How I Validated My Startup Idea

A conversation with EJ Lawless for the HR Tech GTM Podcast

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EJ: I can think of how I might approach this. If I were in that position, I might try to

go out and get large clients first then see if I could subcontract that work to some

lawyers I knew. How did you approach validating this idea. Was was most important

to validate: that lawyers would want to be entrepreneurial, or that clients would use a

service like this?

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Raad: Because it's a marketplace, you're validating both of those needs. When you look

at it from the side of an independent lawyer joining the platform, you want to validate

if they can actually leverage this for a source of income. Are there real dollars that can

be passed from this platform?

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There's been plenty of companies before that just did lead gen that would charge

lawyers a subscription and sell them contact forms, then they would pay per contact

and take it offline. I didn't want to build that kind of business. That's been done by the

late ‘90s, early ‘00s directory websites.

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We started off in a pretty manual way. We used Square readers as a way to pass money

back and forth before we built out a more automated payment platform.

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On the supply side, will they earn enough to stay on the platform? The demand side

was the harder one. We pivoted through it a couple of times. We originally started

selling to everyday people with all sorts of legal needs. Then we narrowed it down to

small businesses and early-stage tech companies.

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Now we've found product market fit with scaling pre-IPO tech companies with an in-

house legal team. For that, it was validating if they would use something like

Lawtrades instead of a traditional BigLaw firm that’s been around for a 100+ years

where they have deep connections and relationships. Will they actually try out

something new?

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That's been a little bit of an uphill battle, but after Covid- most companies were forced

to cut their legal budgets in half and hire remote workers. The pandemic actually

helped accelerate our growth because it forced companies into considering us as a

viable option. Since then, the growth has been snowballing.