LawTrades co-founder Ashish explains how the legal marketplace started with a subscription model that flopped, then pivoted to staffing internal legal teams at late-stage tech companies like DoorDash and Pinterest. The shift worked because businesses needed flexible lawyers more than individuals did.
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So going back to the early, or to the early days, you know, what were like the first steps that you took to start it as a marketplace?
So the first step was just really figuring out, you know, how the hell we were going to survive and like make money. We were both in a position, me and my co-founder, where we both had like a lot of student loans. You know, we didn't really have like a safety net. So step one for us was, you know, it wasn't about building like the biggest marketplace ever. It was really just around like, how do we get some sales through the door. So in the earliest days, the way we tested that was we just kind of looked at what everyone else was doing that were marketplaces. And a lot of the models were, you know, very subscription-based. So in the earliest days, you know, I would like leave my law school class and like try to sign up lawyers, you know, mid-class and trying to get them to pay us like a subscription. We would go to office to office, cold email lawyers all throughout York and try to get some face time with them. So in the earliest days, we were more of like a subscription marketplace and we were connecting them to clients. And then it slowly evolved over time. After law school, we had the harsh realization that bringing on, not to get too technical, but I know you guys are all marketplace aficionados. So challenge that we ran into when we first started was we would bring on divorce lawyers, personal injury lawyers, criminal defense lawyers. If you wanted to start a company, you could also find a lawyer through us. And, uh, you know, we figured out that the demand side was incredibly hard, um, to, to, uh, you know, bring together, right? Like you would need so many different types of leads, uh, to come to LawTrades. They would need several options in several locations. There was a lot of barriers that we were going through when we first started. Um, but yeah, over time we just kept refining the approach. to what it is now where we focus on servicing businesses. So those are our demand side. The businesses that we work with are largely like late-stage tech companies. That's sort of our sweet spot. So we work with brands like DoorDash, Pinterest, Gusto, Redfin, and we connect their legal teams internally to a lot of flexible staff that they could hire. What we found over time was you know, a lot of like white-collar industries, whether it's finance, legal, HR, et cetera, a lot of the folks that own those functions within bigger companies are incredibly understaffed, very overworked. Their departments are viewed as like cost centers for them. So our inflection point at LawTrades really came together when we realized like the general counsels of a lot of these companies need extra help. And if we could get them talent really fast, very seamlessly at reasonable prices and everyone's vetted, then that could be a really good model. So that's along the way, that's kind of what we pivoted to, and that's what we've been doing for the last 3 to 4 years now.
