A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:20:59 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[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. [00:21:07] S0: It's different because the quality control is so unified and because the software is all centralized. And everybody uses the same software. I think we arrived at this business model through first principles thinking, I would imagine. We didn't copy anyone, we didn't look at other industries, we just were constantly talking to users and asking them what would be a good solution to their problems. Now, the closest analogies that I would imagine exist. There are some businesses in the healthcare space, like Headway, for example, in the therapy business. There's been a bunch of businesses with a similar model in the therapy space. The difference is we are much more business focused and B2B focused than a lot of those consumer businesses, in the therapy space and healthcare space. [00:21:49] S2: And tell me a bit more about the customer discovery side. You knew immigration, you knew you wanted to do that. You got to this model you mentioned through conversations, and you worked as a paralegal for two months, but that's the depth. There you don't get the breadth of all these different opinions and the problems. How many of these lawyers did you talk to? How did you manage that side of it?
00:21:49 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:21:49] S2: And tell me a bit more about the customer discovery side. You knew immigration, you knew you wanted to do that. You got to this model you mentioned through conversations, and you worked as a paralegal for two months, but that's the depth. There you don't get the breadth of all these different opinions and the problems. How many of these lawyers did you talk to? How did you manage that side of it? [00:22:04] S0: So I spoke, before I started the company and in the first couple of months. I did the intake for about one thousand clients who actually wanted to procure legal services. At the end of one thousand calls, I knew this market and psychology so well. And I didn't care what some smart VC is going to tell me because I had signal at a much lower level, much more granular. [00:22:25] S2: I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for ten, twenty, thirty minutes now. Clearly, you like it and the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. Doing one thousand calls, if you can do that in just about any problem set. Either you'll come up with a solution or you at least come out very well informed and know what not to build. But how do you get those one thousand calls? What was the framing and the setup? And were you selling or was it customer discovery? What was the structure?