Wevorce (YC W13) makes divorce suck less
wefunder.com
wefunder.com
As a lawyer with many colleagues practicing family law, I don't think this is terribly fair. Divorces are acrimonious because the overwhelming majority of divorcees have fundamental issues with their spouse that they can't even verbalize, let alone work out. The underlying feelings that trigger the explosive fights about nothing (think toilet seats or dishes in the sink) are only magnified when blame for failure of the marriage and the dividing of assets/children comes into play. In other words: divorce is acrimonious because people going through divorce literally go crazy.
I would bet Wevorce is successful because it integrates counseling/communication into the divorce process, something that is basically prohibited when both sides are represented by counsel. That alone sounds like a substantial improvement.
I was belittled, laughed at, threatened and completely farked over by my ex's lawyer. They drew out the process an incredible amount. Why? Because I was paying all of her legal fees.
Every single court appearance they had a different attorney show up - if they bothered to show up. I am still extremely bitter over the whole process and pray I never run into any of those lawyers in person on the street.
Nothing has made me so close to extreme actions as has those complete thieves. I still hold a special place in my heart for revenge against that company.
The model provides a space for spouses to verbalize their issues in a neutral space, without attorneys getting in the way with sometimes overly zealous advocacy.
As an attorney myself for the past 10 years, I have grown weary of the restricted legal system and its outdated modes of advocacy that silently espouse that the only way to deal with conflict is by battling in the courts. Slowly, but surely, mediation, I believe, will gain more traction into the mainstream of the legal system; however, the main hurdles of that happening are the lawyers enjoying success in "battling" for their clients' dollars, rather than seeing the forest for the trees.
Here's to the possibility of the legal community embracing, or at least willing to accept, an alternative way to handle divorce without fearing the inevitable change to the legal culture it brings.
"If may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." C.S. Lewis
The fees are intense. $20k, 50k, 100k gets dropped left and right in this space. (Never underestimate the human drive to reproduce!) Most of that goes to agencies (who do good work, but incredibly inefficiently) and to foreign governments (if international). All to adopt kids that need a good home.
Navigating these waters is intense and difficult. There are so many hucksters, scams, multiple government bureaucracies, lawyers, clinics, and way too many options to make sense of things. It's a nightmare.
This is my pain point right now; I'll be your first customer!
Regardless, congrats to Wevorce for taking on family law.
If you have more time than money, the foster care route is definitely a good option. Plus, there are a LOT of kids in foster care waiting for a permanent home.
Depending on the situation, kids can go back with their biological parents. The social worker should be pretty up front about the prospects of that, though. Of the 5 kids we've fostered, 2 went back to their parents and we were well aware of that before we took them (they were 3 and 6 years old). Usually when infants are removed from a home, there's not much chance of them returning.
Both adopting and fostering are a huge responsibility, and it speaks volumes about you guys that you have done it multiple times.
There could be something in a service to help with adoption profiles. There's a lot of parts to that process that could be facilitated. I also wonder if parts of the education process (eg several of the mandatory parenting, etc. classes) could be put online.
This was the part that was most surprising to me. That's an incredibly good success rate (albiet with a small test) for something that's trying to mediate such a polarized situation. All it takes is either party not being satisfied with what they got to push it to court, so it must be extremely good at helping both sides feel comfortable with the outcome.
Nobody thinking "I'm gonna take the conniving, lying, cheating-ass bitch/bastard for everything she/he is worth!" would be trying to use this.
The benefit to our customers goes well beyond signing the papers. There's a strong education and co-parenting/budgeting tool component which, clients tell us, brings way more value than the legal aspect of ending a marriage.
A common law marriage is likely to last a lot longer these days since, well, it's not common law unless you've been together for a while. Sometimes years.
This is also another reason why parents who ignore their children's feelings when getting a divorce are a bunch of inconsiderate bastards. You can argue all you want about how things are just not working out, but unless one of you is abusive or reckless, there are no irreconcilable differences. You just suck at getting along with each other and you should have thought about that more before having kids.
Got to therapy, go to counselling, try anything to hold it off until your kids are at least older teenagers.
Wanna know what's really destroying the sanctity of marriage? Abuse, Adultery and Divorce.
My father has since remarried and is extremely happy with his wife and my two little half sisters. My other sister and I are doing great. I'm starting a company in Sweden and my sister is about to finish her bachelors from USC. My mom is doing great and just adopted a new puppy. Everyone is happy and the shit show is over.
Alternatively had they stayed together... There would have been MOUNTAINS upon mountains of resentment inside of our household. Fuuuuuuuck that no thank you. Kids are tough. They grow up and will be fine if they are loved and supported by their family members... Regardless of whether or not they were divorced.
This bullshit excuse that divorce damages and gives a kid post traumatic stress is false. As we all know most marriages in America end in divorce, so I have a lot of friends with divorced parents. They're all fine. I've never sat with any of them and pouted or wept over my life.
Correlation does not prove causation.
FYI the age, gender, temperament, environment, household size, family income, income disparity between parents, support or lack of support of other adults in the immediate family, support or lack of support of other children, association with children comparable age/gender/temperament, association with children of different age/gender/temperament etc... etc... one of the few things people miss out when they cite "I'm well adjusted therefore..." as opposed to the legion of people actually studying the effects of divorce on children.
Suffice it to say, your experience with divorce wasn't mine or many others' for that matter. I don't wanna turn this into a flame war, so I'll end it here.
In my case, there was some long simmering resentment due to a certain someone (not i) being a cheating ho and lying about it. Resolving this would have required said certain party to come clean, and rebuild the relationship. Instead, my insecurities were used against me (I was controlling asshole according to her), and she actively worked to decimate my self esteem. I literally spent years not understanding that I was pissed at her, and why I was so. Then she withdrew from the relationship, supposedly because I was pissed at her, but I suspect really due to abuse suffered as a child. I became the representation of that, she withdrew completely from me, and then I got lonely, hurt, confused, and angrier.
I tried talking to her about being lonely, and was blown off. Eventually, I realized that I was f'in pissed at her, and when I tried to discuss all that came out was bile and hatred. Thats when I knew things were unfixable. Counseling was suggested by her at this point, but I had zero desire to be told all things I did wrong by two people instead of just one. I was done.
Eventually, she did come clean, and somehow expected things to be fixed. All in all I'm soooooo glad we decided to end the relationship, I had zero idea how stressed I was constantly by the relationship.
When people would ask me if I was bothered that my parents were not married, my usual answer was "no, because they would certainly have divorced, or my life would have sucked in a major way." I've seen my parents together enough to know that although they were always polite to each other (at least when I was around) that there is no way they would have stayed together.
Likewise, my wife says the opposite: her parents waited many years too long to get divorced and she suffered for it.
As as result when she and I considered getting divorced (in the end, we didn't) the one thing we could agree on is that every step we took had to consider the impact on the children. That doesn't mean staying together "for their sake" but it did mean not dragging them through the mud with us.
What's known is that a substantial number of marriages do end in divorce. These divorces are extremely painful and expensive. The reasons for divorce might be as varied as the number of people getting them, but the procedures involved are rarely unique.
So all of that is an obvious recipe for disrupting an existing industry and printing money in the process. Good on them.
I've got no problem with anyone who wants to get divorced if there are no children involved since that kind of breakup (no matter how smooth people try to make it) will have negative consequences.
But it's there in huge numbers, people do it for all the wrong reasons, and there's no obvious way out of that for a few decades. So in the meantime I'm going to celebrate anyone who can unwind the miseries of people subjected to this nonsense. Keeping people out of court is very much a good thing.
That sounds wonderful. Make it so.
Remember, children model expectations for future life on what they see from role models, notably parents. Subconciously imprinting them with the belief that a relationship should be unhappy, fake and filled with resentment and anger isn't great.
Not to mention that a home inhabited by two people who don't want to be there just isn't a very nice environment for a child.
Just pointing out that in the UK there's no such thing as "common law marriage" even though lots of people think it is a thing. People who are not married (or civil partnered) don't have as many automatic rights when their partner dies.
I'm going to be that guy. I really don't like this startup, or at least how it's presented.
I have never seen a startup's front page focus so exhaustively on a founder's background. After reading about her story I'm not motivated to look elsewhere.
Her story garners a lot of sympathy, but how does the company work? That's all I care about when I go to a website's page. And it's not immediately presented. What I'm hit with first is the name, tagline, graphic and founder's story. I get that she went through divorce. The part about the judge is particularly riveting. But I, personally, don't feel it is as professional as it could be. It doesn't need to be cold, but this is trying very hard to be relatable.
I'm not trying to be cruel, I'm just being honest. I hope I don't offend the founders.
Problem: Divorce is messy and it's the second most stressful event you and your Children will ever go through. The average divorce takes a year with many dragging on for many years,and inculde _________ trips to court with an average cost of $27,000.
Solution: Our initial trial of 104 families Wevorced in an average of 89 days with 1 trip to court (That's not per family that out all 104 families) and our service costs a fraction of what is normally paid in court fees.
We are able to this using our 6 step process _______ instead of the traditional adversarial __________.
We (Wefunder) are featuring Wevorce as startup of the week. We focus on the founders because we love the team and want to present the company from their angle.
We should probably do a better job of clearly separating the Wefunder and Wevorce brands.
If I were an entrepreneur, I'd cut out the middle man and vertically integrate all three into one startup.
What would be your tagline ? How about "no hassles marriage to divorce in 1 package." Then could price your service as:
- Dating only
- Marriage only
- Dating & Marriage (value package)
- Marriage and divorce (value package)
- Dating,Marriage,Divorce (super value package)
Sorry. Couldn't resist.
70% of first marriages will end in divorce so we wont have to pay anything.
The other 30% will average 8 years before we have to pay. If we invest the float at 10% we can double our money by the time they divorce.
Total cost: $900/marriage
Best part is, when they come to us to cash in we sell each of them a new wedding/divorce package.
We want to be careful about making our branding too strong, because this post is about Wevorce, not Wefunder. In the future we'll put more design cycles into separating the Startup of the Week brand from our own, while keeping the featured startup front-and-center.
If her goal is to help other children avoid going through this wouldn't the better problem to tackle be how to lower the number of divorces? Any divorce, no matter how "smooth" the process is is going to be painful for the kids.
My son appears to be scared that hes going to be taken from me, or his mom. Not exactly sure, as talking to a 3.5yro just woken from a nightmare isn't exactly easy or informative and I'm having to read between the lines a bunch.
I need to find the little guy some counseling or something so we can address his fears and help him work through them.
From the article, the purpose of wevorce is to offer a new approach to divorce, where just one lawyer works for the whole family (partners + kids), instead of the usual arrangement where each partner fights the other to death.
This certainly sounds like a good idea, but isn't it just a kind of counseling business (the Accenture of divorce)?
Even if they can speed up the paperwork a little, at least one lawyer will still be needed for every "customer" (couple divorcing), so how does this scale in a startup sense?
Wevorce doesn't employ lawyers directly, it just acts as a marketplace between them and people wanting to get divorced without killing one another, and it takes a cut in the form of software licence.
So from this point of view there's no reason it couldn't scale indefinitely.
Give parents and extended family tools to better manage their split parenting work, from parenting schedules, to birthday wish lists, to the child’s clothing sizes, favorite foods, etc.
- Enable the family on one side to be engaged with the life of the child when the child is with the other parent.
- Help the child avoid feeling as if they have “two separate lives”.
- Function as an intermediary between both sides, with focus solely on the child, thus allowing them to cooperate with each other without danger of confrontation. Seeing Nana on Dad’s side communicating and cooperating with Mommy benefits the child greatly.
- Ideally, this technology-assisted “virtual” cooperation in time will serve as a bridge to real-life cooperation and engagement, healing, forgiveness, and understanding.
Features
- Each parent and child can post their work/holiday/event/school/sports schedule
- Track parenting time
- Keep a diary of the child’s activities (food, health, etc) to share with the other parent
- Track shopping lists and assign who buys what (Christmas, bday, etc)
- Track contact info (school, coaches, etc), clothing sizes, etc.
- Share important documents (report cards, etc)
- Share videos, pictures, audio messages, text messages with parents and extended family
- Q&A and community support for parents
- Allow for indirect phone calls between parties who don’t want to share their phone numbers, or chat video the web site.
- Allow for translations to be added to videos and messages.
I'll share your comment with the rest of the team so we can add some of these to our features list. Thanks!
I understand that YC startups are proud to be part of YC and thus, put the YC label on their site and everywhere else but often (and in particular here) it's the only USP such startups have.
Done right, this idea can be a force for good.
Actually, most of our mediators (we call them Divorce Architects) come from a Collaborative Law background.
Other than that, I think this idea will work.
It may be because the first and most prominent ligature is in the title... and the word "suck"
- ligatures are unusual, even in print, let alone on the web => they're distracting (I found myself chasing them on the page to see if they were also in the article -- turns out they're only used in some subtitles, but the rule isn't clear to me)
- ligatures are kind of "classy" (?), and the phrase "suck less" is very colloquial => the contrast is unpleasant (like seeing someone in a tuxedo, covered in mud)
Finally, the home page of wefunder is completely different, with basic sans used for copy (font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;) and 'ChunkFiveRoman' for titles (?)
In short, the typography seems to be a little all over the place (but that's just my opinion).
We're going through the flow and experimenting with a lot of type choices, and your point about the tone really rings with me. I expect to put ChunkFive on the bench soon, to be replaced by something with a little less angst, though I expect it to still be a slab-serif. As far as Abril Display (what we're using for headings on these featured startup pages) is currently used, we could improve. I think the actual use of ligatures helps give a bowtie look, but it's not necessarily what we're looking to do. The tone of the brand going forward will be key for that decision. IMO Abril Text, being used for the body copy, is a good typeface for long format reading. Though however I try to justify it, we've got some serious typeface gloat happening, and we'll start to see them tightening up over the next few releases.
Thanks again, much appreciated thoughts.
The still from the first video is incredibly off-putting. It's an awkward smile for any website, but for a divorce website, with the caption "They put me on the stand" it seems very inappropriate. I realised seeing the photo later on that it was one of the founders, but from the image and caption alone there'd be no way to know that (people should read the copy text, sure, but many of them will see the image first.) The Founders & Co image is better, but it does make me think that a sparkle will appear on their teeth any moment now...
YC is lucky to have you onboard.