It’s rare for a family-owned business to break with tradition, and even rarer for one to embrace the changes technology can bring. But even though she’s four generations deep, Lisa Fiore is forward-thinking enough to know that e-commerce is going to change her business one way or another. Building a marketplace startup was her way of getting in front of it.
From the beginning, Lisa knew she wanted LandscapeHub to be a separate company, but one that could take advantage of all she’d learned at Fiore. And she had a long list of features informed by her experience. The goal was to give buyers — for the first time ever — a transparent online marketplace website where they could see every available plant, which suppliers had them, what types and sizes were available, and, most revolutionarily, how much everything cost.
The goal, ultimately, is for LandscapeHub to be a true two-sided marketplace startup, where suppliers ship directly to buyers, giving buyers alternatives to the brick-and-mortar distribution network. In the meantime though, Lisa needed to build a minimum viable product that could prove her idea was worthwhile and worth investing in.