[Lyster](https://lyster.io) is a collaborative canvas that enables teams to collaborate across domains on interlinked diagrams. Anyone can draw, IT or business, and dependencies between systems and processes are tracked automatically. The result is a canvas that helps teams make sense of complexity as they work, even if they don't have full-time enterprise architects. Co-founder and CEO Sam Lindemer started Lyster after years as an IT consultant. He kept watching the same thing happen: teams workshopping at a whiteboard, solution architects redrawing in tools only they knew how to use, creating a document the business couldn’t access. It got even worse during mergers and modernization, when teams quickly had to align on shared architecture and processes. ## The challenge Most enterprise architecture tools were built for the top of the hierarchy: specialists who report up to leadership with high-level overviews. The people closer to the work, the ones who actually feel it when processes break, get locked out. Sam wanted Lyster to be the hub between IT and the business: a tool where everyone draws their own way, and then connects their work to other teams’ diagrams. He wanted the power of an enterprise architecture tool with the freedom of a whiteboard. That meant getting realtime right: live cursors, presence, and conflict-free sync across many linked diagrams at once. Building it in-house meant becoming Yjs and WebSocket experts, and none of that work would move the product forward. ## Why Liveblocks Lyster picked Liveblocks because it was the fastest path to adding a [realtime layer with Yjs](/docs/collaboration-features/multiplayer/sync-engine/liveblocks-yjs). ### Betting on collaboration Traditional enterprise architecture tools are heavily data-driven, with an emphasis on tables and forms, rather than creativity and collaboration. Lyster was establishing a new market, betting that giving the people in between a way to work together would matter to companies trying to democratize architecture and processes. Their entire collaborative experience runs through Liveblocks, so picking infrastructure was a huge decision. Sam looked for practical signals: clear docs, real developer tools, and a roadmap that read like Liveblocks cared about the people building on top of it. ### A living workshop on the canvas Lyster uses Liveblocks [Presence](/realtime-infrastructure?primitive=presence), [cursors](/examples/browse/cursors), and [avatars](/examples/browse/avatar-stack) to show who’s in a session and which diagram they’re on. The [Liveblocks Storage](/realtime-infrastructure?primitive=storage) & [Yjs](/realtime-infrastructure?primitive=storage) sync engines handle concurrent edits to diagrams and data models without conflicts.

### From zero to a working prototype in a few hours Sam set Liveblocks up locally, mocked the API endpoints in Bruno, and validated the auth and room flows in a couple of hours. After months spent building Lyster’s data model on top of Yjs, it was the one part of the stack he could stop worrying about. ## The outcome Lyster shipped a combination of capabilities the incumbents don’t have: live multiplayer editing, version control with branching, merging, and custom approval flows, automatic conflict resolution, and a shared model that links concepts across every diagram. Retrofitting these features on top of a legacy stack would have been impossible. The strongest signal has been live demos. When prospects join a session and start drawing alongside the Lyster team, the collaboration sells the product on its own.

## What to consider when building a collaborative experience Final advice from Sam: - Don’t build realtime collaboration yourself until you’ve hit the edge of what Yjs can do. It’s mature. - Install the [Liveblocks DevTools Chrome extension](/devtools) on day one. We found it late, and it would have saved us serious time inspecting Yjs document state during testing. - AI won’t do this work for you. The data model and architecture decisions still need real engineering. ### Building something new? Liveblocks supports startups. Lyster joined the [Liveblocks Startup program](/startups), which gave them runway to focus on building the product instead of worrying about infrastructure costs.