Analysts, product leads, and engineers, with AI agents doing the collecting
Liquid and Grit staffs flexible teams for product, research, growth, and economy work. Each team brings the playbook of mobile gaming, the consumer industry that moves fastest and adopted AI first, to your business. Ten years of tracking the top-grossing apps sits behind every recommendation.
Three-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days’ notice. Every team runs on a monthly cap you never exceed.
Teams at these companies have hired us
Why mobile gaming
Two million apps compete for the same users. The winners release new content every week, run dozens of live experiments at once, and put AI to work in art, acquisition, and live ops years before other industries. Every lesson is visible in the product if you know where to look.
Top titles ship a live event or content drop every week and read the revenue curve the next morning. That discipline turns product strategy into a weekly habit rather than an annual plan.
For your business: a live ops calendar, a release rhythm, and the metrics to judge each one.
Streaks, progression ladders, collections, seasons, and reactivation journeys were perfected in games because a player who leaves on day 2 never pays. The patterns are now standard in fitness, music, fintech, and sports apps.
For your business: progression and reward systems tuned to your own day-1 and day-30 numbers.
Offers, bundles, subscriptions, and VIP tiers are tested on millions of players a week in games. Loyalty ladders, coinback, and limited-time pricing all came from this work.
For your business: pricing, offers, and a loyalty program grounded in what already converts.
Game teams generate ad creative, localize content, build economy tools, and triage player data with AI as everyday practice. We run our own teams the same way, with agents on collection, drafting, and QA.
For your business: an AI-optimized team and the tooling it builds, left behind when the engagement ends.
Work and capabilities
Pick a capability to see the work behind it. All client work is under NDA. Names are withheld; scope, team, and outcome are as delivered.
A standing annual hour budget across analyst, lead, and partner tiers. Each month the team answers whatever question is live: idle mechanics, film and TV IP strategy, cosmetics systems, genre references.
Vertical short-form drama apps went from nothing to a top-grossing category in two years. A publisher deciding whether to enter asked us to track the leaders: content cadence, paywalls, episode pricing, acquisition creative, and retention hooks, reported every month.
A UA teardown of the prediction-market leaders, a web product teardown, and a biweekly report on trade volume, acquisition, and social promotions that the client's team reads every other Monday.
A streaming service shipping a game tied to one of its biggest series asked how it compared with the leading titles in its genre. We benchmarked onboarding, progression, retention hooks, and live content against the category leaders and ranked what to build next.
Tiers, benefit floors, coinback, a service band for players spending $10,000 to $20,000 a year, and near-threshold progression. Specified, prototyped, and built by one Liquid and Grit team working inside the client's roadmap.
Modeled currencies, leagues, and player spend and risk behavior for two game modes, then rebuilt the model from a spreadsheet into a Python app the client's designers tune themselves.
How teams run
Three things every team is built on. None of them come with an individual hire.
A database of 50,000+ screenshot libraries covering every system the top-grossing games have shipped, tagged so an analyst or an agent can pull the exact screen in seconds. Your team starts from what already works at scale.
Agents handle collection, tagging, first drafts, and QA against the database. Analysts and leads spend their hours on judgment: what matters, how you compare, what to do next. The output is senior work at analyst cost.
You see hours by role and the margin on top, under a monthly cap. If a project comes in under estimate, the difference comes back to you as credit. After a three-month minimum you can adjust, pause, or cancel at any month end with 30 days’ notice.
A short discovery call and a written scope with phases, deliverables, and a capped price range.
We assemble the team from our bench, open a shared Slack channel, and turn on database access. No onboarding month.
Working files in your Drive, visual work in Miro, interactive models as apps. Weekly check-in, interim cuts on long phases.
Review hours against the cap, credit back any savings, and resize the team for next month.
Market Pulse
Every team on this page draws on the same system. We log what the top-grossing apps ship each week. Members reach all of it in the Market Pulse portal.
Analysts and agents record the events, features, offers, and economy changes the top-grossing apps ship, week over week, market by market.
Members work in Market Pulse at ai.liquidandgrit.com: the Feature Database with 50,000+ tagged screenshot libraries, the Live Ops Calendar, Impact Benchmarks, and Market Watch reports.
Pattern Radar subscribers add a monthly market report, a Radar scorecard for their product, and research questions answered by our analysts. See it under Plans.
Teams that want the data in their own tools query the database directly over API or MCP. Your AI agents can pull from the same source ours do.
Working with us
Every engagement runs under an NDA and a master agreement. Custom research is yours to own, and nothing from one client’s work is ever reused for another.
Read-only access to your dashboards, exports, or tools is enough. Working files live in a shared drive you control, and we can work inside your Slack.
About 20 analysts, editors, engineers, and partners, working remotely and led from California. Every team has a named project lead and a partner you can reach.
You get a written scope with phases, deliverables, and a capped price range before you sign anything. If it does not fit, nothing is owed.
Three-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days’ notice. Caps are never exceeded, and unused capacity carries forward as credit.
A shared Slack channel, a weekly check-in, interim cuts on long phases, and deliverables as documents, spreadsheets, Miro boards, or apps built on your data.
Plans
Pattern Radar is an annual subscription. Embedded Team and Full Team run on monthly caps you never exceed, with a three-month minimum and then month to month on 30 days’ notice.
For a product team that wants continuous competitive coverage and a scored view of where it stands.
For a GM or studio head who needs a dedicated team on live product, economy, or research problems.
For companies running several products or disciplines at once, or handing a product to us to operate.
Credit-based pricing
Embedded Team and Full Team prepay a monthly cap. Work is valued as hours by role plus a stated margin, and the unused balance carries forward as credit. Pattern Radar is a fixed subscription. Three rules keep it honest.
You see the hours, the roles, and the margin on every statement. We hold ourselves to a target margin. Anything above it is yours.
Need only the data? Database, API, and MCP access are sold separately for teams that want to query it themselves. Ask about enterprise and pay-per-use options.
| Compared with | Liquid and Grit Embedded Team | Hiring the same team in-house | Traditional consultancy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start | About a week | 3 to 6 months to hire four people | 4 to 8 weeks to scope and staff |
| Monthly cost | $15,000 cap, unused hours become credit | $32,000+ loaded, every month | Fixed fee, change orders |
| Flexibility | Three-month minimum, then month to month with 30 days’ notice | Headcount changes take quarters | Locked statement of work |
| Capabilities | Product, live ops, research, growth, engineering, economy | Only what you hired for | Depends on who is on the bench |
| Data behind the work | 10 years of proprietary tracking | Whatever they can find | Desk research |
| Who owns the output | You do | You do | Usually you, sometimes licensed |
Results
We used Liquid and Grit's economy reports to rebalance our app's economy. We saw an 800 basis point improvement in D1 retention and 400 basis points in D30, and rebalanced in days instead of weeks.+800 bps D1 · +400 bps D30 · +57% time in app
From the multiple research services, reports, and consultants I've purchased and hired over the past five to ten years, Liquid and Grit provides by far the best value and highest insights.
When I joined TREBEL as VP of Product, my team had limited experience in games. I needed to build our game design and live ops knowledge fast to make TREBEL deeply engaging and highly monetizing. Liquid and Grit provided exactly that.
We learned the playbook in mobile games and still know them better than anyone. The same teams now run it for sports, media, fintech, and consumer apps.
The founder
Brett NowakFounder and CEO
Brett Nowak was Lead Product Manager on Zynga Poker and later Director of Product at Blue Shell Games. To stay on top of the industry he spent his evenings playing competitors' games, listening to talks, and reading reports, all while running a live game during the day. He wanted a service that did that work for him and handed back recommendations he could use the next morning: in a spec, a roadmap, a strategy, a growth test.
He founded Liquid and Grit in 2015 to be that service. Ten years later the company tracks the top-grossing titles every week, serves product owners at the largest studios and publishers, and staffs the teams that carry those learnings into other industries.
Brett attended Harvard University and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, where he earned his MBA.
About the name. In The Lost Interview, Steve Jobs described building great products with a rock tumbler: ordinary rocks go into the can with a little liquid and grit powder, the motor runs overnight, and the friction between them turns out polished stones.
Intake
Two minutes in the intake form tells us your product, your problem, and your timeline. A partner reads it and books your scoping call. You get a written scope with phases, deliverables, and a capped price range within a week.
brett.nowak@liquidandgrit.com