meetings) and one-time event users. He began recognizing the emergence of "interactivity consultancy" as a distinct service offering—similar to how event teams hire AV technicians, caterers, and coordinators, they could hire interactivity specialists. This hybrid model proved more realistic than trying to force pure SaaS economics onto a market where one-off events were common. Aaron explicitly stated he was skeptical about pure SaaS working for the event segment but saw stronger potential in enterprise internal meetings, universities, and online broadcasting.

Churn remained a challenge, though Aaron aimed to get it below 30% year-over-year. Larger enterprises showed better retention as the tool became expected and embedded in their meeting culture, while smaller one-off customers naturally churned. The team also dealt with the practical challenge of tracking churn across different email domains when employees changed, requiring manual admin matching by domain.

Meeting Pulse is at an inflection point. As of the interview, the company was doing $16,000-$17,000 per month ($200,000 ARR), having doubled from $8,000 MRR a year earlier. With 12 team members and a product that had evolved significantly, Aaron began actively fundraising. He's targeting a $1M seed round at a $7M valuation cap via convertible note, with early commitments already in place. Aaron's vision extends beyond events into enterprise culture change—he sees the potential for Meeting Pulse to transform how large organizations operate by injecting real-time interactivity and feedback into regular meetings. He's open to exploring new verticals and channels, recognizing that continued growth will require finding new "gold wells" as diminishing returns set in on any single acquisition channel.

The founder's 20-year track record building technical teams (including a previous exit as CTO of XLN Telecom) gave him credibility with investors, though he openly acknowledged that fundraising and financial strategy were areas where he'd benefit from more expertise as he scales.