Lisnic enables borderless expert advice with a scalable video platform
Time to read: 3 minutes
Founded in 2020 by Australian digital entrepreneurs Lisa Teh and Nick Bell, Lisnic—a combination of their names—assists people looking for professional expert advice.
“Having guidance from experts is proven to be one of the most effective ways to get ahead in your field,” said Teh. “But finding the right person for advice has always been a matter of luck. We made Lisnic so that anyone, anywhere can find an expert that would move them forward.”
With Lisnic, users fill out a form explaining what they do, what they’re looking for in an expert, and what they can pay that person per hour for business advice. In turn, experts bid for potential.
The result is that the person looking for advice can connect with a worldwide collection of professionals, and the experts find a potentially lucrative revenue stream from people wanting to “pick their brain”.
All sessions happen through video on the Lisnic site. The company has thousands of prominent professionals in a wide variety of industries and fields signed up as experts, and it continues to see regular monthly growth in the number of people looking for advice.
The platform also has celebrity speakers on the platform, including Marc Randolph, the co-Founder of Netflix, who are available for group sessions of an unlimited audience size which are run through the platform.
Finding the right digital partner
As a nascent digital company with a bright future and a small staff, Lisnic counts on its partners to supply them with the tech muscle it needs to support thousands of video connections at a time. They also need to handle virtual seminars and events that involve a worldwide audience.
“I was trying to work out the integration with another solution and saw we could do better,” said Teh. “We needed our users to know we’d be a reliable connection for them so they could focus on why they were there.”
While one-on-one video sessions weren’t an issue, the complication was in planning events in various rooms that could have unlimited attendees. Further, Lisnic is in the process of staging major events with famous business people and motivators that could draw as many as 1 million viewers globally. They needed a solution that could grow and scale with them.
Since the essence of Lisnic is the live interactions between experts and those seeking advice, Teh and Bell saw they needed an experienced advisor themselves to assist them with their plan. They reached out to Twilio for help with creating reliable video connections that would grow the business.
Making connections with the right tools
After discussing Teh and Bell’s plans for how they wanted their site to work, the Twilio team suggested using the reliable WebRTC platform. It allows for richer experiences with custom layouts and virtual backgrounds by using application programming interface (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs) that work across all major browsers and devices.
To handle large webinars and events with thousands of attendees, Teh and Bell also made plans to add Twilio Live, which allows for richer interactive experiences by offering text-based chat, audience polls, and the ability to invite audience members to speak.
“After meeting with them, we saw how we could elevate our client experience,” said Teh. “With Twilio, we’re not forced to develop apps ourselves, which makes it exciting from our side, since development can take a lot of time and it’s not the core of what we do, which is building and supporting a community.”
The Twilio platform also allowed Lisnic to easily add Twilio SendGrid, which provides email and messaging features.
“Twilio lets all of these programs work as a suite,” said Teh. “You’re not picking up all of these random pieces then throwing them together and hoping there are no glitches. Twilio just integrates so well with everything.”
Lisnic has seen better-than-expected growth since it went live. Their latest webinar had more than 500 participants from across the world, and it went off without a hitch. “It was very seamless and the feedback from participants backed that up,” said Teh.
Looking ahead to bigger audiences
In the future, Teh sees Lisnic becoming more of a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs to find the tools they need to scale their business. On the tech side they’re building out the business listings function and looking to build “green rooms” where webinar and event moderators can meet before they go “onstage”.
“The polls we’ve done during webinars have been very popular, as well as the live chat and screen-sharing functions,” she said. “Since there are so many features that Twilio has, we’ve got to promote them more to our attendees so they can take advantage of them.”
When Teh looks at Lisnic’s growth plans, she says she’s confident that they’ll reach their goals thanks to partners like Twilio.
“We have big plans. Our vision is for when people think business, they think Lisnic. In order to achieve that, we need to have the right partners on board. I say that the dev team at Twilio are almost like Neo from The Matrix. They can build just about anything, so we’re looking forward to seeing what they come up with next to help us Lisnic.”
