A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:32:40 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
If they get so much value and Manifest OS lawyers go to that community, answer the questions for free, provide them with content, do webinars, do trainings, and do consultations, if you get a lot of value, you're probably going to buy from ManifestOS Law Attorney. Because you already have the relationship, you've built the trust, you got a lot of value upfront, and you're just going to proceed with it. [00:33:03] S2: Does this work in B2B as well or just B2C?
00:33:03 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:33:03] S2: Does this work in B2B as well or just B2C? [00:33:06] S0: We have the exact same community for B2B buyers. So who manages immigration? An HR manager that handles mobility inside a large company. Some companies have thirty, forty, fifty people in that department. Small companies have one or zero point five, or it's the CEO who does it. We built a community called Mission by ManifestOS. And Mission by ManifestOS is the community for those people that manage mobility programs inside companies. Slack group, anytime there is a news update or regulatory update. They all get together and talk about what does that mean for their business. Weekly webinars, monthly in person meetups, annual conferences, and we've gotten vast majority of Fortune 500 company representatives to be in that community. These are our buyers. These are buyers of legal services from ManifestOS Law attorneys. They build relationships with ManifestOS. ManifestOS doesn't charge them anything. It's totally free and we give them so much value upfront. They meet ManifestOS Law attorneys. They meet government officials. We help them understand changes in regulations for free and nobody has ever done anything like this in this industry. Because it was always transactional. Hey, like, I'm going to cold call you and see if you want to buy my services. And then if you don't, I'm going to cold call you again and annoy you. I don't believe in annoying sales. I believe in sales where you give value and then the person can choose to buy if they want to.