The Achieve Podcast - Scott Seidewitz (Bliss Divorce)
In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Stephen Bunker interviews Scott Seidewitz, co‑founder and CEO of Bliss Divorce, an AI‑driven platform that automates divorce mediation. Scott explains how the service replaces lawyers and human mediators with a two‑layer AI system: a proprietary algorithm that calculates optimal settlements for assets, child custody, and support, and a generative‑AI‑powered virtual divorce coach that guides users through disclosures and negotiations. He recounts the product’s origins—stemming from his market‑research consulting work with LegalZoom—and the validation process that included concept testing, over 100 real‑world cases, and a 90 % success rate in reaching agreements. The conversation moves to current growth challenges: converting interested users who complete free disclosures into paying customers, building trust in an AI solution for high‑stakes, emotionally charged divorces, and handling the need for both spouses to engage and pay. Scott outlines the go‑to‑market plan, including hiring a fractional CMO with divorce‑industry experience, expanding the team, and launching a crowdfunding round on WeFunder to raise additional capital. He discusses messaging that emphasizes cost savings, reduced stress, and the ability to avoid direct confrontation, noting that emotional‑support messaging resonates more than price alone. The interview also covers broader AI usage: the integration of generative AI for the virtual coach, internal tooling changes, and cautionary lessons about AI hallucinations in legal and research contexts. Scott reflects on lessons learned—humility in translating corporate marketing expertise to a startup, the importance of hiring specialized talent, and the need for flexible, opportunity‑driven focus. Finally, he speculates on future extensions such as corporate benefits packages and optional emotional‑counseling services, and offers advice to other founders about leveraging experience, staying adaptable, and balancing early focus with opportunistic growth.
Chapters
Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. I'm your host, Stephen Bunker, and today we're excited to learn from Scott, co-founder and CEO with Bliss Divorce. Now, Scott, for those getting to know you, can you give us a quick backstory of your business and organization?
Sure. Uh, so Bliss Divorce, first of all, uses AI to help couples in a divorce where there's disagreements work out all their disagreements, come up with a full settlement including property division, child custody, child support, and spousal support using only our AI. No need for lawyers, no need for human mediators. Uh, you know, the idea comes back to I have a consulting and market research business and work with large corporate clients. And one of my clients was LegalZoom. And, uh, I saw there along with their CMO at the time that the one market that they tried to get into, uh, divorce, they really had a tough time with because LegalZoom is a legal documentation company. And the problem in divorce isn't documenting an agreement. It's getting two people under very trying circumstances to reach an agreement. So we came up with the idea. We did a lot of prep work. We raised— we've now raised a total of about $1.6 million and developed this incredible AI capability. And the next step now is to market it. It's— we've done over 100 cases, real-world cases, has a 90% success rate in working at all disagreements, 10% or so of cases we have to bring in a human mediator, but that's the vast minority of cases. And, um, we're ready to grow, ready to start marketing it and hopefully expand throughout the country and help couples. I'll just mention the other thing is, you know, divorce is a terrible, terrible experience for family. This makes it so— not only does it save them a lot of money, but it reduces the conflict and stress so that families can get through the process intact.
So how exactly do you use AI to, like, intermediate that interaction.
You know, my Chief Technology Officer, Dan Hirsch, who actually was another client of mine at Intel and came in and came to work for us full-time, um, he doesn't like me to say this, but our AI is very old school. We have the, you know, new current generative AI to— for the customer experience and to guide people through the process. But the actual technology is all algorithmic, based on algorithms I use in my other business to optimize pricing and feature sets for companies. The same kind of algorithms work really, really well in finding middle grounds between couples when it comes to division of assets and things like spousal support amounts.
Okay, so you're kind of coming up with like almost like templated like solutions based off of their scenario to kind of like create a tailored solution that they can bring to the table and not feel like it just kind of bridges and makes that conversation easier.
Yeah, instead of having two lawyers argue with each other and throw proposals back and forth, we ask them a series of questions to understand, one, what's important to them in the agreement. And when I say we ask them a series of questions, it's all program, the platform. Website asks them a series of questions about what's important to them, but then also what, you know, different things to assess what level of income does the receiving side of support need and what level of income can the paying side afford to give. And based on those, we run it through our algorithm to find kind of the optimal middle ground. And, um, in most cases, couples look at it and either accept the agreement or they have the opportunity then to propose changes to it, to each other through our platform as well. Rather than arguing with each other, they kind of are— it all goes through the platform and they're guided through it. More than 90% of the time they can reach an agreement pretty quickly, even when there's very strong disagreements coming in.
Wow. Okay. That's really cool. At this stage of your business, what would you say is actually driving the current growth as far as like interest and demand?
You know, we have been in kind of proof of concept stage, or what they call in the startup world, product concept match. We've not been in growth stage. So we have been bringing in cases, pausing marketing, seeing how they went, changing the algorithms. So a lot of it has been experimentation and learning, but now in the last 50 cases or so, we've done over 100 cases, but in the last 50 cases or so is where we have that 90% success rate. So we know we're ready to grow. So things will change now. We need, we have a fractional chief marketing officer. We need to bring her in full-time. We need customer support staff and some marketing staff. So it's really investing in now growing after we've invested in the product, which is why we're doing another fundraising round, this time crowdsourcing. On a site called WeFunder. It's the world's leading crowdsourcing site. And the reason we're going with crowdsourcing is because people understand how horrible divorce is and how terrible the experience is right now, having two attorneys, lots of conflict, and spending tens of thousands of dollars. Um, so we're going to the crowd and people can invest as little as $100 if they want, and, oh wow, they can invest $25,000. You know, any amount is valued and welcomed, but, um, we think that's the best way to fund some— an enterprise like this that people really understand and get it and know the value of.
Yeah, that's fascinating. Um, as far as the— so you feel like you've kind of come up with like product-market fit, so you're actually at that point, you're ready to really just get your go-to-market strategy going?
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's good. So looking back for you personally, like, what are the turning points that change how you think about this business in particular, like the journey, just like a little bit of your journey and how you got to where you're at.
Sure, sure. You know, in my background, way back is consumer marketing. I worked with Procter Gamble. I was in their healthcare area, brand manager of brands like Crest and, um, Thermacare. Also worked on the launch of Aleve way back when. Um, and you know, that eventually led— I got burned out in the corporate world, decided to start my own business and created a market research and brand brand positioning strategy consulting company, which is where I got the experience working with LegalZoom and Intel, Invisalign, um, large companies, a lot of growth-oriented companies. Um, what really changed in working with Bliss Divorce is I took a lot of the things that I learned from corporate marketing and applied it to startups. And, uh, one thing that we did, there's a research methodology called concept testing that big corporations use to test new products. Very predictive of whether a product, product will be, uh, successful or not in the market. We— I was able, since I own a market research company, I could run a concept test really inexpensively on the idea of Bliss Divorce, really for my own sake, to make sure this was something worth investing. Results were off the chart. Highest demand I've ever seen for a new product idea. But I think what I missed, and this is where my changes come, you know, it's a whole different thing when you completely change the way people do things. Right now, people go to a lawyer, you know, somebody says, I'm going to get divorced. The first thing you say to them is, you better get a good lawyer. What they don't know is most of it's defined by law. It's in California, it's 50/50 property split. Doesn't matter how good your lawyer is. But so people don't really know what they're talking about. Just creates a lot of conflict over very Small amounts. But, but from a consumer decision standpoint, you know, when it was on paper, everyone said, oh my God, I'd much rather do this than lawyers. And we got huge top of funnel demand coming into Bliss Divorce. But we had a very difficult time converting people to purchase. And what we found out was this was such a— it was, it was so divergent, such a change in the consumer psychology to get people to say, yeah, I'm going to trust this website and this AI for what's a very traumatic, high-ticket item. Yeah, really needed to think about what our, our marketing approach was. Now, fortunately, we didn't need a lot of cases as we were developing the product. We needed enough to be able, you know, enough real-world cases to be able to really see was our technology working and to adapt and modify the technology. But I'm realizing now, instead of having corporate markers marketers like me and one of my co-founders, we really need to bring in someone with— and we've identified, we have a fractional CMO now who has— she's phenomenal. She has experience in startup marketing as well as experience in the divorce industry. She started her own divorce coaching business and sold it. So she's a perfect fit for us. But sometimes you need to recognize that things are different than your experience and you need to be able to You know, it's very difficult to do that. You're like, yeah, that's the way it's always worked for me. Sometimes that doesn't work in a new environment, and that's something I learned at Bliss Divorce, that startup marketing is a bit different than corporate marketing. Once we grow it—
I'm really curious, you mentioned a convergent marketing study, is that what it was called?
Concept testing.
Oh, concept testing. Okay. Yeah. And then you did that concept testing kind of lead you to the idea of Bliss Divorce as far as like, or was it the methodology that you followed to develop Bliss Divorce?
No, it was— we came up with the idea and it was before I invested a lot of my time and effort in it. I wanted to take this tool that I use for corporate clients like Intel and Invisalign and Intuit, and, and, you know, they do it themselves too, but we do a lot of concept testing for my other business, the Sidowitz Group, my consulting market research firm. I just wanted to make sure that this was as big an idea as we intuitively thought it was. And so it's a way to test. I mean, you can use it to develop, you can test alternative designs, but we really, we didn't want to spend a lot of money on. So we tested one thing and it was through the roof. But the real lesson was to capture the, the potential that that test identified, we needed to really understand the consumer psychology at a deeper level than we did.
Exactly. People were interested.
Yeah, they, they loved the idea of not having to work with lawyers and thought it was a huge benefit, but they were afraid of it in the end. But the world's different now. We first launched it just before ChatGPT became a big thing.
Yeah.
And, uh, now everybody's comfortable with AI. So now's the time to really invest in Bliss Divorce now that we know it works.
So as you try to grow and expand and like really get that go-to-market strategy going, what's your biggest bottleneck or obstacle that's like keeps showing up and getting in the way?
No, it's definitely been the conversion from top of funnel interest and free usage of our site. They can— users can use our site to— nobody realizes that in divorce you have to disclose all of your assets and debts to your spouse. Like you can't get divorced unless you do that. You have to put an affidavit to the court that you have done these disclosures and there's official forms. And we make it very easy to do the disclosures. You can import your assets and debts. But people are shocked that you have to do this, by the way. We have people contact customer support saying, do I really have to tell my spouse what's in my 401(k) plan? We're like, that's not Bliss Divorce's requirement. That's the state of California's requirement. But the reason I mentioned this is you asked about the bottleneck. So people can use Bliss Divorce freely to do all their disclosures. Each side can state how they would like the divorce agreement to look, not just the division of assets and debts, but also what the child custody agreement should be, what level of spousal support and so forth. But then to actually do the dispute resolution that we call digital divorce mediation with our AI and for us to prepare their paperwork, then they need to pay. So the big bottleneck has been, and you know, we've had chat with people where they're like, hey, I'm ready to move forward, but tell me about the AI again. Why don't I need a lawyer? Legally, can I get this done without a lawyer? My friends are telling me I should have lawyers. So the bottleneck is very much that point at which they go from the theory of using this to, okay, now I'm going to have to pay. And even though it's only $2,500 for Bliss Divorce versus $25,000 for a lawyer, that's the point where we've lost a lot of people and where we really need to work on.
But as I said, yeah, I'm really curious about something. Um, so like you have two potential customers simultaneously, you have both spouses. Like, how do you get both spouses to pay? Or like, can like one spouse try it out and then get the other spouse on board? Like, seems like there's like a You got to get two parties to agree to use Bliss divorce, right?
Yeah, that is one of the challenges. I have to tell you, that's not nearly as big a challenge. We thought that was going to be the big challenge. The much bigger challenge we didn't anticipate is that fear factor of, oh, can I really do this without a lawyer? And, you know, we're not talking about cookie-cutter divorces that you can do on really cheap websites and just do the paperwork. We're talking about divorce. Our average divorce size is $1.5 million. In assets and debts, and there are disagreements they need to work out. That's why they come to Blissful. But sorry, I lost my—
No, it's all good. You were mentioning that, like, the real technical hurdle has been getting people over just the difference between a normal divorce.
Oh, you would ask about the two people. Sorry. Sorry, I— Yeah, you're good. Too much going on today, end of the week. Yeah, so there is a bit of a factor on that, but in most cases, there's disagreements. Both spouses want to work out their disagreements and not have to pay lawyers. So it isn't that hard to sell to have one spouse come in, start doing their disclosures. You can invite your spouse through our website, and then there's an automatic stream of emails that go to people. Sometimes we'll have a customer support person maybe do an outreach to the other spouse, but usually when they hear, hey, you'll be able to work out your disagreements, we're not taking one side or another, it's algorithmic, it's all down the middle, um, but it'll cost a tenth of what it'll cost you if you go to lawyers. Usually the other spouse, it's getting them to start to participate The second spouse isn't the big thing. It's then to getting them to really commit. But we already have some signs that that's changing. And I really think that the, the different perceptions of AI now are really going to make the difference.
Yeah. Oh, 100%. I agree with you on that. When it comes to your messaging and outreach, I mean, what has been working well for you?
Sure. Um, so from a messaging standpoint, one is just the savings money, obviously. Yeah. The other part is the emotional messaging and letting people know— and we have to be careful, we've, we've really worked on this— that to not resort to scare tactics, but let people know, look, no matter how you feel about your your spouse. It is not going to be pleasant for you or your spouse to go through a long drawn-out conflict, which is the way the current process is designed. If you want to save yourself a lot of stress as well as a lot of time and money, that's what we're all about. You— if you don't want to have to talk to your spouse at all, you don't have to with Bliss Divorce. It's all interacting with the computer and with our user interface. And with our generative AI, we have a virtual divorce coach that guides people through the process. Um, it just— it's a much less stressful, much lower conflict process. And really, the messaging around that is what we found, even more than the cost and even more than the time savings, really appeals to people. Because almost everybody knows somebody who's gone through a terrible divorce, and nobody wants that. Even if you're angry at your out. So you don't want that.
That's good. Kind of to pivot topics a little bit, I'm kind of curious. You mentioned AI, but with all the buzz around AI and automation, where have you found ways to use it? Maybe not necessarily in the product, but even in your own business?
Yeah, yeah, no, it's interesting. Definitely the product, the impact, first of all, in the product I'll cover and then I'll talk about this. You know, we already before the generative AI craze, we had already been working on kind of our algorithmic AI and it was already working well. So we've just continued to optimize that. And there are some disadvantages for, for what we're doing to try to use generative AI.
Yeah, because it's predictive, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And also we need to be very careful to avoid practicing law. We're not a law firm. Yes. So everything we do shows a possible compromise to our users but doesn't recommend it. It says you can propose this to your spouse or not. Generative AI is much more about making suggestions and working with the people. And so anyway, a little more comfortable from a not practicing law standpoint to use our algorithms. And also, this is what algorithms are good for. Now, what's really impacted the product, uh, the product is our digital or our virtual divorce coach. And, you know, we, we have a great UI that's standard user interface and user experience. We did a lot of research on different theories of the stages that people go through in a divorce, the emotional stages of divorce. Diane Newman has a good theory on that that we modeled our website after. But you know, that's old school. That's okay, when you get here, this message will pop up. So now what we've wrapped around it is this virtual divorce coach. It's, uh, our CTO can speak to it better than I can. I believe it's ChatGPT-based, but we've put guardrails around it to make sure it doesn't, you know, cover certain topics that shouldn't be covered, to make sure it's accurate. We've identified the main information sources that it should use, and we've tested it pretty thoroughly. So now at any time as people go through, they can be getting tips, guidance, direction, even just usability things like, oh no, it's time to click this button now from their generative, from their virtual divorce coach. So that's really where the generative AI. Yeah, no, it's really, it's, we already had a great user experience and this has just taken it to the next level, but it wasn't possible 3 years ago, you know. And so that's been exciting. On the business side, it's been much more in my consulting. Well, that, that's not true. You know, the way we code has completely changed.
Oh yeah, 100%.
Now I, I can't really speak to that because our Chief Technology Officer, again Dan Hirsch, who has been, you know, in the software business for many years, um, but he's, he's had to really completely, just in 2 years, redo how the team does coding because it's now all first, you know, it's generative AI based, um, But then it really just comes down to tools. I have to say, for my consulting business, I've been very cautious. We are fact-based in what we recommend when we make recommendations to our clients or when we share things with our clients. And the error rate, especially on ChatGPT, less so on Claude and some of the others, but the error rate when we do use GenAI tools, we always, always check for the accuracy of what they're talking. Yeah.
Honestly, that's where I ran into— I ran into a very similar situation where I do a lot of marketing, and so it's like, it's been great. I haven't had to be like— be a little bit of hallucination hasn't been a problem. But then I had a client that needed me to do some legal work for him, where I had to like do some legal research, and the hallucination stuff became a serious problem. Yeah. Where I'm like, I started finding issues left and right because it was an entirely different category of work. And it did not apply.
That's very—
to that situation.
For my consulting business, we tried using one of the generative AI sites to go through like 200 pages of qualitative interview transcripts, and it took a while to get the right prompts and get it to do it. And we thought we got an output, and it would be quotes from the research and then kind of bulleted conclusion or bulleted finding summarizing from the quotes. And we started searching the quotes in the transcripts and we couldn't find any of them. And it had just made up all the quotes or gone and found them out on the internet. So we had to throw out, spend like 20 hours trying to get this thing to work right, then we had to throw it all out. So yeah, so you gotta be careful, but it's, it's a great tool. You, you know where else we might end up using generative AI? This is going to market research, but I think it's very promising is using bots to conduct in-depth interviews and not just in a very surface level way. But some of the companies that are working on this have put guardrails and kind of done the learning for the bots to really conduct effective depth interviews. So I'm excited to give that a try in our market, in my market research business.
It almost seems like, and this is, I'm coming at it from a complete outsider here, but like there's a part of me almost wonders if there's an opportunity to like to bring kind of like that therapist slash coach into the conversation, right? Where it's like, hey, we can help you lower legal costs, but also we can help you work through it from like a non-legal standpoint, but from like an emotional level. I don't know where you're taking that, but it's a thought that came to my mind.
No, that's a really interesting idea. We've been kind of careful, you know, among divorce lawyers. When we started this whole process, we interviewed like 20 divorce lawyers, as long as well as a whole bunch of people that had gone through divorce or were considering divorce, just to get a feel for the market. And the one thing the divorce lawyers consistently told us were, our clients want us to be psychologists. We always tell them we're not. If you want a psychologist, go hire a psychologist. We're legal advisors. And we've tried to build an empathetic user experience for our people who use Bliss Divorce, but we've tried not to give them emotional advice. But I think you're right. I almost wonder if maybe we should expand it or even have it as a side service, have it as, you know, upgrade to emotional support counselor or something like that. That's interesting. I know there's talk about using AI for counseling, but it's been a lot of pushback on it too.
Yeah, well, even, even like, I don't know, there's those services that have like, you know, remote or virtual counseling services or whatever, but I don't know, it's one of those ones I'm like, I'm not telling you what you should do, it just came to mind.
So yeah, yeah, no, that's very interesting. There are so many possibilities now. And oh yeah, I, I just, I do think people need to be careful when they use AI for things like counseling or, or any fact-based thing, to be honest with you. Just put in checkpoints.
Yeah, especially with these AIs. At least we're using the AI for counseling. We run into a lot of issues where there's a lot of confirmation bias, right? So it's like it's going to tell you what you want to hear, which might not necessarily be helpful. Yeah. So when you think about the next stage of your business, what are you most excited about?
I'm really excited just about moving from proof of concept to growth. Excuse me, especially somebody that's been in marketing. It's been really fun working on this product and adapting the algorithms that I use again for pricing optimization and product optimization with corporate clients. But the really fun thing is figuring out what's the marketing that's really going to drive growth and seeing both the business growing. And I really do believe that this is going to be so much better for families. I mean, it's just the divorce process now is horrific. And, you know, I'm not— people sometimes ask me why I'm in the divorce business, and I don't try to promote anyone getting divorced, but when the unfortunate thing happens where this is necessary, it shouldn't wipe out a family savings and be so high conflict that nobody's talking to each other at the end. And it certainly shouldn't make children suffer. And if we can really grow Bliss Divorce, we're really going to help a lot of families avoid what right now is just a horrible experience.
Oh yeah, I can feel that. When you look at your own journey though, like the wins and the mistakes, especially like bringing this product to market, um, what lessons have stood out to you as far as like just overall lessons or things you wish you understood earlier?
Yeah, yeah. Some of them are things that I already touched on, but I have to really say that as a pretty successful corporate marketing consultant, you know, my company, the Sidowitz Group, has worked with huge companies from Intel to Amgen to Merck to Align Technology that does Invisalign and Intuit. And I think we're very well respected in the industry. Sometimes you need to be a bit humble. And I think when my colleagues and I started Bliss Divorce, we thought we were the shit when it came to marketing. Am I allowed to use a bad word on the podcast. But, but we really did. And, um, as much as we followed and deferred to the experts on product development, and that's why I think I enjoyed that process so much, I learned so much. We followed a, a lean product development approach. We had people come in and coach us on it. You know, we had advisors who were experts. When it came to the marketing, we're like, oh, we know what we're doing. And, you know, our corporate marketing approach did not translate well. You know, it got us the cases we needed, but it didn't translate well to startup marketing. And I think when you're trying something new, you know, it's great, bring your expertise in, but also bring a dose of humbleness and be ready to recognize maybe you need to do something different and get the help that will help you make those changes. And, uh, yeah, I'd say that's the main thing that we've learned. I, I thought developing the product would be incredibly hard, you know, and it was challenging, but that was where I was like, God, are we even gonna be able to do this? And we've had enormous success, which is the most important thing, you know, but we haven't gotten our growth curve going yet. And we sort of tried, but not all that much cuz we were focused on iterating with the product. But, um, but now's the time to do it. And instead of me saying, well, hey, I'm a big shot marketer. I'm going to bring in somebody that knows how to market at this stage. And maybe when we get to $100 million a year in sales, I'll take over the marketing.
I also think you made the right choice. So you mentioned you brought in a fractional CMO who has experience in this area. I think that's a great way to go about it.
Yeah, yeah, she's been great. She really helped get us focused even on the minimal marketing that we were doing to just iterate on cases. But she's put together a great vision and plan for us now that— that's why we're doing our next fundraising round now that we're like ready to go to growth stage. We're doing a crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder. I think I mentioned it earlier, wefunder.com/blissdivorce. Um, but anybody can invest in our business from $100 up to $50,000. Um, and, uh, really people, I think, uh, I think normal people like you and I, not, yeah, not mega zillionaires, but, you know, people have been successful in their careers but know others that have gone through difficult divorces. They recognize the value of what we're doing, and I think we'd rather be funded and accountable to them than some big venture capital firm that, you know, might or might not understand our business along with the hundreds of others that investing.
Yeah, I 100% resonate with you. I, several years ago, I was running a big sales team and I had like 3 or 4 guys in one year go through divorces. And like, as their manager, I ended up becoming that coach, right? Yeah, like working through those emotional issues. And like, it was horrific just seeing like how much of an emotional toll it took, the amount of like, honestly, the economic impact, not just from like the splitting of assets, but just from like the low performance and stuff like that.
Productivity.
Yes, massive.
Yeah, we're hoping one of the things we want to look into, but probably not in the initial phase of growth, but is getting into benefits packages for corporations because we think getting couples through divorces with much less conflict much faster is going to have huge productivity gains to what you're saying. I guess the other thing is it was probably a productivity hit for you because if you didn't play the role of their counselor, they're not going to perform well. But now it'd take you away from being able to run your overall organization.
Yeah, that's part of the reason I kind of leaned into my questions about just like, well, counseling fees, because I'm like, right, there's an economic impact, you know, regardless. I mean, I think it needs to be done. Somebody's going to do it. At some point, unless you don't have any friends, and then you just have to bear the burden yourself.
So if our Chief Technology Officer Dan Hirsch is hearing this, Dan, get to work on an emotional version of the visual divorce— virtual divorce coach.
That's great. So do you have any final thoughts or advice you'd give other leaders or entrepreneurs on a similar journey?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. First of all is, um, bring your experience and your passion and your skills into a new enterprise, but be willing to recognize where different skills are needed and learn something new. That was so, you know, I did this at a late stage in my career, so maybe it was harder for me to recognize that, but, but I did. That's number one. The other thing I would say, you know, we had a very clear vision for Bliss Divorce. We knew what we had to do. We raised the money, we hired a team to develop the product. We did a lot of testing. That's why, as I said, we, you know, we've raised $1.6 million at this point and really invested a lot of money in making this thing work. But, you know, there's a lot of enterprises that are at a smaller scale, and I think sometimes smaller enterprises focus too much too soon. With Bliss Divorce, we were like gearing up to be a big enterprise from the very beginning, so focus made sense. So the other thing I would recommend to entrepreneurs, especially if you're just getting started, especially if it's a service industry— with my consulting business, at first I was very opportunistic. I threw the spaghetti out there against the wall. I knew what I could do, but I didn't say, 'I am only going to work with technology and pharmaceutical clients.' doing this type of research. I went out there to all my contacts and I said, I'm available for work. This is the kind of stuff I do. But I also just let them know what my skills were and work started coming in. And what ended up happening was my first big client was Intuit, and the projects I did with them really, really required them understanding their customers at a much deeper level than they did. So I started doing market research for them, doing in-depth interviews. Then I got, um, a big project with one of the pre— a company that was acquired by Merck, Sharon Plow. And again, it— that one was directly market research because I had already developed it. But the reason that the Sidowitz Group, my other business, is focused on healthcare and technology isn't because I said that's what I wanted to do. It's because that's where the opportunities presented themselves, and then I took advantage of those opportunities. Opportunities.
Oh, that's super wise.
Yeah, and I think people are— sometimes they think they need to have a plan and focus really early on. It's good to have a plan, but it should also be loose and more focused on creating opportunities that you can capitalize on than narrowing in on something too soon.
Well, Scott, thank you so much for sharing your story and insights, especially just how you're navigating all this change.
I, I think it's really great that you're doing these podcasts, and a lot of people will benefit from them. So thank you.
Of course, thank you. And to learn more about Bliss Divorce, visit blissdivorce.com, and then you can also check out their, uh, funding through WeFunder slash Bliss Divorce. And that wraps up, wraps up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. And a big thank you to our sponsors Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional leadership services for growing businesses. As well as Achieve Bootcamps, where entrepreneurs can learn hands-on how to build their own marketing systems, automations, and AI-powered tools. If you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show and share it with another entrepreneur who'd find value in it. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
