A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:14:59 · Pablo Srugo
[00:14:59] S2: You do as a founder have to have something that just keeps you going. I agree with you. It can be money. It can be team. It can be purpose. I will say, the bar of success is almost commensurate to that. If it's money, unless you're like, "I can't live with myself unless I make a billion dollars," you know, it's just hard to keep going past a certain point. Because you're like, OK, it was money. I can make a hundred million here, I'm good. You know, whereas if your actual goal, like, genuinely you get up in the morning because you want to say change the way immigration works across the globe. Frankly, you're never done and so then there is really no bar.
00:15:33 · Dan Mishin
[00:15:33] S0: Yeah I agree and, you know, Elon Musk came up with those big meaty goals for his life, and he has that intrinsic motivation that probably will never evaporate. Because he can never actually achieve his goal, and that's the beauty of his goal. But yeah, and the third reason why we chose immigration is that there is actual real technology leverage here. If you think about immigration law, what is it? It's somebody dealing with the government. Anytime you're dealing with the government, there is a predefined set of rules. There is a very clear kind of way that the government wants you to work with them. Manifest OS doesn't empower lawyers that do bet the company, multi hundred million dollar litigation. Because there you have the other side, and the other side could be creative, and they could be sneaky, and they could play by the rules or maybe they won't be playing by the rules. AI leverage there is much lower than it is when you're dealing with the government and if you're dealing with the government, and you're helping a company sponsor a thousand employees for their visas. That basically creates real technology leverage because you can achieve very interesting levels of automation and we're seeing this all the time. Where a lawyer used to spend forty hours on preparing a visa case. Today, they spend ten. Tomorrow, they're going to spend four. The day after tomorrow, they're going to spend two and what can you do with that time? Well, a lawyer can now spend their time actually being proactive with their clients instead of reactive. They could have a weekly call with their client who's going through immigration and say, "Here's a fifteen minute check in, let me give you an update on everything that happened this week, let me tell you what's going to happen next week." Lawyers don't do that because they don't have the time to do this, and they don't have the mindset to do this. Manifest OS gives them technology that eliminates busy work and gives them the time back to work on strategy.
00:17:06 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:17:06] S2: But did you land on this immigration idea just from deduction or did you have a lot of conversations? How did you kind of get to this conclusion? [00:17:14] S0: Well, it was multiple fold. One is just I knew the problem because I went through the problem. I lived the problem firsthand. All my friends lived the problem. So I was not a stranger to it and two, the business fundamentals for the industry were really good and then to validate it, I just worked as a part of legal for two months. Actually doing the work before I started the company and it was amazing because nobody could tell me how it works. I knew how it works. I knew what product to build. I knew where technology would have leverage and where it wouldn't have leverage. It's just the best thing to do. Look, if you are thinking of starting an AI native services business, or any AI company, go and work in an actual entry level job in that sector. You're going to get the level of signal at the deepest possible, most granular level. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore because you're going to understand the underlying kind of workflows and issues.
00:18:01 · Pablo Srugo
[00:18:01] S2: Now that you know, OK, you've worked as a paralegal, you've seen the problems. You want to do something in immigration law. The classic things these days are, you could do an AI native roll up and buy a few of these and Ad AI. You could do services as software and start your own law firm that's AI first, or you could just classic AI and just sell AI to these companies. And be like, "Hey, automate your stuff, fire some people, whatever." You did something, as far as I can see, it doesn't really fit any of those three buckets. What is it that you did and how did you end up there? That's not an easy kind of link.
00:18:30 · Dan Mishin
[00:18:30] S0: Imagine you're a lawyer, you have twelve years of experience, you're sick and tired of following the same path and working at the same four law firms that do immigration around the world. And you're like, I spend most of my time doing busy paperwork. I'm burned out after twelve years of working in the industry. I work eighty hour weeks. I feel like I'm doing a lot of stupid work and I didn't join the space to do any of this. I joined to actually help people. So Manifest OS will reach out to you, screen you extremely hard. Really interview you in many different ways, test you, make sure that you have. We're looking for very, very specific profiles of people to work with and then we're going to say, let us help you launch a practice. We're going to give you one unified brand. So you're going to operate under ManifestOS brand, which means that you're going to be kind of part of the same high quality engine with a lot of checks and balances, with a lot of SLAs and controls. Two, we're going to give you a centralized back office, so you don't have to worry about hiring a paralegal. We're going to give you an AI native paralegal that does the work. We're going to handle your billing, we're going to handle your collections, we're going to handle administrative work. We are, everything is centralized to one place, and we are going to staff you with the necessary personnel, right? So you don't have to waste your time. We're going to give you a unified marketing engine, so we're going to bring you corporate clients, small businesses, or large corporations that want to work with you, and they will hire you. You can collaborate with other lawyers in the network to go and work on the same contract. Let's say there is a large Canadian business that wants to move fifty people to America, too much work for one lawyer. Two lawyers in the network could team up and go, and do this. And we're going to give you one unified software layer, that will replace your traditional Microsoft Office and Outlook. So you're going to communicate on the same platform, draft documents using AI, and you're going to be so much more productive. Because we've eliminated so much of the manual, repetitive workflows that you're going in and you're just completing work faster, better. They handle the legal work, we handle everything that's non legal in nature.
00:20:29 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
So everything that's business, marketing, customer acquisition, back office and support. That's on Manifest OS, a legal judgment rests with the lawyer and then all lawyers live in the same Slack community. They talk to each other, they collaborate, they go on weekly webinars. They go for drinks all the time and it's this decentralized organization in a lot of ways. Where these lawyers are independent practitioners who team up and work on cases when there is a large client, or they work in their individual pods. Working on specific client matters, if they're well equipped to handle that. [00:20:59] S2: Was there an analog of this type of model somewhere else, that you kind of got inspired by? It's pretty unique. I mean, franchise is kind of what comes to mind but it's different. It's very different than this.