Claudia King worked for many years as a lawyer, but she became really stressed out about the so called billable-hour model. As in any service that depends on the time of the people working in the company, the scalability of the business is restrained by the number of hour people are able to perform.

With a strong interest for automation, Claudia became determined to disrupt that kind of business model by not only automating the processes, but allowing lawyers to sell their automated services online.

In the 12th episode, Claudia tells us about the early days of her startup Automio and what were the challenges she faced to find the product-market fit and finally generate traction.

SHOW NOTES

FORMING THE IDEA

Tell us a little bit about the fundamental problem that Automio is solving and what is the solution that it offers its customers to solve that problem?

So, back in 2011, I launched New Zealand’s first online legal service called Legal Beagle. And through that, we sold online legal services and automated legal documents to people here in New Zealand. And it was around that time that I became very interested in automation.

Initially, my enthusiasm for law firm automation was from the client’s point of view and wanting to serve the clients, to make legal services more affordable, accessible and understandable.

But then, during my time as a law firm partner, I became so burnt out and stressed because of the billable-hour model that most law firms use to run their business. And the problem with the billable-hour model is you can’t scale your law firm because your income is always limited to the number of hours in the day.

I wanted to find a way that I could use my valuable intellectual property—that I created as a lawyer—and sell it online to generate revenue for my law firm, while I was sleeping, basically. So, initially, I developed Automio to myself, to my lay firm to use it.

And I really wanted to build a global company and not just be restricted to legal. So, I saw that the product that I developed for my law firm, and for legal Beagle—which is now called Automio—was the big opportunity for me. I could sell it to other lawyers initially, and then to other professionals and business owners eventually.

TOUGH TIMES AND FAMILY FRIENDS

The idea generation came from your family too, right?

Yeah, that’s right. When I was a lawyer, I owned a law firm with my dad Dennis—sort of a more traditional law firm called Dennis King Law. And then while we were running Dennis King Law together, we launched Legal Beagle. After that, we used Dennis King Law and Legal Beagle to incubate Automio. So, dad and I founded Automio together.

Unfortunately, he passed away about two and a half years ago. That was quite difficult and, at that time, I had so much going on because I had my law firm, I had legal Beagle, I had Automio plus I was about seven months pregnant with my second child.

And I thought: “I might have to sell Automio, for now.” And almost didn’t go ahead because, of course, we use legal Beagle and Dennis King Law to incubate it. So, we needed good profits in those businesses to get Automio off the ground and then when dad died, you know, that revenue was gone.

I just didn’t have the same sort of financial means to incubate Automio anymore. But, not long after dad funeral, a couple—who are friends of our family—came to me and said: “Look, we don’t really understand what it is that you’re doing with Automio, but we really believe in you. And we’d like to invest in it to help you get it off the ground.”

So, I saw this as the first step in raising capital to get Automio off the ground.

REALLY AN MVP

How long did it take, and how was it like when you offered it to the first potential customers?

We launched the product into the market in June 2017 and, at that point, it was really an MVP. Before that, we had a limited beta group. And when we launched it, it was rough. It was still an MVP.

In terms of how long it took us to develop it, both stages all up would have taken about 18 months to two years. And it was a bit of a strange process because here in New Zealand, you can get funding for research and development—some software development does fall within that.

We applied to the government for some funding to help us pay for the development of Automio. And eventually we got it but it took a long time. The problem with that is that you’re not actually allowed to start developing it until your grant was approved.

There was quite a lot of waiting around for grants to be approved before we actually started developing the product. So, there was sort of some big kind of periods, we were just waiting to hear we had the money or not to do it.

SELLING THE IDEA FOR THE FIRST USERS

Who were the first customers or earlyvangelists of your product, and how did you approach them?

We launched it in June 2017, but we were actually due to launch it three months earlier. Because of the delay, what I decided to do—I’m a really impatient person—[was] a pre-launch.

Basically, what I did was I ran a series of webinars and then pitched the product at the end. And I said: “This is what the product does, these are the benefits of it. It’s not available yet, but if you sign up for a pre-launch subscription, you’re going to get ‘x’, you’re going to be the first to get access to it when it launches in a couple of months.”

And we were able to sell about 20 to 30 sets at that point to these early adopters who really just wanted to be in on the action.

And it was really those people that helped us get our first bit of traction in the market and who we used to help us get feedback. They were people who weren’t my friends or context. They were really third party people who were interested in using automation within their law firms.

That’s how we did it and I think it was a really great way to get some money coming in the door to start with, and just to get some people engaged with the product straight off the bat.

LEARNING TO GENERATE LEADS

What were the most successful marketing strategies to get the traction coming for your platform, of course, besides the webinars in this pre-launch phase?

Our product’s been in the market for about 18 months now. And, over that time, we’ve changed the way that we sell the product a lot, because what we started doing initially, didn’t work.

We’ve really had to learn to sell B2B. We still do a number of marketing activities, but in addition, we also have a sales team. As part of our sales team, we’ve got a couple of people out doing demos, closing deals, and then we’ve got somebody in sales development rep who does cold outreach, as well as take our marketing leads, nurture them and then...