Liz Pearce, CEO of LiquidPlanner–a fast-growing, Seattle based, maker of dynamic project management technology—and an active member of the Seattle startup and technology community. Listen as Liz talks about her passion in mentoring and advocating for technology and leadership.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – Search Inside Yourself
What CEO do you follow? – “My Top 5 Customers”
Favorite online tool? — Mint

Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be? – “Don’t let go of your interest and you will always get something back when you give”

Time Stamped Show Notes:

01:38 – Nathan introduces Liz to the show
02:02 – What LiquidPlanner is and how it generates revenue
- 02:08 – Project management software
02:28 – How does the customer use Liquid planner
03:13 – LiquidPlanner is a SaaS business model charge per user
- 03:30 - Pricing
03:52 – First year revenue in 2007
04:01 – Worked as a marketing contractor of the business
- 04:32 – What happened to founders
05:13 – Raised total of $13 million
- 05:39 – Liz raised the $10 million
06:05 – Former CEO still active in the company
06:30 – 2015 revenue
07:16 – Negative revenue churn
- 07:35 – Inbound driven model
- 08:05 – Transactional business
08:37 – Document storage
- 08:50 – Team function
09:16 – Average revenue
09:29 – Gross monthly churn
- 10:01 – Negative revenue churn
- 10:09 – SMB market
10:30 – CLTV
10:48 - Lifetime value
11:30 – Some are remote
- 11:37 – Total team size
11:43 – Number of customers
- 12:01 – How many are enterprise?
12:18 – Talking about acquisition or raising the next round?
12:45 – Interested in raising more capital in the future
14:07 – Microsoft project
- 14:45 – Invest in scheduling engine
15:03 – Revenue goal in 2016
15:20 – Acquisition money expenditure
- 16:05 – Total monthly expenditure
17:15 – @lizprc
19:30 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Believe in your product and what it can do to change the industry.
Remember that karma bus drives in circles.
Keep priority focus tight.

Resources Mentioned:

Toptal – Nathan found his development team using Toptal for his new business Send Later. He was able to keep 100% equity and didn’t have to hire a co-founder due to quality of Toptal developers.
Host Gator – The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for cheapest price possible.
Freshbooks – The site Nathan uses to manage his invoices and accounts.
Leadpages – The drag and drop tool Nathan uses to quickly create his webinar landing pages which convert at 35%+
Audible – Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5 hour drive) to listen to audio books.
@lizprc – Liz’ twitter handle
Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

EP 434: Top SaaS Planning Tool Hits $600k in MRR, 1800 Customers, $13M Raised, Growing Fast With CEO Liz Pearce

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders