Raad on philosophy, startups, and life. On Twitter @r44d. <br/><br/><a href="https://raad.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">raad.substack.com</a>
Podcast Overview
Raad on philosophy, startups, and life. On Twitter @r44d. <br/><br/><a href="https://raad.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">raad.substack.com</a>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
4/11/2021
1 verified contact email on file for Raad
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Recent Episodes
June 30, 2022
How we found product market fit
<p>A Conversation with Bryan Pham for the Asian Hustle Network podcast</p><p></p><p><strong>Bryan: </strong>At what point did you realize that you had product market fit and how did you</p><p>advertise this product?</p><p></p><p><strong>Raad:</strong> It started out with my co founder and I knocking door to door with a square</p><p>reader and going on Yelp. We started charging people $300 to join the platform and</p><p>promising them clients, even though we had no ideahow we would get any. Then, we</p><p>realized that actually getting lawyers to pay for your services is a harder problem</p><p>to solve for.</p><p></p><p>So it started off as this SaaS subscription model and we allowed lawyers to upload</p><p>their real time availability. It was similar to a Zocdoc for lawyers where people with</p><p>clients can go in, click a slot, get a consultation, get the lead and they would pay us</p><p>in exchange for that. That wasn't really good at product market fit, It wasn't</p><p>sustainable. We were going after so many different practice areas from divorce</p><p> lawyers, to personal injury lawyers and we were spread too thin. Eventually we</p><p> focused around startups and small businesses.</p><p></p><p>We thought that we had product market fit at that time, but it really wasn't. Yet, it was</p><p>enough for us to get the attention of 500 startups because we were growing. We were</p><p>doing a few thousand dollars in revenue a month and it was picking up.</p><p></p><p>In terms of social network and how we marketed, I utilized Quora which is a Q&A</p><p> site to filter by all the legal questions that people were asking. I cracked open my</p><p> old law school textbooks and began answering hundreds and thousands of them for </p><p>free and I would link Lawtrades at the bottom for people to check it out. It resulted</p><p> in a lot of people visiting the website. I would answer questions like should I</p><p> incorporate as an LLC or a C Corp? I must have answered that in 50 different ways</p><p> on the site, but it eventually drove some traffic back to the main homepage.</p><p></p><p>What's cool about Quora is it also picks up with SEO. So if its a really</p><p>popular question, people can type it on Google and then Quora will usually be the</p><p>first answer there. So not only do you get Quora's traffic, you get Google SEO traffic</p><p>as well. That jump started a lot of our early growth and a lot of our early users.</p><p></p><p><strong>Bryan: </strong>I know that you initially mentioned that you thought you had a product market</p><p> fit, but what was a real Pivot that caused the product market fit?</p><p></p><p><strong>Raad: </strong>It's tricky because you can grow your company, get paying customers and just</p><p>assume that you have product market fit. Fundamentally, if your underlying unit </p><p>economics is not sustainable and your customers aren't constantly coming back to the</p><p>platformusing it more and more, it becomes really hard and expensive to grow your </p><p>product. You can be sort of tricked into thinking that you have product market fit, </p><p>which is what happened to us.</p><p></p><p>We were selling to startups and small businesses and eventually got into 500 startups,</p><p>which invested around 125K at the time. Then, we eventually raised a seed round </p><p>shortly after doing demo, which resulted in raising a little over 3 million dollars. It</p><p> was led by a big VC fund, Draper Associates. At that point, we switched away from</p><p> just posting on Quora because it wasn't scalable to continue running more ads on Google and Adwords.</p><p></p><p>At a certain point, we were spending close to 100 grand a month on Google Ads.</p><p>We were acquiring lots of customers and focused on growing the top line revenue in </p><p>the business, even though we were actually losing a good amount of money.</p><p>The problem with the early stage startup small business segmen, is the vast majority of</p><p>them go out of business within the first year.</p><p></p><p>If you think about when you're starting a company, the last thing you want to spend a</p><p>lot of money on frequently is a lawyer. You're trying to hire for engineering, you're </p><p>trying to market and spend money on a customer acquisition. When you're building a </p><p>marketplace start up, if your demand side usage isn't predictable and recurring, then </p><p>that doesn't provide a lot of incentive for your supply side to stay on board.</p><p></p><p>So at this time we were losing lots of cash, but we're growing top line revenue. We </p><p>were doing anywhere from 100 to 250k in monthly top line gross revenue. We knew we </p><p>were going to raise a series A and we were going to figure out this losing of money </p><p>thing later on. What ended up happening is we failed to raise our series A. At the</p><p> time, we didn't know why, but then we realized that there was a competitor that came </p><p>out that took our idea and raised around 70 million dollars. It just so happened that he </p><p>was a famous founder named Justin Kan who launched his company called</p><p>Atrium. He raised from every single VC that we spoke with and we realized why </p><p>everybody stopped answering our calls. Justin had close to a billion dollar exit doing a </p><p>legal tech company, so why would you trust a bunch of nobodies from Queens to be </p><p>able to compete with him?</p><p></p><p>This goes into the second phase of it, we were forced to get profitable. At that time, it</p><p> was a travesty me and my co founder stopped taking salaries. We laid off 80% of our </p><p>team, and we just had to get profitable.At this point we were all in on Lawtrades, </p><p>failure wasn't an option.</p><p></p><p>It was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to make this pivot into selling to our </p><p>true product market fit, which is legal departments in bigger companies. We now </p><p>work with companies like DoorDash, Pinterest, Opendoor and Angelist. We sell to the</p><p> general counsels within those companies who have a daily legal need. It went from </p><p>startups that might have an annual or quarterly legal need, to companies that use this </p><p>every single hour because their legal teams are small, but their companies are growing </p><p>and scaling.</p><p></p><p>It seemed we were doomed for failure, but it all made sense. We rebuilt the product </p><p>but we used pieces of it that worked for the small business side and tweaked it for </p><p>more longer term enterprise level engagement. Finally it all clicked and our LTVs </p><p>went from $1,000 to, basically close to a million dollars. We attracted an even better</p><p>supply and the revenue was predictable. Then we kept getting more customers </p><p>which attracted more supply and allowed us to become cash flow positive based off </p><p>that pivot.</p><p></p><p>Atrium and another competitor then ended up going out of business and we survived. </p><p>A a couple of weeks ago, we raised our Series A. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://raad.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">raad.substack.com</a>
March 15, 2022
Why I Got Fired from CVS
<p><strong>Kamrul:</strong> Raad, I'm just curious. Why did you get fired from CVS?</p><p><strong>Raad:</strong> There was one night where someone asked me to vacuum the aisle, and I think I was the youngest worker there and I just didn't want to vacuum it. It was supposed to be an every other day thing. And they were like, you have to. I was like, no, I'd rather just do anything else.</p><p>They fired me the next day. They found some excuse. They were just like, oh, your cash register was short by 36 cents. I knew it was because I pushed back on doing something I genuinely didn't want to do. It was a common theme in my life where I just didn't like being told what to do.</p><p>I'm a little bit of a free thinker and maybe that seeded the plants of not ever being able to hold a steady job since then, which leads into a bigger story.</p><p><strong>Kamrul:</strong> But you've never held a job?</p><p><strong>Raad:</strong> I have, but they were very short-lived. I wasn't very good at showing up at one place at a specific time and doing the same thing over and over again. I'm just not a very big morning person. Whenever I had to forcefully wake up, that would just dampen in my mood right then.</p><p>I'm a curious person. So if I'm told to do something and I don't really understand the why behind it, I'm just not going to be naturally into it. I'm going to do it by force. I think I did that with a lot of my other jobs because I needed the money. But I knew it wasn't going to be long lasting because <strong>I'd rather be poor than do something that I'm not generally interested in.</strong></p><p>Before CVS I worked at Jones beach concession stand, I worked at a country club as a food server. Then I worked at a couple of law firms and luckily those were pretty short because they were while I was in law school, they were two or three months long. It was just enough to realize this has to end at some point. I needed to look at the writing on the wall. I just got into making stuff on the internet.</p><p><strong>Kamrul: </strong>Obviously you have this company and you manage people. How would you deal with someone like you? Someone that's a free thinker and maybe takes direction, but doesn't want to do exactly what they're told?</p><p><strong>Raad:</strong> I try to actively find those people. I'm not the best manager. The people that we hire and bring on have to be self-starters, and just be generally curious. I'm good with setting the stage and setting the vision and letting them know why this work is important and the impact they could have on the greater society. After that, it's really just up to them on how they perform. Money is a decent motivator, but if you're building anything early stage, you really need people to go away beyond just money being the main motivator. It needs to be something that comes from the heart.</p><p>And that's the only way you're really going to succeed. When you're doing something really early stage, especially in the technology sector, and within law. There's been institutions around for hundreds of years, and you're this less than 10 year-old startup trying to disrupt it.</p><p><strong>You need people to go to the extreme</strong>. Extreme actions lead to extreme results. I try to actively find those people. It's very hard for us to hire because there's not too many of them out there.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://raad.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">raad.substack.com</a>
March 12, 2022
Marketplaces Achieve Network Effects From Trust
<p><strong>EJ:</strong> Does this create any network effects, as you sell into lawyers? Obviously if they want to, they can go start their own practice and use Lawtrades. Do you see that happening?</p><p><strong>Raad:</strong> That's an interesting question. We've actually had people in both ways. We have had people on the supply side get hired by a company and become the GC there who then use Lawtrades to hire another team of remote freelancers. There's definitely network effects from a traditional platform perspective.</p><p>The more talent and supply side you have, the faster matches the better experience and all of that. Even on the customer side it's a very referral driven industry. You're not going to be able to sell to general counsels via a LinkedIn ad or a cold email.</p><p>That helps for little bit of brand awareness, but it really is word of mouth driven. So for us, getting a couple of customers and making them really happy and exceeding all of their expectations in terms of price, in terms of quality, in terms of product experience, and really blowing them away led to a lot of our growth because they went around and told all their friends- and their friends told their friends.</p><p>That's why a lot of our focus is on community building through virtual events and in-person events. Not only is it fun to hang out with your customers and grab a drink with them, but it adds more fuel to the fire in terms of spreading via word of mouth.</p><p>The same thing happens on the talent side. If somebody gets on the platform and they get hired and land an amazing gig- they tell their friends about it. LinkedIn is our main platform. </p><p>So we see people posting about us from a talent perspective-</p><p>This was amazing. It was life changing. And so much better than the traditional staffing model or so much better than working at a Big Law firm. </p><p>People take note of that and then apply themselves. They'll often share different opportunities with their friends if it wasn't a fit for them. I think for these very vertical marketplaces, it really is important to provide an amazing experience for both sides because they're the ones that are going to drive most of your growth.</p><p>It's not a SEO play. It's not an ad-words play. <strong>It really is just brick after brick- building community, gaining trust, and then giving them the tools to go out there and spread the word. </strong></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://raad.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">raad.substack.com</a>
24 total episodes available
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