A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:22:55 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:22:55] S0: It was intake for a law firm where, I mean, typically intake is handled by non lawyers who do the initial screening and collect the facts for a lawyer to make a decision if the client qualifies for a case. If you have a personal injury case and you call a personal injury law firm. There's typically a non lawyer who's gathering all the facts, sharing them with the lawyer, and then the lawyer makes a decision if they can help this person with their case or not. That's what intake is. So I did intake calls and I was very clear about what the pain points are, what type of cases people are dealing with, what the psychology is. A lot of marketers know the tools. A lot of growth people know the tools. They know how to spin up landing pages. They know how to spin up Google Ads. They know how to do SEO or AI optimization. But what they miss most of the time is the forest behind the trees. They miss the psychology of a buyer, and the psychology of a buyer is. If you don't understand the psychology of your buyer, it doesn't matter how good you are with tools. Because you're not connected. You don't know what this person is feeling right now. [00:23:53] S2: But in your case, is the buyer a lawyer or the buyer is somebody with a legal problem?
00:23:53 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:23:53] S2: But in your case, is the buyer a lawyer or the buyer is somebody with a legal problem? [00:23:57] S0: In that case, it was understanding the actual people that would then hire lawyers. Who would be the ultimate clients paying lawyers for their legal services and that was incredible. The best thing I could have possibly done for this company and I would recommend that if anyone is starting a business, I would recommend getting a job in the space first and actually getting the lowest level signal before you take venture capital, before you take the risk, before you take the dilution. You could avoid so many pivots. [00:24:23] S2: We talk about these three levels of customer discovery. Frankly, what most people do, unfortunately, is talk to twelve people and ask them if it's a good idea. But the real first level, first degree would be to do five hundred customer discovery conversations with your ICP. Then the other level is, which is what LaGuardia did. You're selling to law firms, go sit in a law firm and work at least alongside them. And the best one, which is what you did. Which is just become the customer. Whether it's a week or a month or three months, whatever it takes. Become the customer and then you'll know all the subtleties, and the details, and what you build will be way more on point.
00:24:23 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:24:23] S2: We talk about these three levels of customer discovery. Frankly, what most people do, unfortunately, is talk to twelve people and ask them if it's a good idea. But the real first level, first degree would be to do five hundred customer discovery conversations with your ICP. Then the other level is, which is what LaGuardia did. You're selling to law firms, go sit in a law firm and work at least alongside them. And the best one, which is what you did. Which is just become the customer. Whether it's a week or a month or three months, whatever it takes. Become the customer and then you'll know all the subtleties, and the details, and what you build will be way more on point. [00:24:54] S0: And when you're exploring a new idea, it's like an onion, right? So you've got to peel different layers. The interesting stuff is never at the surface. If it was at the surface, it would have been done before. But if you go four or five layers deeper, and to do that, you have to commit to an industry. I think you commit to an industry or you commit to solving a problem. That's probably even better, solving a problem. If you're like, "I'm committed to solving this problem. I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm committed to solving this problem." And then you just go layer. [00:25:20] S2: You don't know the wedge. You don't even know what aspect. You're like, "I'm going to solve immigration." Well, you're not going to solve immigration, but then you start winding down until you find the thing that you could actually make an impact on.
00:25:27 · Dan Mishin
[00:25:27] S0: And the thing that ended up working is not the same thing that I thought we would get to. And, it's so weird when you talk to especially early stage pre seed and seed investors. Who are passing on the idea because of the attributes of the idea and they're like, "Hey, I don't think your, whatever, go to market strategy makes sense." You don't know what the go to market strategy will be. You have no clue, you're so early. Even Series A, you don't really know. So I think that a smart person committed to a problem and everything else is details. Everything else is going to shift. Everything else is going to change. The go to market is going to change. The product is going to change. The team composition is going to change. The underlying business could change. But I think there is something very powerful about committing to one problem and sticking with that one problem, and unpeeling those layers over and over and over and over until you get to the true gold. One of the main problems that we are solving is the problem that legal services are so unpredictable. Let's say, God forbid, somebody is going through a divorce. How do you find a good lawyer? You ask a friend that got divorced and maybe that one lawyer, because again, it's not product, it's service. That one lawyer could have solved this problem for their one client successfully one time, and then fifteen other times they were unsuccessful. You have no data, you have no knowledge, you're operating based on instinct, and then how do you even interview a good lawyer as a client? What questions am I supposed to ask? If I'm talking to a lawyer, like, "Hey, I don't know, tell me about your similar cases." How do you know? It's so confusing. So Manifest OS Law brand, in my vision, is the new gold standard of what legal services should look like and then Manifest OS as a technology company powers those attorneys to enable them to provide that quality.