A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:05:29 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:05:29] S2: Because that's your billable. Then you got to eat, go to the bathroom, and then do non billable work on top of that. [00:05:35] S0: Correct, so you end up either working four thousand hours to actually bill for two thousand one hundred hours. Or I'm missing something. I'm not making any accusations. [00:05:45] S2: Yeah, the math doesn't matter otherwise. So it's tough. [00:05:48] S0: So that's option one. Option two is you start your own business as an attorney and if you start your own business, you spend sixty percent of your time doing non billable work. You're chasing clients, you're doing business development, you're running around to conferences, you're recording TikTok podcasts and the truth is, a person goes to law school, accumulates $300,000 of student loans, and then they end up doing work that doesn't require a law license. Just to sort of become a glorified salesperson. So that is not a great path either because people don't become lawyers to be salespeople. They want to help people with their legal needs. That's why they become lawyers. So the pain points that lawyers experience are very acute, and the PMF was so strong because the pain point itself was so strong. [00:06:34] S2: Now that we know that moment, when things were starting to work and you were starting to get referrals. Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start Manifest OS and what were you doing? Not necessarily your whole background, but the few years before you started and before you had the idea of what was going on?
00:06:34 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:06:34] S2: Now that we know that moment, when things were starting to work and you were starting to get referrals. Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start Manifest OS and what were you doing? Not necessarily your whole background, but the few years before you started and before you had the idea of what was going on? [00:06:47] S0: So I was building a company in real estate tech, which was my company number three at that point. [00:06:53] S2: What year is this? [00:06:54] S0: Well, I started the company in 2017. Late 2017, early 2018, it was two years ago. I was building that company. The company was growing fairly well. We were over $50 million in ARR, two hundred employees, a fairly large business. Profitable, we raised $60 million of venture capital from pretty good names, like SoftBank was an investor and I found myself in this weird situation. Where I'm not seeing purpose in all of this. I'm building a business. On paper, it's growing well. I still have some invested stock. But there is a lack of sense of purpose. Because that business for me was just, you know, we were helping real estate owners increase their earnings from their buildings and as much as I could relate to that pain point. I didn't want to spend my thirties, my most active years, on solving that pain point. So I started thinking about transitioning myself out of the business. [00:07:49] S2: And now you're what, '21, 2020? When you start having these thoughts?
00:07:49 · Pablo Srugo, Dan Mishin
[00:07:49] S2: And now you're what, '21, 2020? When you start having these thoughts? [00:07:53] S0: I can't remember the exact year, but like, and it was also. There was no one aha eureka moment. It was slowly building up. [00:00:00] S2: But more or less just to give a sense of kind of timeline. [00:08:02] S0: I transitioned into Manifest OS in 2024. [00:08:03] S2: OK, so somewhere a couple of years before that. [00:08:07] S0: And I started working with my team, and basically building the leadership team to sort of plan for the transition. And ultimately, my chief of staff, who was then COO, became the CEO. I trained him, we communicated with investors proactively for many, many months. We gave everyone a heads up. We managed this transition, which was actually an interesting experience. I've never done that before, and the new CEO took over in August 2023. And I started basically thinking more deeply about this idea of building Manifest OS. [00:08:36] S2: Did you have this idea as you were transitioning or you just knew you wanted out of what you were doing and would figure out what the new thing would be? [00:08:44] S0: I knew that I wanted to build something in legal. I wasn't spending much time thinking about what that would be. I knew that legal is this interesting industry, where it's an industry that matters for the world because legal services are fundamental to our society. It's not, you know, delivering burritos five minutes faster. It's actually make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true.
00:08:44 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:08:44] S0: I knew that I wanted to build something in legal. I wasn't spending much time thinking about what that would be. I knew that legal is this interesting industry, where it's an industry that matters for the world because legal services are fundamental to our society. It's not, you know, delivering burritos five minutes faster. It's actually make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true. [00:09:08] S2: Or at least it can be. I mean, some stuff is little, you know, whatever contracts. But they can get serious. [00:09:13] S0: It can get serious. Ask a healthy person what they want in life, they tell you a thousand things. Ask a sick person what they want in life, and they say one thing, right? Same applies to legal situations. If somebody's getting sued, if somebody is in litigation, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is going through divorce, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is getting their visa or green card, that's top of mind for them. So for me, it was meaningful work. I knew that I wanted to build in this space because I felt like it's meaningful work and the reality is, if you're building a company. Which is freaking hard, you know, you might as well work on something that actually matters. I knew I didn't want to build enterprise SaaS. I knew I didn't want to go and build a GPT wrapper that does something fun. I wanted to solve a meaty, difficult problem in a regulated industry, and legal just perfectly fit those criteria.
00:09:57 · Pablo Srugo
[00:09:57] S2: That, by the way, is not to be taken lightly. It's actually pretty crazy. If you just think about when you're starting off, you're starting to be a founder and you just dream, and hope that this business is going to work. And then you get it to a point, like you said, $50 million ARR. This is a solid working business, and then for you to, and obviously some people do, you know, transition. But you transition out because you have another idea that you just can't stop thinking about. It's like, OK, I can, I understand that, I get it. But for you to just say, ah, it's just not enough for me, I'll start from scratch. I don't know what this next thing is, maybe it'll completely blow up and it'll be a tenth as big as this thing. Because I don't even know what it's going to be, but you know, screw it. I just can't see myself. It's just not worth my time to be here. I want to do something more impactful. It's not small, it's not a small decision.
00:10:43 · Dan Mishin, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:43] S0: But if you look at, like, look. I don't mean to get all philosophical here, but actually I think we as founders sometimes don't think about the timeless truth enough, and why are we building what we're building? And you can get motivation in so many different ways. You can get motivated by money, and there's nothing wrong with that. People are embarrassed to talk about it, but why? I have no issue to admit that, my first company, which I started at eleven. I started because I was broke and poor, and financially hungry. And that was the real reason, or you can be motivated by your team. And there is nothing wrong with that. People can be building in the most, I don't want to call them boring categories, but like. [00:11:15] S2: You could say, yeah. There are some boring categories.