A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:28:12 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:28:12] S2: Why did you choose this model? Given everything you've told me, the obvious thing would have been. You have your brand, Manifest OS, you've got your AI, and then you just hire some lawyers. And they're in the background. I don't even know who I'm dealing with. I'm just dealing with Manifest OS. That would have been the obvious model. What's the advantage for you to having the lawyers have their own independent practices? [00:28:34] S0: Well, I mean, we had a couple of choices. Choice number one, let's go and sell software to existing law firms. [00:28:39] S2: Sure [00:28:39] S0: That was the most obvious choice. I've seen, I've heard that feedback from early stage investors as I was starting the company. [00:28:46] S2: That's the Harvey, the Legora, Spellbook, whatever name. There's a lot of them.
00:28:50 · Dan Mishin
[00:28:50] S0: And as I was starting this company, people knew me from my previous businesses. So I had some relationship. They're like, dude, what are you doing? Just go and sell software to lawyers. It's so obvious. What is this weird construct that you're trying to build? The problem with that, going back to the mission, going back to the why, is that the fundamental system is flawed. When somebody has to bill for twenty one hundred hours, and you're selling them software that will reduce the amount of hours that they bill for, what is their incentive to buy it? Other than to tell their clients that," You know, I'm adopting this fancy AI software, so I'm more efficient." And the reality is they probably don't, or don't do that as frequently as they should. So there's a major misalignment of incentives. If somebody bills by the hour and their goal is to bill for as many hours as possible. There's not that much incentive to become more efficient. The other problem is that the whole kind of construct of how these law firms are created is not right. It's not the most customer centric approach. There's so much legacy, there's so much politics. Retrofitting existing systems is so hard. So that option was never a good option for me for that exact reason, that I just didn't think that it was solving the mission. The mission of, how do you make legal services faster, better, more transparent for the end client? How do you actually improve the underlying experience? So that was not an option. The other option was to hire lawyers, but U.S., it's a highly regulated market, and U.S. is a highly regulated market. And you can't just go and open a Delaware C corp and hire a bunch of lawyers, and provide legal services. It's a highly regulated market and you have to follow the law.