A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:30:21 · Pablo Srugo
[00:30:21] S2: Now let’s talk a little bit about go to market, because that’s kind of the business model. That’s how it’s all going to work. You actually have to go out and source legal work. You mentioned that one of the ways you’ve done this is through communities. You have five million people in these communities. Tell me just everything about that. What’s the strategy there, and then how do you actually implement this kind of selling through communities motion?
00:30:40 · Dan Mishin
[00:30:40] S0: If we take a step back, I believe in value led customer acquisition and not just ads. Value ad customer acquisition, in my opinion, is the gold standard. OK, so I'm an immigrant. I'm on a visa that's dependent and tied to my employer. I want to have independence. Maybe I want to change a job. Maybe I want to start a business. To transition into a self sponsored visa, like an O 1 visa or an EB 1 visa or an EB 2 NIW visa. Those are the three very popular visa types for people that want to be independent. I need to go ahead and do a lot of work in preparing for those cases. Because the requirements are really high. You need to be extraordinary in a certain field. So what ManifestOS has done is we've launched a Slack community for people that are not there yet, but who want to ultimately file for those extraordinary ability visas, and we've created free training programs that go every month. Every month there is a free training program for different people, for different cohorts, who go through classes that teach them how to work on their careers in a way that enables them to apply for those extraordinary visas. We created a mentorship program where people get paired with each other. Somebody who went through the immigration obtained that visa with somebody who wants to do that. They get paired in couples and they work together and mentors coach them to apply for those visas. We provide them a ton of information, tons of content, tons of curated videos. We invite former U.S. immigration officials to speak with them. We bring immigration judges to speak with them. That community is mind blowing for people. There's so much value there. In person meetups, events, and it's knowledge. It's motivation to build your case. It's training, and it's community, just meeting people. You know, immigration is lonely. You meet people that way. This is not the most obvious marketing tactic because it's not about, you're not selling anything to anyone. We're not promoting Manifest OS in that community. It's not even called Manifest OS Community. It's called Extraordinary Ability Club. People join, people get a ton of value.