Liquid Article by Illinois Tech 

ITA Spotlight: Liquid Analytics

March, 13 2012 / Submitted by sthomas
With Lauren Fellure, Account Executive
Your  company name:
Liquid Analytics
Your company url:
What is your company’s Twitter handle?
@liquidanalytics
Who are the founders of your company?  What are your company roots?
Vish Canaran and Lyn Nguyen founded Liquid Analytics in 2007.  Liquid’s roots are in mobile app design and development.  Our executive team has over 30 years of mobile app development experience combined, and consists of successful serial entrepreneurs.  Our main goal is to design apps that solve a business problem and create value for our clients by engaging and delighting their customers and employees.  We abide by three overriding principles to achieve this goal.  First, we focus on design because we believe the design is the user experience.  We perfect the design of our apps before ever writing any code and, throughout this process, we focus on fusing artistic principles with the technological components of our apps.  Next, we bring consumer principles, such as the 90 second or stoplight rule, to our apps to ensure our apps are intuitive and that our customers can pick up their tablet or smartphone and begin using our apps without needing training or an instruction manual.  Finally, our apps follow a tight, focused use case and solve a single problem or problems for one type of business user as opposed to attempting to do everything for everyone.  This is how we create value for our clients.
In 25 words or less, what are you all about?
Our users: We like to enjoy ourselves, so we create apps that inject a little fun into our users’ everyday business tasks.
What problem do you solve?
Generally speaking, we help companies mobilize portions of their workforce, such as the sales team, and keep business processes moving and uninterrupted while their employees are on-the-go.
How did you get started?
Our founders started Liquid in 2007 because they believed that mobile was going to be the new way to do business, and they saw a need for a company that specialized in creating high quality apps quickly.  For the first few years of our existence, we mainly created custom mobile apps for businesses of all sizes.  Gradually, we began taking the consistently popular features of our custom apps, and using these to create our Liquid Decisions line of products that we now license.
What makes your company special?  How is your product differentiated in the eyes of the consumer? 
I believe there are 3 things that really differentiate Liquid from other mobile app development companies:
1.  Our commitment to design and creating apps that both engage and are valuable to our users.  It’s easy to get caught up in technological jargon and forget that it’s people who use apps, so development efforts must focus first and foremost on designing an app that provides a great experience for its user.
2.  Our apps provide insights, via “Insight Pops,” to our users that allow them to plan their days and make important decisions.  Through these analytics, our products provide additional value to users beyond simply pulling information from a desktop app and displaying it on a mobile device.
3.  We execute quickly – Liquid has a small, cohesive internal design and development team that can develop pilot apps and move them into production in 8-12 weeks, on average.
How do you make money?  Who are your primary customers and why do they choose you?
Our main moneymaker is the licensing revenue we receive from our Liquid Decisions line of products.  Secondarily, we make money through consulting services from software installations, hosting and creating custom mobile applications for clients.
Our main clients are businesses of all sizes and in all industries. Typically, our apps are used by a unit within a company that is constantly mobile and needs to keep processes moving, uninterrupted, while the unit is on-the-go. A great example of this is a field sales force – Liquid Decisions: Sales (“LDS”) is one of our most popular apps in the Liquid Decisions line of products. LDS uses analytics to provide salespersons with insights, which we call “Insight Pops,” that give critical information about the accounts and daily appointments in a salesperson’s area, allowing salespersons to optimize their time.  LDS also has all major CRM functionalities plus a Library function, along with enabling salespersons and clients to create/submit orders and generate invoices from the salesperson’s mobile device via the “Order Wizard” function.
Our customers, most especially our LDS customers, choose us for three main reasons: (1) because our apps give users mobile access to all major background customer and product information, along with insights that allow them to make key decisions each day; (2) our apps have additional value-adds, such as the ability to order and invoice from the app and augmented reality functionalities; and (3)  because our app interfaces are visually engaging and intuitive.
Work Hard/Play Hard or The Early Bird Gets The Worm or something else?
I personally believe in work hard/play hard.  I think that was ingrained in me through my long stint in grad school…  I also believe that sometimes the early bird gets the worm; oftentimes, though, the early bird almost gets the worm because the second bird, after learning from the early bird’s mistakes, snatches the worm from the early bird at the last second.
What’s the #1 thing on your To-Do list?
Other than mapping an attack plan for my first Chicago St. Patrick’s Day, I would like to get the word out more about Liquid Analytics and our products in the Chicago community, specifically, and throughout the midwest, generally. It’s especially important to gain mindshare in the tech and startup community because we can learn from and help each other quite a bit.
What are your dreams for your company?
We believe in a very focused approach to both app development and growth, so we have no desire to try to be good or great at everything for everyone.  I would like us to perfect one of our products, such as LDS, and be top 2-3 in the industry for that product.  Our products are good enough for it to happen, now we just need to get the word out about Liquid.
It’s our kind of town too… but what are the advantages of being a Chicago-based technology company?
I see Chicago as a burgeoning tech and startup hub, which I would have never expected or believed prior to moving here a few months ago.  There is a very active and energetic tech community in Chicago and there are ample resources and funding available for startups.  This is what I consider the biggest advantage: not only is Chicago one of the largest and best cities in the US and centrally located, it is also home to one of the largest and most active startup communities I’ve seen.
What trends do you see heading into 2011 that are relevant to your industry and company?
The #1 tech trend that is directly relevant to Liquid, in my opinion, is that business processes will continue to become increasingly mobile.  Over the next few years, business professionals will expect to be able to do most things on their smartphones and tablets.  In relation to this, people are becoming less and less tolerant of complicated software and apps.  People very much expect to not only do everything from a mobile device, but for most tasks to be as easy as pressing a button or choosing from a drop-down menu.
From a personal perspective, until recently I’ve never been a techie (confession – I didn’t have a smartphone until about one year ago).  My opinion is that the tech industry as a whole struggles with this concept of creating user-friendly apps and software.  The industry needs to understand that people will become even less tolerant of these clunky, cumbersome apps.  If I can enter and store things in a massive Excel spreadsheet faster and more intuitively than I can use your system, I’ll choose Excel.  And if I’m forced to use your system, I’ll use it as little as possible.  The same thinking applies to mobile apps – if it’s easier for me to pull out my laptop and do what I need to do than it is for me to battle with your app for five minutes, I’ll choose my laptop every time, even if I have to carry it with me (many laptops aren’t much bigger than tablets now anyway…).  To summarize, less is more when it comes to software.  Streamline apps – it’s better for them to perform the most crucial functions quickly than to be able to do everything (slowly).
What’s your #1 need going forward… other than funding and customers, anyway?
Our #1 need is to streamline our processes by making them more repeatable quickly.  It’s the same story all growth stage companies have – we need to scale quickly and, to do this, we need consistent and repeatable processes and standard messaging.
What are the biggest challenges you are facing in scaling your business up?
This is basically the same answer I gave for the last question, but I would say it’s challenges surrounding standardizing processes throughout the company, making our messaging consistent, and creating reusable templates that can apply to multiple clients and projects.
This one is all you… Anything else you want to tell us?
Oh boy, this is giving me flashbacks to the dreaded “tell me a little about yourself” question in interviews.  I suppose I would simply like to emphasize that I think Chicago is a great city and I feel lucky to be here and be a part of such an impressive entrepreneurial community.