Being a Rebel to Build a Movement: Non-Traditional Approaches to Scale | DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder

Hello everyone, good afternoon. Thank you for coming to my talk. My name is Josh. I started and run this company called DoNotPay. I am one of the few consumer founders that snuck in to give a talk. And DoNotPay is a robot lawyer that helps consumers fight for their legal rights. We operate in over 200 areas of what people call consumer rights. Things like getting people refunds from landlords, suing Comcast, canceling subscriptions. And I'm sure the question everyone has is, why am I here? And the reason I'm here is that from my journey starting DoNotPay 6 years ago, I've learned a lot of unconventional lessons that go, go against kind of the popular wisdom of starting, scaling, and distributing a product. And I'm really excited to share those lessons today. So kind of to get started, I should say I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I never really knew I would start a company. As you can probably tell, I'm British from my accent. And when I moved here a few years ago, I will use the excuse that the Americans drive on the other side of the road, but it turns out I'm actually a terrible driver and began to get all of these really expensive parking tickets. Between the ages of— so I'm 25 now. Between the ages of 18 and 20, I probably got around 30 parking tickets. And it was a serious problem because I was a kind of broke college student at Stanford, and I couldn't afford to pay these $300 tickets. And so out of necessity, I became a legal expert just getting out of all the rules and regulations of how parking tickets work here in the Bay Area. And what I learned is remarkable, which is if you know the right things to say, you can save a lot of money in life. And so I got this reputation in college as kind of the guy who can get people out of parking tickets. And over time, everyone started coming out of the woodwork, people I'd met once messaging me with just a photo of their ticket saying, can you help? And I would try to be nice since I'm trying to make friends in this new country. So I was helping people, um, and it was— it got overwhelming for me. Uh, one day I was like, uh, spending 4 hours in Microsoft Word copying and pasting letters to send to the different, like, San Mateo County, San Francisco County, all of these different authorities. And I was studying computer science at the time, and I thought there must be a better way. And so I created, uh, donotpay.com as a way to get people out of their tickets automatically. And the way it works is the software asks a consumer several questions like, was the parking bay too small, or was there a tree covering the signs? And it uses their answers to match them to a legal defense. Once it finds a legal defense, it populates a letter, goes on the government website, and does all the clicking and submits it on their behalf. And really, this was just a side project to kind of save my friends. And at this point, I'd also expanded to the UK, so I was helping out my UK friends and family as well. But something remarkable happened, which is it completely went viral. In the first week, we went from about 20 cases, the people I was no longer doing the copying and pasting for, to tens of thousands of cases. And every news network picked it up, and it went to the front page of Reddit and all of this stuff. The website started crashing. And this taught me my first lesson as sort of an accidental entrepreneur, which is if you can capture the zeitgeist, it's almost like a cheat code when launching, where we live in such a noisy world of, like, launching products and hiring people. But if you can kind of tap into something in like the psychology of society, you can be propelled much more quickly. And it propelled me to like 50,000 cases within a few weeks. And so the question is, how can you capture the zeitgeist? And I did it by accident, but a more kind of systematic approach would be you kind of have to tap into two things. So in my case, it was like David versus Goliath. Everyone here hates parking tickets, hates the government, hates these big corporations, and this is really like an emotional wrath appeal against Goliath, and everyone is sort of David in my product. But there's really two things that you can do in a systematic way, which is the first is emotions and the second is current events. So emotions: wrath, greed, lust, and envy. So I'm obviously tapping into lust— I mean wrath. But I mean, yeah, wrath for sure. But other products like, you know, dating apps tap into lust. But I'm sure— and so I'm sure the question you have is, okay, it's all right for you, but this is SaaS, you're a consumer founder, what does this mean for us? So I'll give you a few kind of SaaS examples. So one of them is, I just picked this out, it's an online ordering SaaS solution for restaurants. And there's two companies. One is Incentiveo, and the other is Owner. And I'm not talking about the merits or anything about either of the two companies, but one thing I'll say is one homepage says online ordering for restaurants. That's like a boring commoditized tagline. And the other says take— and this is the top of the homepage, so it's their core message— take back control from Uber Eats. 'Big companies like Uber Eats are stealing from you. Owner.com helps you as a restaurant with your online ordering.' And if you're a potential customer, I think it's obvious which one more emotionally appeals to you. And this is a great example of like capturing the zeitgeist. All of these restaurants are being scammed by these delivery platforms, and a SaaS solution can come in and fix the problem. Sometimes the product is so boring that you need to kind of have an extra boost with current events and trends. And this is something that I've done, and I'll talk about how I went from 1 product to 200 products. But one example is when the Equifax data breach happened and 350 million Americans had their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, some bank details leaked. By Equifax, we built a product to fix that. And I'm sure everyone's saying, okay, well, that's great for you, but what are some SaaS examples? So there are companies that whenever there's like a climate conference, this is a return SaaS company that helps automate returns. Couldn't be the more boring business. I hope they're not here. But they figured out how to kind of tap into this climate event with reducing packaging and things like that. And then Twilio, with the Ukraine crisis, they're offering their services. And so current events are a great example to show the value of your solution because you can offer it for free to nonprofits or people who need it. And that gets on media, but it also allows people to imagine using your product without being a customer. So, one last thing I would say as well, in case there's any doubt, DoNotPay, we've done literally hundreds of product launches. We're controversial but apolitical. So something that's controversial is we say we hate robocallers. Actually, that's not that controversial. What we say is we want to replace all of the lawyers and make the law free. But it's not political. And we We don't generally believe in taking a political side, but you can be controversial, have a kind of powerful message, but not necessarily take a political side because you want everyone to agree with you. And everyone in this audience hates canceling subscriptions, and so we want to fix that. So going back to my story, I had all of this virality. I was a student, and— I made a deal with some investors. So, there was one investor who got a lot of parking tickets and actually used our service to get out of it. And I got into this whole kind of VC cycle on Sand Hill Road, given that I was living nearby. And one investor— and that investor was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And they said, "Well, do you want to take money for your company?" And I said, "Well, I'm not sure." I do, but I just got here. It was like my life's dream to study in the US and learn computer science here. I don't want to drop out. And so I made a special deal with Andreessen Horowitz where they would invest $1 million in the kind of pre-seed, but I wouldn't have to drop out. And the reason I bring this up here is it allowed me to take my journey a lot slower than other companies. You know, you typically see there's like a demo day in 6 weeks, like scale, scale, scale. All of this stuff, but the money hit the company bank account and I didn't do anything with it for a while. And by taking it slowly, it allowed me to pick the right strategy for my company. This idea seems obvious, and for every entrepreneur, I think it's really important to ask, why now? Why hasn't this idea been built before? And there are SaaS tools and apps to do everything, especially for a mass market consumer thing like this. Why hasn't the app that solves your consumer rights problems been built? And after some slow light research, I realized that there was a graveyard of companies that tried this idea. There's a company called Fixd, which helped people with parking tickets in San Francisco, which shut down. There's a company called Servus, which helped people with delayed flights, which closed. There's a company called Cushion, which helps people with bank fees. Paribus, which helped people automate credit card price protection. The founders of— that shut down. And the founders of Paribus since built Ramp, which is hugely successful. But all of these companies were only focusing on one or two areas of the law. And unless you're a bad driver like me, the average American only gets a parking ticket once a year. And so it's very difficult to build a retentive product with just one use case. Especially very difficult to build a retentive product, but even impossible to build a subscription business. And so this kind of taught me my second most valuable lesson as an entrepreneur, which is platform companies are more valuable than point solutions. And the Mailchimp CEO was speaking earlier about unbundling and bundling, and he says that we're very much in the bundling era, and I agree with him. It's much easier to capture the zeitgeist and build a movement movement when you have a horizontal platform that can be applied to hundreds or thousands of areas than if you're just building a parking ticket company. And so that's what I set out to do. I rented a house in Palo Alto, actually the house where Facebook was started, and we, I just, instead of building any more products, I just built, started building SaaS integrations with like Twilio, Lob API, UiPath bot builders and things like that. And that allowed me to go from one product, parking tickets, to over 200 today. So I've got a way of launching products. I've got a kind of a strategy to build products, which is to be horizontal rather than vertical. The question I'm sure everyone has is, how do I actually distribute DoNotPay to make sure that everyone here and everyone in the world starts using it? And it's not enough to just have PR articles. What I found was DoNotPay was like on the Today Show twice. It was great. The revenue grew. The usage grew. But eventually, that's not a sustainable strategy. So you need to come up with— I needed to come up with a long-term way to actually continue to get customers. And Investor says most customers get their— most companies get their customers from a single acquisition strategy. And I agree with him. You look at companies like Airbnb, it's primarily SEO. SaaS companies, it could be built-in virality. When Brex was starting out, they plastered San Francisco with billboards. So when I was looking at this advice, I thought, okay, well, if I have to only pick one or primarily focus on one, I should pick the best one. And I created a framework for different acquisition strategies and how they applied to me. And after talking to a lot of people and seeing how a lot of companies succeeded and failed, I came up with 3 criteria. For me, it had to be scalable, profitable, and organic, so it happened naturally. So scalable is pretty obvious. When I was starting DoNotPay, I was like messaging my friends to use the website. That's not scalable. Profitable seems obvious, but a lot of companies in 2021 were paying $100 to acquire a customer and only making $70 from those customers, so I didn't want to do that. And organic happens naturally is probably the least obvious. And what I mean by that is, I love these like cemetery pictures, but if the entire marketing team was to pass away, the acquisition strategy would continue. And so that's kind of my definition of organic marketing. So I look to paid social. Paid social is probably the worst acquisition channel, especially with the Apple privacy changes. I'm friends with a lot of companies and the CACs have drastically increased and they haven't been able to target their customers effectively. It's definitely not organic. Once the marketing team stops spending, uh, the ads will stop running. I considered virality. Virality is a great channel because it meets all of those 3 things that I focused on. But, and 2 examples I should say is one is Figma and one is Rapplet. And so what I mean by virality is virality is built into the product. So with Figma, you can't, Figma is a collaborative design tool by definition. And so, By definition, if you sign up for Figma, you have to invite your teammates. And the same is a tried and tested story with things like Slack, etc. And the same is true with Replit. And they even have these viral words in their taglines like "Together" and things like that. The problem with me is that a lot of these issues are very embarrassing. If you have bed bugs, I'm not sure you want to invite your friends to help you with your do-not-pay legal issue. So although this is a very successful channel, it's not something that we could have used, or maybe we should be using it, but we haven't yet found the way to do it. So the second way is, is a kind of organic social. So you see every 6 months a new social app gets to the top of the App Store, and they're primarily tapping into organic social to get there. So you see things like these anonymous, uh, question apps and people can post anonymous ways for people to ask questions or submit feedback. And to get— actually find out who sent you the anonymous things, you have to post it to your story. And of course, it goes viral organically, and that's how they get a lot of users. The same, the same can be true in the enterprise with various campaigns like referral campaigns and things like that. Once again, people do not want to advertise some of their legal issues. Maybe it's very embarrassing and taboo, and so this didn't work for us, but I think it's a great channel and it's helped a lot of companies. So I'm sure the question everyone has is, what do we use? And the answer is SEO. So we started publishing SEO articles by accident just to help our customer support team. We have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people use donotpay.com every hour, and so our customer support team were getting swamped. And unfortunately, we're a software company, not a law firm, but a lot of people assume we're a law firm, so they're writing in asking for individualized help with their legal issues. And so we began writing these SEO articles, um, and out of luck or because they were good content, Google started ranking them for free. And so we published this SEO article, for example, 83B election, which is a tax filing everyone has to make if they're a founder, and Google ranked it as number 1. And what we began to see is, wait a minute, if this works for this really niche thing, why can't it work for 100,000 other things? And so we began to scale up probably one of the biggest SEO operations going at the moment. We have a team of 250 contract writers based in Georgia, the country, that pump out SEO articles. And Google is constantly changing its algorithm, but my view is that if you publish good content that's manually written, not AI-generated, Google wants to surface the kind of white hat best answers to the question. So the way the product journey works is the user searches something like 83B election filing, and they come across this DoNotPay article, and the DoNotPay article tells them step by step how to conduct their 83B election filing. But every 3 paragraphs there's a big button that says, "Let DoNotPay solve it for me." And people are so lazy, especially with some of these consumer disputes like suing United, that they don't even read 3 sentences, they just click the button and become our customer. And we've seen this be hugely successful. What— there are all these kind of SEO companies like NerdWallet, and Zendesk is a great SEO company as well. And on the consumer side, a lot of them monetize through paid ads. But we're creating really a new model of an SEO company that monetizes with mass consumer SaaS. And my goal is to turn DoNotPay into one of the most popular websites on the internet. As of right now, this, this chart is outdated. We get about 6 million users visit our website a month, and I think in the next sort of 18 months we can scale it to kind of 60 million using SEO. And so you really don't have to go overboard with trying 10 marketing channels For us, we only focus on one. Our paid ads budget is zero. Our referral budget is zero. We just focus on one key channel. So we have a strategy to build and distribute the product. What did I learn in terms of building a team and actually executing on that strategy? So going back to my Stanford days, where I saw all these companies, uh, blow up in the consumer rights space, um, I noticed that, um, they— all these SaaS companies and consumer companies have a tendency to get very bloated. They hire like VPs, and then the first thing the VPs do is they hire, uh, 5 directors, and then the directors hire like 5 people each. And oftentimes you hire someone and the first thing they do is hire other people. And so I thought, if I want to make DoNotPay a success, we have to be relatively lean. The second thing I would say is that I knew DoNotPay would take a while to build. I've been at it for 6 years, especially with this horizontal strategy. The YC mantra is you build one thing and you build it well. We're trying to build hundreds of things and build it well. And so I knew it would take a while. And if you have mercenary team members, they're not going to be motivated to kind of stick it through the tough times. And we've had team members stay for 3, 4, 5 years because everyone on the DoNotPay team is the type of person that, like me, stays up till 2 AM surfing Reddit looking for consumer rights hacks. And everyone feels like it's their mission to fight these big companies and the government. And by having a kind of lean team and mission-driven team, it allows us to respond to current events and the zeitgeist even to this day. Like when all these big crypto companies were freezing deposits, we were sitting in our office on Townsend Street in San Francisco eating Panda Express, and we managed to build a solution in 2 days. And that's really important for capturing the zeitgeist because these issues very timely. Once a few days or a few weeks go by, it's no longer relevant. So you really want a team to kind of build these features and products quickly. And the final thing I would say is, at least until maybe 50 or 100 people, everyone should be technical. And I mean that by like a very broad definition of technical, which is they're a builder. So they're a designer, engineer, really good at sales, things like that. But you don't want to hire these sort of strategy people because they kind of slow the business down. And so we don't do like business development or strategy because you really just want to be building and selling in your early days. So to kind of sum it up, capturing the zeitgeist is a cheat code for every product launch and announcement. You can only build a movement as a horizontal company. If you're a vertical platform for dentists, it's very difficult to get people excited about that and expand horizontally. A movement requires often one very successful acquisition strategy. For us, it's SEO, but there are several other good ones which I highlighted. And you should make sure your team is behind you. And they should be mission-driven, technical, and lean.