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Curiously, it was fishing that brought together Western Australia’s newest team of tech entrepreneurs and led them to Insight, the business transition specialists who helped transform their bold new LITT App from a great idea into a thriving business.
Insight Director, Stewart Blizard, explains that the company has worked for many years with LITT co-founder Brent Thompson’s family, particularly around succession planning for the family’s Cervantes cray fishing business.
The two other LITT App founders are Brent’s childhood friend, Josh O’Byrne, and his brother-in-law, Peter Salom, a former sales and marketing manager with Quiksilver Australia.
The Birth of LITT
LITT began four years ago with a creative idea that emerged during one of those casual conversations friends and family have around the barbecue by the beach. The conversation continued over coffees, lunches, and boardroom tables until their tech start-up dream became a reality, aided by $3 million in early seed funding from WA backers.
Peter Salom explains that the LITT App integrates social media, including photo/video sharing and messaging, with an eCommerce backend that includes LITT Cash in a digital wallet and online gift cards/vouchers.
“That’s the major difference between our platform and all the other major platforms out there because ours is a fully integrated platform that provides an experience between social media and eCommerce,” he says. “Further developing the augmented reality proficiency is very exciting and that’s just coming out as part of the digital advertising upgrade.”
A Turning Point
Brent Thompson recalls a real turning point during a visit to America about three years ago, as he was flying into Los Angeles. He vividly remembers asking himself, ‘how the hell are we going to capture some part of this world?’.
“We always thought about how we could be different from the other big social platforms; we asked ourselves what have they forgotten,” he explains. “After all, there are a lot of gaps there, like including communities and giving back to people. I remember thinking, ‘what if we bring in advertising revenue but give some of that back to users?’.
“I rang Stewie in the morning and asked, ‘can we pay our users some of the advertising revenue that we get, into their own digital wallet?’.” Brent laughs when he recalls Stewie’s answer: “It’s an absolute nightmare, but yes we can do it.”
Making the Idea Bankable
Insight Director, Mathieu Paul, explains that initially, the aim with LITT was to protect the idea and make it bankable. With support from Insight, that step was accomplished, and attention turned to tackling LITT’s unique, complex, and multi-faceted challenges.
“Everything the LITT founders wanted to achieve was and is doable, it’s just a matter of having the flexibility and innovation to be able to achieve it,” he says. “The multidisciplinary approach used between compliance, management consulting, R&D, and a collaborative effort to help them in areas that firms like ours typically don’t do, such as operations planning, HR, marketing, and a precise selection and implementation of systems and processes, was, and is vital.”
“Some work also revolved around gaining ASIC approval of virtual cash and credit, tapping into Insight’s Innovation division to submit an R&D Tax Incentive claim. We are constantly seeing clients finding opportunities, disrupting, creating new technologies and innovative solutions to old problems, and we have the pleasure of helping them grow, develop, and transition. LITT is just one success story.”
Growing Success
LITT launched in April and has already attracted 4,000 users and 30 mostly Western Australian merchant businesses, with those numbers continuing to grow. The next phase is what Brent Thompson describes as one of the most ‘powerful capabilities’ of any platform of its type: the LITT virtual credit card.
“It’s kept growing – that digital wallet piece. It is the most powerful component we have and now we’re turning that into a LITT Visa card, our very own tap-and-go card usable with any merchant. It launches in October and the big brands are poised and waiting.”
Read about other client success stories:
Freedom Pools
LITT
Amaroo Retreat and Spa
PumpnSeal
Tree Chalets
Newland Precision Engineering
3 Monkeys AV
