We were lucky to catch up with Olivia Mihaljevic recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Olivia, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

During the past few years we’ve seen companies really struggle with taking care of their employees. Whether it’s with remote or hybrid work, quiet quitting, loud quitting, or just the overall employee experience. There’s been a lot of changes.

A few key trends in the HR industry are:
1) Remote and flexible work arrangements
2) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
3) Employee well-being and mental health
4) Digital Transformation – AI in HR processes
5) Employee experience

Recently, there’s been a big shift in return to the office and many large tech companies mandating in-office work environments only. This is a transition from the flexibility employees were able to enjoy while working remotely. Maybe they got to travel, or live in another place, or just save time not commuting. By offering flexibility, employer’s are able to access the best talent from anywhere which is an opportunity. But managing a remote team does require thoughtful planning, open communication, and extra effort needed to foster a supportive company culture.

Olivia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m one of the co-founders of LIVD. We’re an HR tech company in the employee lifestyle benefits space. For those that might not be familiar with that space, it involves any type of benefit a company provides beyond traditional health, dental, or paramedical, to its team to attract or retain employees. We’re focused on making it easier for companies to take care of their teams, by providing flexible benefits. Our mission is to make this process easier, and we’re starting with small-to-medium sized businesses, which is where the majority of people work.

How we do this is through an app. Each month employees get a monthly stipend from their employer that’s loaded into their profile within the app. They can use those dollars to shop our platform for hundreds of benefits, and find one that suits their needs or priorities. Whether it’s fitness and wellness subscriptions, food, transportation, or travel benefits, the possibilities are endless. Each employee is able to pick and choose what benefits they want, rather than HR providing a one-size-fits none solution.

Prior to working on LIVD, I spent about a decade working for large companies in a variety of different roles including product, product marketing, and pricing strategies. I’ve spent a large portion of my career working in marketplaces, so was able to leverage a ton of that experience when we started building LIVD, which is a B2B marketplace.

My co-founder and I have experienced this problem from both sides, as employees of other companies and now as employers trying to manage our own team, and attract and retain employees.

We’re really proud of what we’ve built with LIVD. It’s a solution designed with employee flexibility in mind. Our platform gives the same level of benefits whether the team is remote, in the office, or hybrid.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

LinkedIn DMs! I met my co-founder by DM’ing her on LinkedIn. I was looking for a full-stack mobile app developer and went about all the typical co-founder matching routes – like going through my network, asking for referrals, looking in founder communities. But, I wasn’t finding anyone I really connected with.

I decided to go onto LinkedIn and start searching profiles and asking people for coffee chats as a way to get to know them. I messaged my now co-founder and asked to chat. She was super skeptical at first, since we had no connections in common, but agreed to chat with me. We got to know each other over several months, worked on a small project together to test how the working relationship would go, and really took things slow before she officially joined as a co-founder. We have such complimentary skills and do a good job on balancing out each other.

Finding a co-founder is definitely one of the hardest challenges early stage founders go through. You need to find someone just as passionate about what you’re solving for, someone who can help you build it, and will take a risk and join you on this rollercoaster of a journey. It’s such a special relationship and takes time to develop.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We’re actually going through this right now. We’re going through a substantial pivot, based on all the learnings we’ve had so far in building LIVD. We launched a totally different product last year – a marketplace for beauty services. We connected customers with local artists – makeup, nails, and hair.

From that we learned just how challenging it is to be a hyper local, and hyper personalized marketplace where you’re connecting customers and local artists. We grew it regionally, but ultimately, it became very challenging to scale beyond just a regional business while being bootstrapped.

We spent a lot of time analyzing what went right and what we needed to change in every aspect of our business. We really loved building the supply side (business side) of the marketplace, and recognized that was definitely a team strength.

We decided to scrap all the code we had written and start again at the beginning of this year. This time, we changed the way we built our apps, from natively built, to cross-platform. This allowed us to build much quicker and cheaper and we’re gearing up for our re-launch.   

Contact Info:

• Website: https://livdapp.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/livd/?viewAsMember=true