My startup journey: Part 1 — New beginnings
Yes, I finally joined a startup! I have always worked in big companies — P&G and Samsung, and over time I have come to appreciate the benefits of working for them. I know it’s fashionable to say that all big companies suck, but I have got a lot out of them. Great mentors, amazing responsibility, and most importantly, time for your loved ones. Thanks to them, I have reached a stage in life today where I can afford the risk of joining a startup. And so, when the opportunity presented itself, I dived straight in!
The Company
The company I joined is called LexInnova. It had been a patent and litigation consulting firm for the past 8 years, but now, the founder was trying to reinvent it as a pure legal technology company. His vision was to become a major player in the rapidly evolving Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) industry. And the product I am most excited about is LexInsight. To understand what LexInsight does, it is necessary to start with the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM, refer below). EDRM basically provides a framework for doing discovery of electronically stored information during legal battles.
Out of all the steps involved in eDiscovery, the most time and resource intensive stage was “Review”. According to some studies, the Review stage contributed to almost 70% of expenses involved in a case requiring eDiscovery. This was because it was mostly manual, often with hundreds of contract attorneys shifting through millions of documents to identify and produce the relevant ones. Lawfirms have traditionally been hiring contract attorneys through staffing firms, and this was the model LexInsight was trying to disrupt. I have covered the problems with current model in detail in my previous post about the founding story of LexInsight. LexInsight was meant to usher in the “Uber moment” for eDiscovery, and was the world’s first marketplace focused exclusively on eDiscovery and Document Review services. And this, according to me, was a problem worth solving.
My first one month
Well, I definitely learnt what it REALLY meant to drink from a firehose! It was a completely new industry for me, and I needed to learn fast how it worked. I joined as the Director of Product Marketing, and was responsible for leading the entire Sales and Marketing functions for LexInsight. I loved the role because it was a great mix of high level strategy and hands on tactical work (much more of the latter). I had always been an execution-focused person, and the role was a great fit. But before I could be effective, there were several skills I needed to pick up quickly.
- Email Marketing and Automation
InfusionSoft is the Swiss army knife for small businesses. It offers an incredible blend of CRM, Marketing automation and eCommerce in a single reasonably-priced package. Before I joined, everything was done using Excel sheets, and complex macros. LexInsight had just signed up for a InfusionSoft (IS) subscription 3 weeks before I started, and we needed to figure things out quickly. According to IS experts, it typically took a small business 6–8 weeks to transition to IS. I had one week!
I spent a lot of time learning about IS and how it worked. By the end of my first week, I was able to set up automation campaigns for Email Marketing that actually worked! I created several email templates and automated the process of targeting cold leads with a sequence of emails to warm them up, and to convince them to join our platform.
2. Solving the chicken and egg problem
Everybody loves a platform and every startup wants to be one, but it is incredibly hard to build a successful multi-sided platform. LexInsight was a two-sided platform. One side was the employers - legal practices, law firms and corporations (the Demand side), while the other side was contract attorneys, the people who actually did the work (the Supply side).
To solve the chicken and egg problem with multi-sided platforms, several studies have recommended to start with the supply side first, and to get as many of them on your platform as possible, by brute force if necessary. Uber did this with drivers, and elance did this with freelancers. So, we decided to start with the Contract Attorney side. In addition to Email Marketing campaigns, we set up cold calling teams to followup with people based on their interactions with our emails.
3. Product Management
When I joined LexInsight, the product was still being built. Luckily, I came with a Product Management background, and some experience of building products. I had taken a one year course on Product Management (PM101) during my time at business school, and also created an online platform to simplify the process of professional networking. Based on this experience, I was in a great position to help out the Product team with their product development efforts.
I worked closely with them to create wireframes for our MVP and our final product. We decided to customize an existing Wordpress template for our MVP and migrate to a custom platform in a few months once we have proven the concept. However, there was a big risk with a Wordpress MVP — clients in the industry were used to using highly refined hiring platforms like UpWork, and there was a risk of a false negative if our MVP did not have features on par with existing platforms. I guess we’ll find out soon enough if we need to change our approach.
4. Content Marketing
Since LexInsight was very new, we did not have a Content Marketing strategy in place. So I decided to work on setting it up. The first thing I wanted to create was a company blog. Since our product team was completely tied up with building the MVP, I decided to temporarily set up our blog as a publication on Medium (LexInsight blog). I wrote the first few articles as well.
In parallel, I also set up LexInsight’s social media profiles (Twitter, Linkedin) and started posting content on them regularly. I have recently started discussions with a content marketing company to help us with generating industry-relevant content at regular intervals. They look quite promising, and I am optimistic about the outcome. Once we launch our MVP, I intend to start working on our SEO strategy as well, most likely in the next 1–2 months.
5. Lead generation
This was a tough nut to crack. The LexInsight team is distributed in nature with people spread out over US and India. Most of our lead generation efforts are concentrated in India. This was my first experience of managing a distributed team, and it has been a great learning experience till now. My team consists of a Marketing Manager, a Sales Ops Manager, an Inside Sales team and a Lead gen team.
I helped set up a lead generation process using a legal database called PacerMonitor, that tracks all cases filed in the US. I also used information available from job listing sites like Craigslist and Indeed. By the end of first month, my team has been able to generate almost 500 leads per day for potential employers (across the US), and 100 leads per day for contract attorneys (select cities). The number of leads for contract attorneys is lower in number because we decided to launch LexInsight in a controlled beta in select cities only. Once we have tested and perfected the model, we would scale to the rest of the US.
Once the leads are uploaded to InfusionSoft, we run automated Email Marketing campaigns on them, and follow up on warm leads with cold calling by inside sales reps. This model has been working so far. I plan to spend the next few months refining this model to see if it’s possible to improve conversion rates by tweaking different parameters.
Conclusion
My first month in a startup has been really hectic, but quite rewarding as well. I have constantly been challenged, and I am learning new things every day. Hopefully, this trend is going to continue. There is a possibility of LexInsight shifting its base to the Bay area in February, and I am pretty excited at the prospect of what lies ahead. I look forward to capturing my startup journey in a series of blog posts along the way. Stay tuned! :)
