If you’re familiar with Amazon’s Wish List feature, which allows users to add practically any merchandise to their wish list from any website, LivThis built a similar software plugin that aims to provide online shoppers an alternative option for collecting online items all in one place.
Kansas City native and LivThis founder Ryan Bennett (left, photo from linkedin.com) moved back home after a stint in Silicon Valley to pursue LivThis even stronger, with the relief of lower cost of living and a team to continue building LivThis.
After an exchange of emails, I was able to capture Ryan’s perspective on startup lessons and his stint in Silicon Valley.
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LivThis aims to provide online shoppers one place to collect all the merchandise they want. Screenshot from livthis.com.
Silicon Prairie News (SPN): Tell me about LivThis and what you do.
Ryan Bennett: Liv is a consumer internet company that allows you to collect and organize all the items you want, love and Liv for. All in one place. All online. For example, you could be shopping for jeans online and with one click of the mouse, be able to add that item to a wish-list that is automatically synced with your family and friends.
I am the founder of Liv with a team of four including myself. Because I am the founder, I handle all the business-related issues, including sales, partnership relations and the finances. I also code the HTML, CSS, and JS and work with the team on the product.
SPN: You moved away from the Midwest to live in Silicon Valley for a little while. How did Silicon Valley differ from the Midwest?
Bennett: For me, being born, raised and educated in the Midwest, Silicon Valley was a huge culture shock. Silicon Valley is very diverse with the smartest people in the entire world all living in a little valley between San Francisco and San Jose. It was an amazing experience, because I was able to meet, talk with and learn from people who were the top entrepreneurs in the world. The most eye opening experience I witnessed was how the startup entrepreneur was highly regarded. Lawyers, accountants and other highly educated people would voluntarily, even seek out, working with the entrepreneur for free. Every day companies would raise money or be sold, making their accountants or lawyers 10x return on their investment. I don’t know anywhere else in the world where that is the norm. There are meetup.com events every day, from learning about a new database design to going to a party of a company that just sold to Google.
SPN: Your startup is currently experiencing a pivot. What advice have you relied on in this transition period of your startup?
Bennett: Build, measure and learn. I know this has been overused many times, but that is exactly what we are doing. We have this overall large vision of the problem we are trying to solve, and we are working at executing all the small details to get products to market as quickly as possible and measuring their impact. It took me a little time to find and recruit the right team, but once we all gelled together it was like a well-oiled machine coding and launching improvements, new features and new ideas. It is a great experience to know the team you created is running on all cylinders and having a blast.
SPN: If you could start over again, what would you do differently with Liv This?
Bennett: Build for the want not the need. We should have built a product for the want and not the need. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but we noticed a huge need for a product that allows people to collect and organize all their favorite products in one spot. However, after many months, we realized that although a need did exist, no one wanted to use it more than three times a year, which were Christmas, birthdays, and furnishings for apartments or homes. We should have built a product for the want not the need. Even if there are 10 products doing exactly what we were doing, if a big enough want still existed then we would have users willing to sign up and use Liv.
