Comment by nwenzel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwenzel | Hacker News Reader

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Hi. Co-founder here. Thanks!

We're talking to a few law firms now. Small/mid-size firms believe their structure is a competitive advantage over Big Law firms. Our dashboard is a good way for their customers to see that advantage.

We just added integration to Xero. Quickbooks and Netsuite will follow, so we'll be well positioned to help small/mid sized law firm.

Re: standardization. It's industry and matter specific. Patents and IP work is very different from litigation and insurance work. But, within each vertical we have opportunity for price discovery which is really exciting to me. Fixed fee legal work is growing in popularity because attorneys and their clients are tired of watching the clock.

I like your analogy of a a legal bill to a log file. Though, hopefully SimpleLegal isn't "like" an analytics dashboard. Hopefully it is an analytics dashboard. Or at least a giant spotlight pointed at one of the largest P&L line items where companies currently have almost no data.

This is a nice product you have created but I think the problem you will have is in being able to acquire customers cost effectively that have enough pain with legal bills to want to pay the price you are selling the service for.

You can't build a business that is (or appears to be) targeted toward startups who may have large legal bills at one point in time.

You have to have a product that is used by traditional firms.

So how will you acquire and market to those traditional firms that need this? And, at the low prices you are charging, will you be able to market to them?

So I think what you need to do is have one product targeted toward one community (say low priced, startups, what you are doing now) and an entirely different branded product that has a much higher price that is targeted toward the legal department of small and mid sized companies.

So my feeling is you need two brandings, you can't just have different levels of offerings out of the same website and name.

I know the people at this company:

http://legalfiles.com/

If you look at their client list they are the type of people that would use your product. But at your pricing there is no margin to get them involved as a sales channel for you.

Thanks for the feedback - we'd love an introduction to the folks at LegalFiles if you'd give it.

As for our target customers - we services startups, but it's our customers that do routine work with outside counsel, spending tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly that benefit most from our application. We're working our way into the million(s) per month customers soon.

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