Ben Fischer talks about starting a company as a Stanford sophomore

Ben Fischer is the founder of Lighthouse, a social app that allows users to broadcast to their friends that they’re free for a call — no phone tag, no scheduling, no back-and-forth. Lighthouse enables the spontaneous moments of connection and conversation that are usually impossible at a distance.

Ben was a student at Stanford until last spring, when he took a leave of absence to focus full-time on Lighthouse. The beta version of the app launched last September, and the full version is coming this spring.

In our chat, Ben shares how he launched the product and company from scratch, differentiating from other social apps, and how lessons from the beta are informing the full version of the app.

Tell us how Lighthouse got started.

Like millions of college students around the country, I was abruptly sent home from Stanford last March when the world shut down. I was living in Israel, on the other side of the world, suddenly cut off from my friends, my community, and my social circle that I was just starting to build in my freshman year of college.

Growing up, I moved around a ton so I was used to maintaining long-distance friendships. But there was something about my college experience that wasn’t translating online — something unique and hard to pin down. After a while I realized I was missing the experience of leaving my dorm room door open and having a random friend walk in, or going to grab a coffee, or stopping by a professor’s office hours — all those moments of spontaneity. I wanted a way for my friends to know when I was free to call — to not have to deal with all the phone tag that was so quickly becoming so routine in our online lives. I wanted a solution, and that’s how Lighthouse started.

How did you transform that problem into a solution?

I’m generally non-technical. In college, I was completely resistant to that startup-student archetype that was all around campus. I was into classics and literature and that was my focus. But I had some amount of startup experience beforehand; I started a tutoring network right around the time covid hit, but that was relatively short lived, in the period when schools were fully closed.

So I didn’t really know where to start. I was in Israel, and there’s a massive startup community here. So I asked around to find anybody who would share some wisdom.

I didn’t know if it was an app, a platform, a spreadsheet, or what — I just needed a way to solidify my frustration into a solution. I met with someone and had a conversation about it. At the end he was like, “Just send me your wireframe.” And I was like, what’s a wireframe? I didn’t know any of the jargon.

But for every person I spoke to, I asked to speak to three more people, and at the end of every one of those conversations, I asked them to put me in touch with three more people. I ended up spending quite a while learning, ideating, and networking. I realized that what I was dealing with wasn’t just a personal problem — it was a universal problem, a lack of spontaneity online, and the solution to that was Lighthouse.

I spent money from my previous job hiring some kids I knew to build an alpha for me — a very, very early, one-button version. That was a complete failure, but it provided tons of learning lessons. And it put me in a position to bring on a friend who would help me develop our new alpha and our new beta. That was around the time that we were forming our identity and that’s about the time we raised our pre-seed round with Xfund.

What did you learn from that first, early failure?

At that time, the failure boiled down to having no idea what I was doing, outsourcing people with this vision in my mind despite having none of the right tools to communicate it. Above all, the experience helped me figure out how to translate a vision from this weird and ambiguous thing in my mind into something actionable and concrete.

I knew as well that having people on this journey with me, sharing my vision, would be super powerful. Building a startup is a lonely experience, because you’re building this thing that the world doesn’t yet know about, but it’s really hard to do alone. This experience taught me a lesson that I’m still applying, which is that you shouldn’t go through this alone. You want to build yourself a community of people, mentors, and friends who will share this vision with you.

What makes Lighthouse different from other social apps?

We operate in two spheres: spontaneity and serendipity. Those are the two sensations we’re trying to bring out in the conversations we’re having and in the way people engage with us and with each other through Lighthouse.

There’s no spontaneity online. Messaging chat apps all depend on this game of phone tag that we’re so used to playing, and this dynamic of sending a message and it being ok for you not to respond for a week because you didn’t see it or you left it unread. There’s just never those moments in our asynchronous, online lives where we can synch as easily as Lighthouse enables us to.

For example, there was never a question that you and I were going to set up this call, which involved emailing back and forth, sending a Zoom link, and putting it in my calendar. In person, you can just pass somebody on the street and start a conversation. That just doesn’t exist online. Social apps don’t provide that kind of face-to-face, one-on-one opportunity. That’s why we’re there as a tool.

Another aspect is the unique nature of the conversations that happen through Lighthouse. There’s this graph I can draw, of how far in advance you schedule a call and the unspoken expectations for that call. For example, if you and I scheduled this call six months ago, we would probably expect to talk more than 15 minutes.

And so what happens when the time out from the call is zero, or in other words, it’s spontaneous? What ways are people comfortable being on the phone with somebody?

One of the most exciting and validating things for us, is that people are telling friends that they’re free when they only have a couple minutes going between classes, because they’re trying to bring back that experience of passing somebody in the hallway and having a spontaneous chat.

We’re also trying to bring in some serendipity too. When you turn your light on, when you tell friends that you’re free to call, you don’t know who’s going to pick up. There’s this kind of unique, exciting reward of connecting with somebody, and until you connect not knowing who it is. It could be somebody you haven’t spoken to in years or your closest friend. It’s really gratifying.

You launched your beta version last fall, and the full version is due soon. How did you iterate? What did you learn from the beta?

Lighthouse lets you tell friends that you’re free to call, when you’re free to call. So, going into the beta, we knew that it could be used in one of two major ways.

On the one hand, you could be using Lighthouse sporadically to have long conversations with people you’re way overdue to talk to — reconnecting with old friends or having that catch-up you keep kicking down the road. In this case, Lighthouse is a tool to stay engaged for a long period of time. Alternatively, you could be comfortable using it as a tool for spontaneous conversations while you’re going in between classes, eating dinner real quick, or doing the laundry, running, cooking, cleaning, whatever.

Those are two very different kinds of conversations and despite the overlapping functionality, they’re two different apps.

In the beta, we found that users were gravitating much more toward the latter use — which was super exciting for us because that’s one of the most unique things we do. We learned that people are actively interested in and enjoying being on the phone with a friend for only a couple minutes, just to say hi and bye. It sounds simple and small, but it makes such a huge impact on our online communication routines.

So our full version is going all-in on that. Once we realized that was the way users were using the app, we’ve built features, functions, messaging, and design around enabling that as best as possible — making it easier for people who are already using it, and more enticing for those who don’t know how it works yet.

Is it difficult to stand out in Stanford’s startup scene?

Stanford is — for good reason — oversaturated with students pursuing startups. Big or small, whether it’s something they did in their dorm room for an afternoon or a years-long company, everyone’s got a “startup.” I think that oversaturation, especially in the social space, naturally makes it a harder community to penetrate or take root in. There’s a natural and understandable resistance to it — you know, another student social app? Do I really have to download this one? You have to make your differentiation so much more clear. If the word of mouth is just that there’s another student social app, you’re kind of dead in the water, because I hear that every day.

Was it a difficult decision to leave Stanford to focus on Lighthouse?

Not at all, in very large part thanks to Xfund. I was taking online classes last spring. I didn’t have the option not to; the idea of taking the quarter off for it was crazy to me. But I hated it. It was really hard. I was working from 8 pm to 4 am. I didn’t want to do that. So what a wonderful coincidence that I stumbled upon an idea that I’m more passionate about than anything else I could be doing right now.

How did you connect with Xfund?

Last summer, I knew that the way to take Lighthouse from a small idea that I didn’t have any of the resources to make happen, into a reality with the resources to find success, was to raise a pre-seed round. I made a short list of the VCs in the Valley that I would love to reach out to, and Xfund was at the top.

Coincidentally, Brandon Farwell was giving a Zoom webinar to Stanford students. I joined just to learn what the VC landscape was like right then. Afterwards, I completely cold emailed him: “Hi Brandon, I’m a student, do you have 15 minutes to talk sometime next week? Here’s my pitch deck.” At the time, I barely even knew what that meant.

I didn’t even necessarily know what I was going to ask for; that only came a couple conversations in. But I knew in the end I wanted to raise funding, and I wanted to start that process. I was so thankful and lucky that one of the first people I spoke to was the one who would help us.

What advice do you have for first-time founders?

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. Once I realized the solution to my problem was an app, I was scared of embracing that because I had no idea how to develop an app. At the time, it was such a new world to me. I felt like I was starting at zero, with no resources and at the outset, no network of people to advise me until I worked to build it.

But I’ve found that since then, rather than being intimidated by all those things I don’t know, the things I don’t know are what’s driving me. I don’t know what we’re going to look like in a couple months, or what success we might find, and that’s really exciting. I also don’t know all the skills I’m going to continue to be learning and growing. As Lighthouse scales, I’ll learn how to be a better manager and CEO. Once the product takes off, I’ll learn about how to engage a community and a growing network of users who are spontaneously connecting.

Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know, because eventually learning it is going to be the most fun part.

What’s next for Lighthouse?

Our full launch is coming at the end of this spring, which is super exciting for all of us. With it comes a ton of new features, a ton of new optimization, and the implementation of all the lessons we learned in our beta. That means this summer we’re going wide and we’re trying to be helpful to communities and organizations on campuses around the country. That’s our short-term laser focus.

In the long term, we are passionate about bringing spontaneity online, not just for students but for institutions who want to be connecting with their communities in ways they can’t with our online toolkit right now. So part of the bigger vision is being a hub for spontaneous connections online, and being a tool to find serendipity in ways you otherwise wouldn’t. We can bring back online those short, casual, unplanned conversations that are some of the most exciting parts of socializing.

Originally published at https://blog.xfund.com on January 9, 2022.