Every year, a host in Rovinj welcomes the same family back to their apartment, and every year, that booking runs through an OTA that takes 15–20% for a guest who never needed finding. Livvi, founded by Lovro Tovernić, went through BIRD’s Incubation 2025/26 program and is built to fix exactly that. The platform is now LIVE, with hosts already taking direct bookings. We sat down with Lovro to talk about the first year, the hardest lesson, and what’s next.
Who are you, what’s the name and age of your startup, and what problem are you solving?
I’m Lovro Tovernić, 26, from Zlatar. Livvi is almost a year old — we went live on March 1st, 2026. Co-founders are Marko Sukreški (CFO & CBDO) and Leon Kranjčević (CTO).
The problem is simple. A host in Rovinj gets a family that comes back four summers running. They know where the keys are. They send him a Christmas card. And every year they book through Booking.com — because there’s no other way. He pays 15–20% commission to reach a guest nobody had to find.
Livvi is a PMS and direct booking tool in one, at 2% commission. The returning guest becomes the host’s asset, not the platform’s.
Every startup faces challenges: what’s been your toughest obstacle so far, and how did you overcome it?
Filling the supply side. Classic chicken-and-egg — hosts don’t want to sign up without guests, guests don’t want to book without hosts.
We actually tried demand first. Spent €50 on 2,500 clicks. Got zero bookings. The insight wasn’t targeting — it was trust. Nobody books an unknown platform with three apartments in their town.
So we changed the order. Every euro goes to host acquisition until we have inventory density. Facebook host groups, cold outreach, a Poslovni dnevnik feature that drove 1,400 sign-ups before we even had a product. Guests come later — through their own host, not through an ad.
What’s one resource, connection, or experience at BIRD Incubator that truly made a difference in your startup’s growth?
Georg Bauser, without a doubt. He co-founded Accoleo, which Airbnb acquired — so he knows the OTA world from the inside in a way almost nobody in this region does. We sync every two or three weeks. He pressure-tests every assumption I bring and pushes back hard when the story doesn’t hold up. That kind of advisor is worth more than any workshop or grant.
Livvi is live at the moment — who is it for, how does it work, and what makes it different from other accommodation platforms?
Livvi is for independent short-term rental hosts — the ones running one to five apartments themselves. Croatia alone has 120,000. Europe has 1.8 million.
It works like this: the host manages calendar, pricing, channels and guests in one dashboard, and gets their own direct booking link to send to returning guests. Same experience as Booking on the guest side — card, confirmation, done — but 2% commission instead of 15–20%.
What makes it different: most competitors are either OTAs (whose whole model depends on owning the guest) or PMS tools (whose subscription revenue is the same whether a booking is direct or not). Nobody has an incentive to actually shift bookings toward the host. We do — it’s the only thing we do.
What does pricing look like for users, and can people already book their summer stay or sign up to try Livvi right now?
Hosts can sign up today at livvi.io and start taking bookings. The first end-to-end reservation has already gone through.
Pricing is 2% per booking. Free for the first 12 months, then €9.99 per apartment monthly, capped at €60. That’s it — no setup fee, no channel fee, no per-guest fee.
Guest-facing marketing kicks in January 2027, once we have supply density behind us. Until then, every guest booking will come through a host they already know.
What stage of development is Livvi at right now, and what’s next on the roadmap?
We’re in beta with 119 registered hosts, 45 properties listed, and the platform running end-to-end — reservations, payments, channel sync with Booking and Airbnb, and the eVisitor integration for Croatian compliance.
Next up: automatic guest capture and a marketing module built on top of the guest CRM. The idea is that a host with no marketing team can run campaigns to their own guests the way an agency would — pulled straight from their reservation history, sent without them having to lift a finger. That’s the moment the tool stops being a booking system and becomes a growth tool.
Where do you see your startup in five years, and what goals are you most excited to achieve?
Livvi as the operating system for independent hosting in Europe. Croatia proves the economics — highest OTA dependence, heaviest seasonality, hardest compliance regime. If it works here, it translates.
Longer term, I want Livvi to be the layer that connects the whole tourism ecosystem — hosts, tourist boards, local producers, experience providers. Right now that data lives with three American platforms. There’s no reason it has to.
To wrap up, what’s one piece of advice or wisdom from your journey that you believe every founder should know?
Motion isn’t progress. Sign-ups aren’t customers, meetings aren’t deals, and press coverage isn’t traction. Early on it’s easy to feel busy and mistake that for building. The number that actually matters is whichever one you’re most afraid to look at.
Follow Livvi’s journey here :)
