Launching Liively

Live events experience made better.

You try to peer around the person queueing in front of you — still another 7 people to go! You look at your watch. How long have you been waiting? It feels like forever. You can hear the faint, distant whistle of play resuming behind you. The person at the front is served, snatching their food and running back to their seat. You edge slightly closer to the counter, but it is still far from reach. The roar of the crowd builds to a crescendo that seems to come up through the floor. You catch eyes with others in the queue: a shared and unwanted experience of desperation.

You find yourself wondering why it has to be like this.

About Liively

Who wants to wait in line? Founders, Norbert and David, feel your pain and are here to change the game! Liively, their visionary product is the “cure for queueing”, transforming the event food ordering experience. In short, Liively keeps you in the action, connecting you with food and beverage vendors whilst you watch.

Liively’s groundbreaking approach means spectators never miss a thing, vendors get more customers, and sports/performers keep their audience — It’s a win/win!

To bring this vision to life, Norbert and David partnered with Everest Engineering, a world-leading software company with a wealth of experience in software engineering, product design and UX.

Four short months later, Liively is live!

The Product

Liively’s unique selling point is its ability for customers to order from multiple vendors simultaneously. No other platform does this. To make this a reality, Liively needed several moving parts working harmoniously to make it work seamlessly for spectators and vendors. Everest Engineering worked with Norbert and David to design the end-to-end product so all user’s journeys were well understood. Everest then developed four separate front-facing connected applications so each user group had a tailored experience, including:

• Patrons — customers can browse menus, place orders, and access important information all from the comfort of their seats.
• Vendors — can manage their menu, including comprehensive customizations and accepting & declining orders directly from their dashboard.
• Admins — can monitor order flow and assign runners for vendor delivery. Dashboards serve as central hubs for managing venues, vendors, and runners.
• Runners — are continuously updated on their assigned orders.

Further, Everest has designed easy-to-understand management dashboards and detailed reporting options for vendors, admins, and runners to support smooth reconciliation between Liively and their partners.

The Team

To bring Norbert & David’s vision to life. Everest Engineering formed a team of skilled engineers and business analysts. Fundamental to Liively’s success, Everest ran a culture of empowered collaboration, open communication, and experienced design and engineering practices. This built a healthy team spirit that help navigate every challenge with grace.

Empowerment bred innovations such as demoing features in continuous delivery — as soon as they were ready. Short feedback loops fostered rapid learning.The Tech

Everest Engineering used its deep experience with React, Material UI, and NestJS to bring Liively to life. Committed to developing future-proofed and scalable products, Everest:

• Minimised language differences in the application layers (front-end and back-end code) to keep things simple and connected.
• Used GraphQL as the foundation, binding the four tailored applications together.
• Used NestJS’ comprehensive support for GraphQL to help the platform materialise rapidly.
• Developed a common thread of responsive design, authorisation, and notifications was shared across the applications.
• Made payments fast and easy, integrating the comprehensive global payment system Stripe (which also supports Javascript, such as Stripe-Elements for React).
• Deployed Liively regionally in Australia & Bahrain bringing the platform closer to their users, ensuring a low latency user experience.
• Delivered a responsive UI using MongoDB’s fast read speeds.
• Ensured focus on critical customer outcomes by using cloud services, such as AWS’ Cognito, Amplify, ECS, SNS, SES, and S3, and Firebase’s Cloud Messaging (FCM).

The Go-Liive

As part of Everest’s delivery assurance process, we conducted a test run on May 25th, 2023, releasing Liively as part of a single event.

Through this exercise, we gained valuable insights, and provided the founders time and means to uncover important user behaviour; for eggsample — the heavy reliance of vendors on payments made via Apple or Google Pay. This meant there was a risk that some spectators or vendors would be left out!

With important refinements now released, and Liively’s infrastructure scaled to cater to a significantly larger crowd, Liively was ready for a bigger test.

On the morning of the 27th of May, an hour before the main event, the Liively platform went offline. Everest responded immediately, performing a rapid root cause analysis exercise, identifying that the event domain provider had caused an external DNS issue.

Everest facilitated virtual collaboration with the Domain provider. Soon enough, Liively was back for business, and orders started to flood in. Thousands of orders were successfully processed during the 4 hour event, showcasing the resilience of Liively, and it’s readiness to get out there and start serving those customers.

What Exactly Happened — The Outcome

The success of the main event proved Liively’s solution at scale. As a result, Liively:

• secured a global distribution partnership opening up events and stadiums across the Middle East, Europe, and Australia
• has been invited by the Saudi government officials so they can understand more about how it could be customized to serve the needs of different venues.
• are in talks with major sporting event managers in Australia.

Delivering the ultimate smack down, Liively’s in-event ordering platform will be used for all WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) venues for the next two years!

The collaboration of Liively’s vision and Everest know-how, ensured that this innovative solution made it’s mark, going live reliably at the right time and place.

What We Learned

• Fast ‘Test and learn’ cycles remain a critical contributor to successful launches.
• Transparent, open communication, especially during a crisis, helped coordination between parties, which was crucial to success.
• Continuous feedback through demos and deployments, done as soon as possible, ensured a successful delivery.
• Client involvement and priority to attend daily rituals and demonstrations is crucial.

Future Prospects

It’s going to be a big year for Liively, and Everest are there to help them do it, every step of the way! The team is already working on Liively’s next evolution, delivering exciting features to their users. With so many new locations at their fingertips, keep an eye out for the “cure for queueing” at your next event!

This article is written in collaboration with Naveen Kumar Bettaswamy