How Lifie found its product
Lifie builds voice and chat AI for businesses. Two product lines: REACH, voice AI for outbound customer engagement, and ASSIST, chat AI for inbound support, appointments, and sales workflows.
That is not what we set out to build. Here's how we got here.
How it started
July 2025.
The original idea was simple: a personal AI assistant for consumers. Something that could negotiate with businesses, book services, and make purchases on your behalf. Like having someone handle all the annoying parts of interacting with businesses.
To make that work, businesses would also need their own AI systems that the consumer assistant could talk to. So we had two sides to build: consumer and business.
We started with the consumer side. We quickly realised the industry wasn't ready. Most businesses had no AI systems for an assistant to interact with at all. So we stepped back and decided to build the business side first.
The vision wasn't wrong, the timing was. If the ecosystem isn't ready for what you're building, build the layer that's missing first.
The classification trap
Building the business side, we designed a clean system: four types of business AI, split by what they'd handle.
- Product: e-commerce, catalog
- Professional services: consulting, freelancing
- Bookings: appointments, reservations
- Information: FAQs, knowledge base
Logically it made perfect sense. Clean separation, clear architecture.
Then we talked to actual businesses. Not one of them wanted a single category. A restaurant needed bookings and product info and support. A salon needed appointments and customer follow-ups and FAQs. Everyone needed everything, mixed together.
Engineering truth and market truth are different things. A clean abstraction that users don't want is just wasted code.
The pivot
We dropped the classification system and rebuilt around one idea: one unified system per business that handles whatever that business needs. No categories, just capabilities.
We also dropped the consumer assistant entirely. It was too early. Instead we focused fully on helping businesses automate their customer interactions.
Around this time we connected with a team building voice AI for outbound and inbound calling. Their tech was complementary: they had the voice layer, we had the intelligence layer. We merged.
Killing your original vision isn't failure, it's clarity. And merging with the right team is faster than building everything yourself.
Where Lifie is now
After the merger we structured everything into two product lines.
REACH is voice AI for outbound customer engagement, covering different vertical use cases: reaching, qualifying, and engaging customers through voice. ASSIST is chat AI for inbound workflows: appointments, sales conversations, and customer support.
Both share the same intelligence layer underneath.
What I learned
Eight months of building Lifie taught me more than two years of coursework.
Market over architecture. The market doesn't care about your architecture. Build what solves the problem, not what looks clean on a whiteboard.
Pivot early. The longer you hold onto the wrong idea, the more it costs. We pivoted twice in four months and each time the product got sharper.
Supply side first. If you're building something that connects two sides, work out which side has to exist first. We spent time on the consumer side when businesses weren't ready for it.
Merge when it makes sense. Building everything yourself feels like ownership, but finding the right team to combine with is a faster path to something real.