About Us

What We Do

Each month you get a short email on the major revenue drivers and product trends in your market, linking to the full report. The data behind our reports is open, so you can see how we reached our conclusions.

Everything else lives in Market Pulse. Years of reports and analysis sit in Deep Dives, classified by our taxonomy so you can find what is relevant. Tens of thousands of galleries of features, events, and content sit in the Feature Database, with gameplay video and screenshots, so you can see how a release actually worked without installing the app and playing to the right point. Reports link straight into the database.

Our Name

In an interview, Steve Jobs was asked about his beliefs on great product development. He answered with a story about a rock tumbler:

We took some regular old ugly rocks and we put them in the can with a little bit of liquid and grit powder, and we closed the can up. And he turned this motor on and he said, come back tomorrow. And I came back the next day, and we opened the can. And we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise, had come out beautiful.

Our job is to be the liquid and grit powder for your product development.

Our Founder

Brett Nowak, CEO and founder:

Back in 2015, I started Liquid and Grit. I was director of product at Blue Shell Games and before that the product manager on Zynga Poker. I was putting out fires, writing specs, doing analysis, dealing with personalities, and everything else that went with managing a top-grossing mobile game. I was also downloading all the competitors’ games and playing them, looking at their revenue numbers, and trying to figure out what the next revenue-driving feature would be. I needed to know who was going to be my next big competitor in the market, what apps were getting released that I should know about in other genres, and everything else that goes into formulating competitive intelligence. I felt like if I had that problem, then probably some other people I knew had that problem too.

Brett attended Harvard University and the Tuck School of Business.