Lawtrades shifted from serving consumers and early-stage startups to enterprise customers after struggling financially. The founder realized small customers had low repeat usage while larger companies drove most revenue, so the company doubled down on the segment that actually worked.
You mentioned that pivot was about 3 to 4 years ago?
Yep, yep, yeah. We pivoted around 3 to 4 years ago. We did it with, you know, very little money in the bank. We were basically on life support for those initial early years. And around that time, you know, some of you guys might be familiar with companies like UpCouncil or Atrium. You know, while we're trying to figure out our own path, you know, and barely raising a seed round, you know, we did it by the skin of our teeth, basically. You know, companies like Atrium and UpCouncil, I think, had raised like around $100 million collectively between the two of them. So, you know, we were dealing with that mid-pivot as well and trying to figure out our own identity, our own purpose, principles, etc.
At that, you know, moment in time with, you know, some of the competitors, kind of like you mentioned, you know, what was it like kind of thinking through, you know, your business and the potential direction of it? And maybe some of like the kind of, I would say, like nuances that went into, you know, thinking through what does the future look like for us as a marketplace?
Yeah. So, you know, we started working with these consumers and then we realized that, hey, the real opportunity is probably working with businesses. So we started working with a lot of early-stage startups. Like at a certain point you would've been able to go to LawTrades and, you know, set up your Delaware C-Corp or get a basic contract drafted. And that's sort of what us, UpCouncil, Atrium, and there was, there there was obviously some others too. We were all trying to be the on-demand legal services, on-demand legal service for businesses. What had happened was, is, you know, we realized that one, working with, you know, smaller businesses, you know, it's great to serve them, but a lot of them didn't need our marketplace that frequently. You know, if you think about your own selves, you might need to hire a lawyer as an early-stage marketplace, maybe once a year, twice a year, if that. You know, if you do need more than that, it's probably not a good sign. But yeah, you know, we would really like— we, the writing was on the wall, right? Like working with smaller businesses was a bad business model. We knew that from doing it our own, you know, sort of being like the third runner-up in the space. And we knew that they were probably dealing with that scenario too. Companies wouldn't come back frequently enough. When you're operating off like a margin, it's very hard to kind of scale that with a service that you're only using you know, just a couple times throughout the year. But we had a few bright spots, you know, during that realization. One of them was that we had a few big companies that were using us amongst all these smaller businesses, and we saw that they were just using us almost every day. You know, every day, every month, they were expanding, they were spending, they made up such a large portion of, you know, the gross revenue that was facilitated And, you know, when we were on life support, the decision was made like, hey, before we throw in the towel, let's go all in on this customer segment and see if that gets us anywhere. So that's how the pivot really came to be.
