Mon, 04/11/2022
As part of its work highlighting innovators in the dynamic tech sector in Nebraska, the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center is reaching out to regional tech leaders and organizations to ask them a few questions about their work, how they got started, and where they see their company headed in the future. Today we are featuring an interview with Cory Scott – CEO of LiveBy – about LiveBy’s founding, early barriers the company faced, and LiveBy’s future trajectory.
Tell us a little about LiveBy and the work that you do.
LiveBy is a real estate data and software company, with a core focus on location insights when it comes to buying or selling homes. We sell our SaaS and DaaS products to real estate brokerages, agents, MLSs, and other large data acquirers. Today we serve nearly 500 brokerages and 3,000,000 agents.
What led you to found LiveBy?
We founded LiveBy after taking part in Lincoln’s JumpStart Challenge event. A large, local real estate company was pitching a problem centered around communicating neighborhood information to consumers and we decided to pitch a solution back to the company judges. Our idea won the competition and we took the business concept into the NMotion Accelerator 2015 cohort and never looked back.
What early barriers did you face?
Too many to count. LiveBy started as a consumer application, matching homebuyers with ideal neighborhoods to live in, based on their preferences. We uncovered how truly difficult it was to be a consumer application in the real estate space since most of the data is not publicly available unless you have a brokerage license. We switched gears to be primarily a B2B business model, selling to real estate companies, which allowed us access to data we needed to build high-performing products.
What advantages or challenges does Nebraska pose for a tech firm?
At the end of the day, Nebraska investing in technology is still scarce. It is certainly growing, but it still remains relatively conservative, which poses a difficulty for Nebraska-based tech companies to fundraise in a high-growth model. Talent is also an issue; because there are not many large technology companies in Nebraska to gain experience with, there is not a large pool of technology talent to hire competitively against or convince to come work at a smaller tech startup with experience.
Where do you see LiveBy heading over the next five to ten years?
LiveBy was acquired in April 2021 by intelliAgent, a Fathom Holdings company and is still operating as its own subsidiary under the holdings company. Through this investment strategy, the goal is for LiveBy to grow exponentially and become a $50M/yr data company with 250+ employees over the next 10 years.
