One SaaS Positioning Bet That Beat Microsoft Project

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Liz Pearce.
Liz is the CEO of Seattle based Liquid Planner, the industry's only priority based predictive online project management solution.
Liquid Planner was founded in 2006 and although Liz isn't a founder, she joined the company very early on and has been involved since the early days.
To date, Liquid Planner has raised over $11 million in funding.
Liz, welcome to the show.

Liz Pearce (00:54.830)
Thanks for having me.

Omer (00:56.430)
Now, before we talk about Liquid Planner, tell our audience just a little bit about yourself.
What's your background and who is Liz when she's not working?

Liz Pearce (01:07.630)
Sure.
So my background is in marketing.
I went straight to grad school after undergrad and got a degree in telecommunications.
And turns out in 2001 when I graduated, there weren't many jobs in telecom.
I had moved out to the Bay area from Washington D.C. and started working at PlayStation, Sony PlayStation, and then moved to Google from there.
And when I came to Seattle, I started working at Amazon, you know, in various marketing roles.
I then left to start a consulting business of my own and hooked up with the founders of Liquid Planner right at the very early days of their conception of the idea and did the initial market sizing analysis for the business and, and then joined as Director of marketing.
So kind of worked my way up from Director of Marketing to VP of Sales and Marketing and Chief Operating Officer.
And I became CEO about a little over two years ago.
So that's kind of my career history in a nutshell.
I also, outside of work, I have two little kids, so I spend a lot of time with them when I can.
And I think those are the bullet points.

Omer (02:15.520)
Great.
Now, before we dive into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?

Liz Pearce (02:26.560)
You know, one of the things that I picked up on very early on in my startup journey was that one of the things that there was no shortage of in our world was opportunities.
There were just opportunities everywhere I looked and it could almost be overwhelming at times.
So a quote that has helped me is feed the eagles, starve the turkeys.
And I interpret that to mean find those one or two really bright star opportunities and focus all of your energy there.
You know, the turkeys will be pecking around your, around your ankles and trying to distract you from your goal.
But if you can identify which ones, which things are the eagles and which are the turkeys, you can go pretty far.

Omer (03:08.240)
Great.
Love that one.
Okay, let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of Liquid Planner.
I'd like to understand who your target customers are and what are the main pain points that you're trying to solve for them.
And probably more importantly, what the heck is a priority based predictive online project management solution?

Liz Pearce (03:25.600)
It rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
So our founders came to market in 2006 with this idea that the whole project management industry really needed to be rewritten, rethought.
And they had experienced in their careers at Expedia and at Microsoft that the tools that teams were using to run projects didn't work the way the teams worked.
And they set out to kind of find a better way to do it.
They were students of an author named Steve McConnell.
Some people in the audience might have heard of him.
He, he's written many books on software development, including one called Demystifying the Black Art of Estimation.
I think the code Complete was the main title.
I might be confusing that, so you'll have to forgive me if I butchered the book title.
But he had a really important idea in this book which was that most people don't know how long things are going to take to complete.
There's uncertainty in the work that we manage every day.
And he had this idea of the cone of uncertainty that over time your uncertainty narrows as you get more information about the thing that you're building.
And so our founders were inspired by this idea of capturing uncertainty in your project plan.
And they went off looking for a tool that they could use to do that and there wasn't one.
And so that was when they got the original idea for Liquid Planner.
And the way we've implemented that idea is by allowing you to actually prioritize your work, give it a best case, worst case estimate and assign it to a resource who has some amount of availability.
And our software actually calculates for you when you're likely to complete your work based on those inputs.
And this is really important to the customers that we work with because in their world things are constantly changing.
Things get reprioritized, estimates expand or contract.
Resources get pulled off onto other projects or they're or new resources that are added to the team.
So these aspects of our projects are constantly changing.
And existing tools were very static, they were very date driven, they were very manual, and they didn't allow teams to adapt to Those changing business circumstances the way they knew tools needed to.
And so that's where the predictive priority based scheduling comes in.
Once you prioritize things, Liquid Planner predicts when you can complete them based on all of those other constraints.
And so it actually makes things a lot more automated and less manual.
And you're more likely to have an accurate living plan than you are if you are using a traditional tool.

Omer (06:06.150)
Got it.
Okay, great.
Thanks for that.
Okay, so you started working with the founders, Charles and Jason, very early on.
Can you tell me what stage was the company at when you got involved and you know, what were the sort of the early days, the early challenges you guys were trying to tackle?

Liz Pearce (06:30.380)
Yeah, so I remember my first meeting with Charles and Jason.
It was at a coffee shop.
I was about eight and a half months pregnant with my daughter.
And they had these two ideas for businesses.
One was for Liquid Planner and one was for a family calendaring app.
And they said, go off and size the market for project management and see if there's any, if there's money to be made in this market.
And so I went off and did some research and came back and said, yep, there's, there is, this is a big market, we can go after this.
And that idea ended up being the one that stuck.
And so from, from the early days, I was really interested in the problem they were trying to solve.
Having been a project manager at big companies, I knew the pain points that these, these people were feeling.
And so I was instantly attracted to the idea and really excited about finding a way to solve the problem because that was different than what had been tried before.

Omer (07:22.330)
So interesting.
So you were involved before even the idea was baked about this business?

Liz Pearce (07:28.730)
Oh yeah, I remember before we had even a line of code written, we just had sketches taped up to the wall.

Omer (07:36.330)
So, okay, so you guys have got this, you've got this idea, you've gone out and sort of sized the market and got a sense that there is an opportunity there.
What did you guys do next?
How did you go and validate this other than looking at the market size?

Liz Pearce (07:53.540)
Yeah, well, you know, we were going into a market that was big, it was old, it was very well established.
You know, everybody had a copy of Microsoft Project on their computer or their project manager did.
And so a lot of people told us we were crazy for even trying.
But we spent about a year building the first iteration of the scheduling engine.
The scheduling engine is that aspect to our software that, that calculates those dates for you.
And it was a lot of work.
We Were solving a really hard problem, it turned out.
And so we were aggressively moving towards a private beta.
So it took about a year to launch the private beta.
We did that in January of 2007.
And the people that were in the beta were just friends and family people that we had kind of reached out to through some local, you know, press outreach and things like that.
So it was, it was a small group of people.
And in the first six months of the beta we were aggressively collecting customer feedback, iterating on the product as much as we could with our small team, and getting ready to head towards our commercial launch that June of 2007.
Am I getting these dates right?
It's, it seems long ago now, but we had about six month beta period, I guess that was 2008.
So, you know, early on it was all about listening to customers and hearing what they had to say.
You know, when people were using our product, they were getting a pretty bare bones offering.
You know, they were really using it for the estimation.
And the products we were competing against had, you know, fully flushed out feature sets that we, you know, we didn't have any of that.
And so we really had to sell just that core differentiator to make any headway in our market.
Luckily we had some early evangelists and early fanatics who help propel us through the initial commercial launch and allow us to actually start selling the product.

Omer (09:48.230)
Okay, great.
So let's talk a little bit about that because I think that's not an unusual situation where, you know, a startup will go into a new market where they're, you know, pretty entrenched incumbents who've been established, they've been there around for many years, they've spent a lot of time, they've made the mistakes and they've got, you know, a good set of features and functionality and then you come along with a new product, which, you know, is pretty thin maybe compared to what those other companies are offering.
So tell me a little bit more about what you did to play up and sort of figure out what that differentiator was going to be for you.

Liz Pearce (10:27.470)
Sure.
So, you know, even in the early conversations that we were having with customers and the analysis we were doing of our market prior to launching the beta, we really hooked onto that idea of best case, worst case estimation and of capturing uncertainty in your plan.
And so our initial outreach and press coverage was all focused around project management that deals with uncertainty and that idea resonated with people.
And so we wanted to double down on the scheduling engine aspect of the product and Figure out if we could deliver this to the market in a way that created customer value.
And so it, of course, wasn't perfect in our first.
Well, it's never perfect.
Right.
But it left a lot to be desired in the early days.
And so we started using our own tool to collect customer feedback.
And again, kind of going back to that.
Feed the eagle, starve the turkeys, figure out what we had to add in what order to be most viable as a product.
And so right away, we found out that in addition to the scheduling engine, in addition to the date calculations, people needed to be able to track their time.
So we started working on adding time tracking into the application.
And it kind of went from there.
You know, we would.
We would go after one feature after another that would get us just one step further in being competitive in our space.

Omer (11:51.960)
Did you charge people during the beta?

Liz Pearce (11:55.000)
No, no.
We didn't think we could get one, pay for it during the beta.
So it was a free.
It was a free private beta.
We opened the beta up a little bit more broadly before we went commercial.
And then we were looking, you know, launch with some.
A few paid customers that we could name and, you know, be really excited about having something to take to market that was already vetted by customers.

Omer (12:20.940)
Okay, and when did you get your first paying customer?

Liz Pearce (12:24.060)
It was.
It was April 2008.
I still remember the customer.
I'm not going to name their name, but I remember that first sales call.
I had never actually sold anything in my life before Liquid Planner.
And so I remember that first sales call where we got the deal and know, looking around the room being like, whoa, we can actually.
We can do this.
That was an exciting moment.

Omer (12:44.890)
I think for many people that first.
That first customer is.
Is kind of like.
It's almost like, you know, you just hit your first million dollars or something, right?
It just.
There's just a huge amount of dollar

Liz Pearce (12:56.810)
bill taped to the wall.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.

Omer (12:59.850)
Great.
So let's talk about a little bit about what you were doing to acquire customers.
Was it.
Was it mainly focused on sales or what kind of marketing activities were you doing?

Liz Pearce (13:10.240)
So one thing that was really effective for us was an initial program that we had.
We called it three for Free.
And so we gave away the first three users for free.
And then after that, we charged a per user monthly fee.
And so that was the way we first started charging for the product.
That got a lot.
You know, people love things that are free, so that got us a lot of eyeballs.
And our marketing channels were pretty light.
We Were using search advertising, pr, blogging, starting to do a little content marketing and a little bit of social media marketing at the time.
But really that three for Free program drove a lot of business initially.
And we found out pretty quickly that people will do almost anything to keep it free.
They don't want to put their credit card in, so they would share licenses and things like that.
Ultimately, we decided to do away with the three for Free program about a year or so later.
But for an initial launch campaign, it was very useful.

Omer (14:12.710)
So looking back at those early days, what do you think was one of the biggest mistakes that you guys made?

Liz Pearce (14:21.910)
Well, I told this story a couple times before, but it was very.
We had an experience that was very transformative for the company.
The problem we were solving was pretty complex.
We needed to give people a way to both organize and prioritize their work.
Our initial concept for this actually had people do that in two different views.
It made perfect sense to us.
But we started to get some sneaking suspicions that we had a real user understanding problem.
People weren't getting it the way we thought they were.
It was all anecdotal evidence at that point.
But we, we thought about how can we really grow this business?
And there was just a nagging feeling that this was gonna, this was really gonna hurt us.
So a couple people and I embarked on a huge customer research project.
I think we interviewed over 100 customers in depth in a summer.
And we transcribed all the interviews and we looked at, you know, what kind of teams they were on and what they said about the product and how they used it.
And we collated all that information and, and I remember the meeting where I looked around the room and I'm like, we have a big problem.
And we realized that we basically had to re architect our entire system.
And it was going to be really brutally hard and it was going to take a really, really long time.
Time that we didn't think we could afford to take.
But we were faced with a fork in the road where we could say, let's do the right thing, let's fix it for real, even if it's going to be extremely painful, or keep staying the course and see what happens.

Omer (16:01.920)
What exactly.
Sorry to interrupt.
What exactly was the problem that this was creating for your customers?

Liz Pearce (16:08.640)
Just overall confusion about where their data was and how to use it and where to put things and, you know, just disorientation in the product.
And we needed to move from two views of the work to a single view.
And it was really a full re architecture of the product.
And so it took us nine months to do it.
It was a nine month sprint, we called it.
And our customers were beating us up every day.
They're like, when are you guys going to release something?
Come on, come on, come on.
And we had to really hold our ground and just make this big change.
So it was one of those moments where we put on our battle armor and we kind of went to war as a company.
And you know, we still have a lot of the, the original team with Liquid Planner today that, that made that change and I think it brought us together as a company and it made us realize that you can't look away from the hard problems.
You have to take them head on.
And we're very glad that we did.

Omer (17:09.060)
Okay, so you talked about this three for free program and using that as a way to attract customers.
But how are you getting the word out?
How are you letting people know about this product?

Liz Pearce (17:27.870)
So we were using a number of different channels.
We were, as I mentioned, starting to blog, starting to socialize those blog posts and submit answers to sites like Quora.
I'm not sure if Quora existed at that point, but things like that, you know, even things like Yahoo Answers.
And we were going to events so there would be, you know, conferences all over the country that we would, you know, we would scrap together a booth and a couple people to go out and do demos.
We were doing advertising like I mentioned, but everything was all about driving traffic to the website and converting people to a free trial.
So, so that was really our primary lead gen source was the free trial.
And that worked quite well.
You could sign up without a credit card.
We could see who was signing up through the trial and reach out to people and call them.
And we were getting a large number of trials every month.
Not all of them qualified, but enough that we had people to call and talk to about the product and get feedback and turn that back around into product improvements.
So there was no rocket science involved.
It was your, it was your typical channels.
We did some email campaigns, you know, we had a website.
But there, there was nothing, nothing unusual about the way we went to market compared to any of our competitors.
It all was about the product and the differentiation.

Omer (18:54.990)
What marketing activity did you pursue, which in hindsight turned out to be a waste of time?

Liz Pearce (19:07.560)
Well, I think there's some marketing channels that are.
You don't get direct attribution for the, for the spend necessarily, and you can't always tie it back to results.
Things like pr where you get an article here, an article there A link here or a link there.
You know, maybe you don't see in your Google Analytics that that particular site drove hundreds of thousands of page views, but there's a tide that lifts all boats, right?
The more links you have, the more site visits you have, the better your search ranking for your keyword terms are.
And so, you know, I wouldn't say there was any one particular activity that we were like, wow, that was a huge waste.
Rather, we had to go on gut a lot of times and say, you know what, maybe social media marketing is not gonna drive 200 trial starts this month.
But it's an important trust mark.
When someone comes and looks at our brand, they go to Facebook and see that we have thousands of followers, they're gonna have more faith that we're a credible company.
And so a lot of conversations like that, like, is it worth doing if we can't prove that it's working?
And I think there are a lot of programs where, yes, it is worth doing even if you, you can't prove it because it goes to the whole big picture of how people perceive your brand.

Omer (20:30.780)
So let's talk a little bit more about this nine month Sprint of yours.
What sort of impact, if any, did that have over those nine months in terms of acquiring more customers and growing the business?

Liz Pearce (20:49.510)
So we did continue to acquire customers, not at the rate that we were hoping for, but we kept on a steady path.
One of our core values as a company is service first.
And we put a ton of effort into our customer care plan around that release.
Every month or every couple months, we were proactively communicating to existing customers, to prospective customers about what we were working on, why, what the timeline would be and what the impact would be.
I mean, this change actually required us to mess with customers data and kind of change their data.
And so it had to be handled with kid gloves.
And we were able to execute that customer care plan without really losing any significant customers because we prioritized it as high up as we did any of the actual development work, you know, in terms of how we thought about it in the business.
And so it was just super important to respect the customers and to do the right thing by them in order to be successful through this, through this Sprint.

Omer (22:00.280)
Okay, so remind me again when you launched after the private beta.

Liz Pearce (22:05.720)
So we launched commercially in the summer of 2008.

Omer (22:09.800)
Okay.
And then what did the growth trajectory look like over the, the next few years for you?

Liz Pearce (22:18.730)
So we ended up raising it around of angel funding in 2009.
So that allowed us to Expand our team from just really a handful of people to, you know, 10 or 12 people, and to continue building on the core scheduling engine feature with additional features and start, you know, adding one or two salespeople, one or two support people.
And so, you know, we were, we were growing steadily and it was really 2012, I guess, when I became CEO.
And we made that transition because we felt that we had finally gotten the product to a point where we really had good product market fit, where the product was in a great place to invest more into customer acquisition.
And the SaaS metrics that we were watching looked great.
You know, people were signing up for the product, they stuck around, they liked it, we could acquire them relatively cheaply.
And we decided to kind of switch roles between, you know, me moving from Chief Operating Officer into the CEO position and our former CEO moving into the role of Chief Product Officer so he could focus on the thing that he cared most about, which is the product.
And that move was really all about driving growth.
And so when I took the CEO role, we did an additional round of debt financing to help us just kind of bridge the gap and grow a little bit more.
And then it was this year that we raised our first round of institutional financing, an $8 million Series B.
And that's allowing us to fund even more growth.
And we're using that to really precipitate a change in the market that we're going after.
We're going more upmarket towards the enterprise, whereas we have been more concentrated in SMB prior to this year.

Omer (24:14.370)
Yeah, I think when I looked at the pricing on your website, you had three plans for 29, 39 and $49 a month.
It didn't seem like that maybe this was sort of targeted at enterprise users.
What's the reason for you guys wanting to move away?

Liz Pearce (24:39.980)
You know, we found that people are most successful with our product when they have their whole team in the system.
You know, it's a collaborative solution.
Everybody in working on the projects is participating in the planning process.
It's really, it's collaborative planning and people are commenting back and forth and sharing documents and updating their estimates.
And so when you have just one or two people in the system, there's kind of a gravitational pull away, you know, back to the whiteboard or back to the post IT notes or whatever, you know, other system that you might use to keep track of to dos.
And so we're really focused on helping the customers that invest in the platform to be really successful with it.
And so that means for us, a Big focus on customer success and our onboarding and implementation phase of kind of our customer life cycle and you know, really focusing our efforts on larger and larger customers that we have, you know, seen get just tremendous value out of this type of planning.

Omer (25:44.880)
Okay, so you, you were around 10 or 12 people in 2009.
How many, how big is the team today?

Liz Pearce (25:56.360)
We're about 55 people today.
So we've, we've grown, probably tripled in size over the last couple of years.

Omer (26:03.160)
Okay.
So, you know, with growth often come growing pains.
Can you tell me about maybe one challenge that you faced over the last couple of years as the business has started to grow, whether it's either on the business, the product or the people side?

Liz Pearce (26:25.130)
Sure, I can talk about both sides of it.
You know, I think from, from the people side, you know, we're hitting that kind of, those kind of teenage years of being a business where whereas before we might get away without having a documented process for something in the business, now we really need to have documentation so that we have control over quality.
And you know, the people that, that love the small startup, they don't, they don't always love the process.
Right.
But it's, it's, it's a necessity.
You know, we've also started to add more layers of management to the company.
You know, so we're learning how to develop people into leaders, you know, at different stages of their careers.
So these are, they're challenges, but they're, they're exciting.
On the product side, I think everybody that builds a product, and especially SaaS products, you have to make trade offs between when you invest in features versus tech debt and scalability and things like that.
And so as more and more people come onto the platform, sometimes we have to just hit pause on the feature development and really think about performance and site delivery and all those things.
And so there's always that give and take, you know, push and pull between features that the market cares about, that our customers care about, and you know, just the back end, ability to deliver the service.
So we watch that balance pretty carefully.

Omer (27:53.890)
Got it.
What's your revenue these days?

Liz Pearce (27:58.210)
Well, as a private company, we typically don't disclose our revenue, but it's growing nicely.

Omer (28:05.090)
Have you got a million dollars?

Liz Pearce (28:07.100)
Yes.
Yes.

Omer (28:07.980)
Okay, so 10 million.

Liz Pearce (28:11.580)
Like I said, we're a private company, so prefer not to share.

Omer (28:15.260)
Okay, so you're somewhere in seven figures or above.
We'll leave it at that.
All right, tell me, what's the one thing in your business that you're most excited about right Now

Liz Pearce (28:31.580)
I'm really excited about the conversations that we're having with customers.
I spend a lot of time talking to different kinds of teams, doing different types of things all over the world.
And we see a lot of common threads that we feel that we're in a great position to help address and to help make teams more efficient.
And so it's always been for me, since day one, the most energizing part of doing a startup is getting to talk to customers.
And so I still, you know, I'm like a kid in a candy store when I get off the phone with a customer.
And I still feel that way today.

Omer (29:08.030)
Okay, so it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I'd like you just to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?

Liz Pearce (29:16.510)
I'm ready.

Omer (29:17.630)
Awesome.
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?

Liz Pearce (29:24.270)
Yeah.
Our former CEO Charles Sepel gave me this advice when I first became CEO and I was just raring to go.
I was just couldn't wait to implement all the things, all the ideas that I had.
And he said, you are mentally like way out ahead of people and you have to bring people with you.
You can't be two miles out in front and look behind you and say, where is everybody?
You have to take the time to talk about the ideas, talk about the plan, talk about the strategy, and keep people in line with you as you move forward.

Omer (29:54.270)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Liz Pearce (29:58.730)
It's a classic, but I have a big soft spot for good to great Jim Collins book.
I think there are so many important lessons about running the right kind of business and being the right kind of business leader that should be valuable to anybody who's in this business.

Omer (30:15.690)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Liz Pearce (30:22.090)
Perseverance.

Omer (30:24.570)
What's your first favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Liz Pearce (30:29.290)
I guess it would be cheating to say my own tool.

Omer (30:32.010)
Yes, it would.

Liz Pearce (30:35.210)
I have a hack at home that saves me so much time and anxiety, which is I have a template of all the things that I buy for the house.
Groceries, toiletries, everything that we buy on a weekly basis.
Instead of having to write out a grocery list every week, I just use a highlighter to highlight the things I need and saves me so much time.
It's crazy.

Omer (30:58.600)
I might have to steal that idea from you.

Liz Pearce (31:00.760)
Yeah, I haven't posted on Google Docs.
I'll share it with you.

Omer (31:03.240)
Okay, cool.
If you had to start over tomorrow, how Would you go about finding that next business opportunity?

Liz Pearce (31:11.320)
You know, I think that I, well, I would be tempted to, to continue working in this space or something having to do with organization.
I mean, as a kid I used to like mess up my room on purpose so I could get to clean it.
So I' a little bit of an organizational nut.
But I think that if I, if I weren't doing that, I would, I would maybe look to do something that had a social good angle to it and maybe one of your other questions, we'll, we'll get into specifics on that.

Omer (31:38.020)
So what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Liz Pearce (31:43.860)
I do cartwheels in the office.

Omer (31:45.940)
Seriously?

Liz Pearce (31:48.340)
Well, I did until I got injured the last time.
But when good things happen, I should

Omer (31:55.450)
drive down to Seattle and maybe have a picture for the show notes page or something.

Liz Pearce (32:01.010)
My husband yelled at me for doing one at the holiday party one year but.

Omer (32:06.130)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Liz Pearce (32:10.930)
You know, one thing I'm really involved with is working with organizations that are helping to get more women into leadership positions in business and technology.
And so I'm a member of a number different steering committees and different volunteer organizations that help women of all ages from elementary and middle school up to mid career get into tech.

Omer (32:35.729)
Awesome.
Great answers, Liz.
I want to thank you for joining me today and sharing your experiences and insights.
And thank you for letting us get to know you a little better personally as well.
Now if folks want to find out more about Liquid Planner or they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Liz Pearce (32:54.300)
So to find out about Liquid Planner you can go to www.liquidplanner.com and I have a personal blog@lizprc.com and would love to engage via the blog or on Twitter also at lizprc.

Omer (33:08.620)
Wonderful.
Thank you again and I wish you continued success with Liquid Planner.

Liz Pearce (33:12.860)
Thanks Elmer.

Omer (33:13.820)
Cheers.

Liz Pearce (33:14.460)
Take care.