Livelii.io

The expanding gig economy created a demand for reliable financial transaction platforms for freelancers and clients. This demand increased with the COVID-19 pandemic and the global transition to remote work. 

Postindustria helped develop Livelii.io, a mobile app and backend platform for secure, seamless financial transactions between freelancers and clients, processed in compliance with Canadian legislation. 

About the Client 

Livelii is a startup that aims to provide the Canadian freelancing community with tools for better invoicing and benefits management. The company was accelerated by Techstars Toronto in September 2020.

Livelii founders Anya Switzer and Adam Roach began developing their platform with an in-house team. When the project ran into difficulties, they decided to look for external expertise. In June 2020, they were referred to Postindustria by one of our previous satisfied customers.

The Client’s Challenge

After several mistakes with in-house project planning and execution, the product Livelii brought to us was far from ready to be released. The core features were unstable, which was jeopardizing the successful release of the platform. 

Postindustria began by conducting a technical audit of the product in order to assess its condition and performance. After this, we drew up a roadmap for MVP development in order to stabilize the product, finalize its features, and prepare it for scaling. 

There were several key challenges:

1. The founders’ vision for the product had never been completely transformed into specs.
2. The amount of work left to be done was not easy to determine.
3. Some core features were not operating as expected.
4. The product was estimated to be only 50% complete, just ten weeks prior to launch.
5. The platform had to comply with Canadian requirements regarding STR/fraudulent transactions logging, payer personality/business type identification, payment threshold control, and more. 
6. The product was built using legacy technology.

In summary, Postindustria had to meet the challenge of combining an in-depth discovery phase with rapid development and testing, all on a very tight schedule. 

Our Solution

Postindustria provided four specialists to work together with Livelii’s in-house team: frontend and backend developers, a business analyst/PM, and a QA specialist. 

In order to achieve the required functionality, we worked on three product components: a mobile app for freelancers (iOS & Android), a web app for clients, and a freelancer subscription management and marketing website. 

The roadmap involved:

• Organization and planning: organizing the development and QA cycle, managing delivery and milestones, auditing the current product, and elaborating on product requirements.

• Consulting and expertise: providing expertise in financial funds transfer with EFT, KYC integration, rules-based reporting, and fraud detection.

• Development and integration: performing server-side and API development of highly scalable systems with cloud-based Azure architecture; developing iOS and Android apps using React Native; integrating with third-party platforms for transactions, billing, email, and other functions.

• Testing: product QA, testing financial calculations and formulas, and defining manual testing use cases for web and mobile apps.

The final product streamlines freelancer registration through the website or app, synchronizes data across the system, enables seamless invoicing and payout monitoring for all parties, and provides control over the health benefits and funding of paid days-off.

The Results

Working together with Livelii’s in-house team, we successfully achieved all of the project objectives. Postindustria helped the customer to understand what the MVP should look like and how it should operate. We also built and released the MVP in advance of the accelerator deck submission. 

The Postindustria team provided the following deliverables:

1. Performed detailed analysis of the modules and components in use 
2. Implemented the core functionality on top of EFT technology based on Zumrails
3. Updated the legacy ASP.NET and SQL databases to the latest versions 
4. Integrated the product with ESC for KYC verification 
5. Integrated with RevenueCat for in-app purchases in iOS app store
6. Integrated with Stripe, Sendgrid, and Netlify for subscription, email, and marketing activities

The final product runs on Microsoft Azure and is stable and scalable. It was successfully pitched by Livelii, and accelerated by Techstars Toronto in September 2020. 

We plan to continue as Livelii’s partner for tech expertise as the startup pursues new ideas to innovate and grow. 

Here you can find our full PDF version of this success story