In my podcast, I explore the many different facets of the world of high tech from development to marketing, to sales, to entrepreneurship, all with the goal of collecting key insights on startups for listeners to gain value from this knowledge-sharing. So, what did I discover this week?

The key to survival in the business world in the next few years will be the level to which a business is able to adapt to the growing wave of digital experiences. If the coronavirus did not yet prove it to anyone, perhaps recent statistics suggesting that the global market for digital transformation will nearly double in the next several years will convince the naysayers. Digital transformation is here, and it is coming to affect every industry.

What is Digital Transformation?

It is a term we see thrown around quite a bit, but what is it actually? Essentially, it is a process of implementing and adopting new technologies to improve, modify, or create business processes. The idea is that these new digital processes will make the business more efficient, help save costs, and open up new revenue streams. It can require serious collaboration from multiple stakeholders but can lead to a solid direction moving forward.

Of course, this impacts the business world immensely since the digital transformation is largely spurred on by changing customer expectations as to what meets the criteria of good and effective service. That means the businesses that aim to survive their customers’ digital adoption, must change to fit their new needs. Yet, many businesses can find it challenging to make the shift. Whether budgetary or resource concerns, it can take time for businesses to adopt, and, in the meantime, their income can take a hit.

Zviki Ben Ishay, CEO and Founder at Lightico, saw this whole transition as a problem that needed to be solved. “Enterprises are conducting conversations with customers, complete onboarding, and servicing use cases with paper”, he adds, especially when consumers are used to digital interactions in other business situations. Zviki goes on to add that “Lightico embarked on a journey to eliminate paper from consumer-facing interactions.” Imagine trying to change your bank, sign up for an insurance policy, or any other type of commercial interaction, up until recently many of us were subjected to still having to do this on paper. And, while some companies have begun adopting more digital-friendly policies, there is still a long way to go for many industries and businesses. Lightico aims to change that entirely.

Changing the World - On the Side

“During the first stages of Lightico it was a lot of bootstrapping until we got the first client,” Zviki recounts as he describes working on Lightico after joining with his two partners and leaving his prior job. Beginning in 2015, he and his team were hard at work trying to discover the right ways to go about their digital transformation offering. They consulted on various projects and onboarded beta customers to test their solutions. “We had to learn if these customers represented a big enough vertical to go to market before actually doing it.”

Zviki’s experimentation took the better part of two years at the start of the venture to figure out what Lightico would turn out to be. During that time, he worked another job so that he could bring in some revenue to support his growing family and the time he spent perfecting Lightico. “30% of the day, nights, and weekends, we focused on Lightico…30% of human time, you know 5, 6 am was the time we were working on Lightico...we hardly slept for this period,” Zviki adds jokingly when talking about the arduous process to build his venture.

New Clients and Growth

In a sense, the team knew what they wanted to build. They knew they had a winning idea. But they needed the space to be able to grow and work on it and incubate it. Still, once they found that their solution could work, they needed to find the critical mass of clients to actually prove they had something that could help a large customer base.

As Zviki puts it, they needed “20 or 30 customers, not just one to prove that this is an issue we can solve for many businesses and that we have a trend.” Fortunately, enough for Lightico, in between zoom meetings in Zviki’s backyard and other guerilla tactics, they were able to secure these clients and prove their solution to potential investors. With the money they have raised, most recently being a Series B, they are now committed to growing their solution and making the digital transformation accessible to businesses around the world.

It goes to show that at the end of the day with the right dedication and space for innovation, the possibilities are endless.