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Comment by ryporter | Hacker News Reader

How will you make money? You made no mention of it in the post, and it would really surprise me if there's enough money in this market for you to be able to deliver the sort of return VCs are looking for. This may be a better candidate for YC's nonprofit track.

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There is lots of money in providing services for attorneys/the legal system, so I wouldn't discount it out of hand.

Right, but their tagline suggests that their primary customers will be public defenders. I don't know much about that market, but I doubt that they have much of a budget for tools like this.

There's a lot of cases available for public defender and the standard bill rate ranges from $50-$100/hour. That easily covers a $10/case fee[1]. Assuming this will save the attorney 6-12 minutes of total time (over the life of the case) it's a net win for them.

[1]: I'm making up the $10 number. No clue what pricing they'll be doing.

Yup! This is the answer that we came to from our research. If we could save the defenders (or courts or prosecutors) even a small amount of time per case then we can generate enough value to charge them a $/per case fee. We're still honing in on what the exact sweetspot for the case fee is, but based on what other folks in the market are doing it seems to be somewhere between $2-10 depending on who and where the client is.

Thanks for the question!

We plan on charging firms on a per case basis.

Eventually we also plan to to sell to other customers, particularly courts and prosecutors, but we have to start somewhere and this is where we felt there was the biggest mismatch between need and current tech.

Both prosecutors and courts have more money than PDs (generally), but they are also much much harder markets to crack since they tend to be more directly integrated with the governments IT and contracting infrastructure.

That sounds like a good plan. You seem to identified a market that's easier for a startup to penetrate, which will then give you a basis for expanding into more lucrative customer segments.

Based on this discussion, I'd suggest that you deemphasize public defenders, at least removing it from your tagline. I'm sure there were others who had a similar reaction to me. Instead, pitch your service as one for the entire legal system, and then discuss how public defenders will be your go-to-market strategy.

I might still change the title.

The reasoning behind the current choice was that I personally find the specificity to be a bit more compelling even if it is intended only as a go-to-market strategy. When I used to pitch this to folks as "rebuild the public data infrastructure for the legal system" they would mostly roll their eyes at me.

Point is well taken though. Thanks.

I think it depends heavily on the audience. If you are talking to potential investors then discussing the long term vision of targeting the entire industry is a good thing. However in the short term, targeting a very specific segment of the market and communicating that on the website is wiser in my opinion. It makes the tech and sales a lot easier in the beginning.

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