Great Products are in the Details
Recently, while reading Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington, I found the following passage describing the British evacuation of Boston under American siege:
“On Sunday, March 17…nine thousand quick-stepping redcoats and numerous Loyalists boarded an armada of 120 ships stretching nine miles out to sea and left Boston forever.”
Hang on. Nine thousand people? One-hundred twenty ships? Nine miles out to sea? How the heck did that work? Was this a nine mile traffic jam or a finely orchestrated ballet? Did the ships come to dock or did they shuttle passengers out to sea by row boat? How many row boats were there? How many people could they hold? How far were they rowed? Didn’t these guys arms get tired? Did they sing sea shanties while they rowed? Which ones? You could write a whole other book answering these questions, and I, for one, would be fascinated!
That’s because I’m a nerd for details!
Maybe it comes from years of programming; digging through layers of coded abstraction to understand the mechanism of a framework or the root cause of an obscure bug. It might also come from years of improv where mining situations and character relationships for subtle detail is what brings a scene to life.
Great products often come from deep understanding of the details. Deep understanding comes from one of two places: experience in the problem area or asking a lot of really dumb questions. At Paladin, we have a good mix of both. Other members of our team have years of legal and pro bono experience and I have a lot of really dumb questions.
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend the American Bar Association TECHSHOW in Chicago. I saw lots of really interesting products in the legal tech space. The ideas that really sparked my interest were those that were built on a deep understanding of areas of law I knew nothing about.
For example, can you name the number one reason for attorney disbarment in America? Is it perjury? Professional misconduct? Witness tampering for the mob? Apparently not!
The easiest way to get disbarred is to screw up your client’s trust account. Trust accounting is like regular accounting, but…different. If it sounds like I have no idea what trust accounting is, it’s because I don’t!
But that’s okay, Tom at TrustBooks does. I met Tom at the Techshow’s Startup Alley. He knows the details of trust accounting inside and out because he did it for years. He saw that folks in his field were getting penalized or losing their licenses not because they were nefarious but because they didn’t have proper tools to manage their clients’ trusts. Some try using QuickBooks but it’s too complicated for their needs and doesn’t support the specific nuances of trust accounting. Others turn to Excel where one mangled formula can get you disbarred.
Tom’s solution is an easy to use software tailor made for trust accounting. Are trust attorneys willing to spend money on making their lives easier and keeping their licenses? I bet!
I also had a chance to meet Nehal and Hannah from fellow NYC legal tech startup Alt Legal. Alt Legal’s customers are intellectual property lawyers who today waste a lot of time shuffling forms back and forth between their clients and the US Patent and Trademark Office and trying to keep track of a myriad of filing deadlines for the properties they manage.
Alt Legal’s product takes a lot of the manual burden away by integrating with USPTO data to automatically monitor attorneys’ IP filings and deadlines, provides customer-branded client IP intake forms and tools to more quickly fill out USPTO forms.
The reason I love this idea is the team at Alt Legal has found an important but underserved market. Intellectual property is an extremely valuable asset to its owners yet it seems that many IP attorneys today have to rely on spreadsheets to keep track of important information like filing dates. Alt Legal has deep knowledge of the space and turned it into a product people need.
TrustBooks and Alt Legal are not trying to shoot the moon with a new technological innovation or bust the block with a trendy social app, they have deep understanding of real problems that real people will spend money to solve.
Next time you’re in the market for a new business opportunity, try finding a problem that a lot of people are solving with Excel and ask them a lot of really dumb questions.
