“Round here, we eat our own dogfood.”

“You, uh… what?”

Interviewing for my job with LiquidPlanner late last summer, I was feeling a little over my head. I’m relatively new to the software industry and was meeting with really smart people who have years and years of software experience. And now they were talking about eating dogfood?!

What they were really referring to, of course, was using LiquidPlanner to build LiquidPlanner. And now, with a few months at the company and a successful product launch under my belt, I know why this is so unique, and so valuable.

There aren’t many industries in which you can use the very product you’re developing to inform the development process. Doing so has enabled us to find bugs before our users do, to test new features, and to see how changes to the UI appeal to different users. Not only are we capitalizing on the value of our product but we’re improving it at the same time, a very tasty proposition.

Since we launched our beta program at the DEMO conference in January, we’ve been thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for LiquidPlanner accounts. Many of them are already actively managing projects using LiquidPlanner, but of course, as with any new service, some of the new accounts are not yet in use.

This past weekend, we sent out a brief survey to a few of the folks who signed up for LiquidPlanner but weren’t yet using it to manage their projects. Could they not figure out how to use it? Were we missing critical features? Or were they simply too busy to try it out? The answers were varied, with the majority responding that they haven’t had time since signing up to really see what we were all about.

Interestingly, the answers to another question in the survey validated an assumption we’ve been working against for a few months now: that most people haven’t found a project management tool they like yet. We asked these same people what product they were currently using to manage their projects, and over 50% responded that they weren’t using any formal project management software. (?!?!) Maybe they were building lists in Excel, writing milestones on whiteboards, or sending task lists around in email. This percentage is amazing, given that the SimpleSpark catalog alone lists nearly 250 project management apps. One might think that, by now, everyone would have found the tool that’s right for them.

This is like hearing that someone hasn’t found the right bank yet, so they’re just keeping their cash under the mattress in the meantime. For serious projects, those types of tools just don’t scale.

Edited for clarification on February 22.

Without further ado…

We survived!

Smooth sailing for the most part. I can only credit hours and hours and hours of rehearsal. The morning was spectacularly bright and clear and before we went into the green room we stood around outside with John Cook. He’s been posting like a mad man.

Anyway, things went right according to script and then we headed over to the pavilion for the real work. After all, the on-stage demo was just the teaser to get folks in to look at the in-depth demo. Jason’s been rocking the one-on-one demos. We’ve already gotten some great press.

It is now well past midnight and I’m sitting in the lobby bar. The place is still hopping. There are all kinds of tech folks chatting animatedly about all sorts of stuff. I really should be heading for bed, but hell… I can sleep when I’m dead.

The response has been really positive so far. Most folks really “get it”. We’ve even had a few converts who started off thinking of uncertainty as either a gimmick or a crutch and after a few minutes started to be receptive to the idea that it is a key part of what has been missing from project management.

Among the nicer coverage has been in PC World by Ephraim Schwartz and Michael J. Miller in his Forward Thinking blog.

Now I believe I’m going to post this and take one of the kindly folks at this bar up on their offer of wine.

I’m writing from the stage at DEMO.

Yes. The stage.

John Cook from the PI who has been following our DEMO launch experience is as bored as we are. We were supposed to have our rehearsal around 3:45 but it is now 5:30 and it looks like we’ll be going next. Stacy, a member of the staff, has been keeping us posted on the progress. She’s a sweetie!

The hold up appears to have been this weird car thingie in the picture below.

We don’t know what it is. But it seems to have kept us standing around for a while.

We’re miked now and ready to roll. So I’m gonna save this and get ready. Charles is hovering like a mother hen.

He’s bugging out because I’m blogging from the stage and we’re up in just 2:28. Yeah. Maybe I should focus on what I’m gonna have to say.

… 10 minutes later…

Okay. Well, don’t want to jinx anything but the rehearsal went alright. Not great, but pretty good.

We’re up friggen early tomorrow morning and they’ll be streaming the video live.

The demo is reset and ready to roll and I’m abandoning my laptop to the tender mercies of the DEMO technical staff (these folks are real pros).

Here we go!

Hand gestures. I’m panicking about hand gestures. Everything I’ve ever learned about public speaking is being driven from my brain. I wanted to do final run throughs in front of a video camera to find all the stupid and annoying things that I know I will do on stage. The ones that will make the video of our performance so friggen painful to watch.

Where do I hold my hands?

At my side? What looks relaxed and confident? You know, the two things that right now I most certainly am not.

What projects “this guy is not a tool”?

I think I’ll just cover my eyes. If I can’t see them they’re not there. Right?

Well, we made it. It’s now nearly midnight.

We’re checked in and fed and after wrestling with our network connections for the better part of an hour and a half I’m finally posting (thank you nameless Dell support guy)! Yay!

Tomorrow we get to dig in and polish the presentation. I’ve a bit of trepidation generated by the fact that we don’t really know what the DEMO stage setup is going to look like. We know that there’s some big video screen and that there’s a table thingie on which to put my laptop. But where they are and how the whole layout works is still causing me to have, as Hunter S. Thompson so eloquently put it, the fear.

We’re still not sure about how to fail-over in case we have trouble with the internet connection. I have brought a copy of our RoR code and our demo data local to my laptop. So if things come completely off the rails (so to speak) we can go with my laptop as both the server and the browser. The worry we have about that is that we wouldn’t likely know anything was wrong until we were in the middle of the demo. Time is tight, six minutes ain’t a lot. We’d really have to make some stuff up on the fly.

Not that we’ve ever done that before.

As I type Charles and I are on the plane flying down to Palm Desert. We’re heading down a couple of days early so we can get rehearsal time in before the big day. The DEMO demo (metademo?) is now 63 hours away.

Travel isn’t so bad. There were the mandatory uncertainty jokes surrounding Seattle traffic and the drive to the airport. Other than that it has been pretty smooth. We have now rehearsed to the point where we can spew out excerpts from our talk at randomly inappropriate times. Like some kind of presenters’ Tourette’s syndrome of inside jokes.

Charles keeps reading through Wired magazine and pointing things out. “Looks like Mint.com is doing well. Do you still use them?” Or, “Hey, we should look into using Google Gears.”

I gently remind him that in less than 48 hours our servers may very well be falling over from load. Or from bugs. Or both.

He sits back, “Yeah, I guess we’re gonna have bigger things to worry about.”

Yeah.

He doesn’t really take up a lot of space in the room. But nonetheless, there’s a palpable difference when well-known Seattle journalist John Cook is in the LiquidPlanner office. He’s been hanging around for a few days now, observing meetings and chatting with the team, as we go through the final stages of prep for DEMO. The point? A chronicle on his blog of “the road to DEMO,” as told through the eyes of a single startup. Of the several other Seattle companies attending (blist, Eyealike, and others), we’re flattered that he picked us. A little afraid, though, too. (Who knows what Bruce might say?)

John will be attending the conference and shadowing our esteemed presenters through to the end. I’m optimistic that the last post in the series will be a vivid narrative about our acceptance of the coveted DEMOgod award. After all, it’s what we’ve been planning for.

Well, here we are, less than a week away from our launch at DEMO. The nervous time is definitely hitting, hard. We’ve got our script written. We’ve got the product ready to roll. We’ve got all our travel arrangements made. Actually the DEMO conference team really made it easy for us to get our ducks in a row.

The thing that I think has been the hardest has been finding the time to rehearse our script. Charles and I have been running through it at our desks, which sit side by side so that’s easy. But that’s no substitute for actually doing it in front of an audience.

We thought about giving the 6 minute presentation to our advisors and the rest of the team, but the problem is that they’re really good at giving advice. We’re really afraid that meaning well they’d give us good criticism on what we should change. And being that there are several of them (along with developers and marketing folks) we’d come away feeling entirely inadequate. At this point I think having confidence is more valuable than getting a whole laundry list of “hey maybe you should…”

I’ll feel a lot better when the whole thing is behind us.

Of course then the real wild rumpus starts.

Because then real, honest to goodness, actual users will be hitting the site.