Clio

“We literally launched it in October of 20, 25, and we've gone from zero to 60,000 dollars a month in less than two months.”

“I took the marketing concepts from that business and understood the idea of FOMO, building waitlists, using emails and webinars, and we took it to SaaS.”

“So the emails that I was showing were literally the reason why we were able to get to 30 KMR and then 60 KMR. It wasn't just viral content. It was emails.”

“For launch number one, we just did one LinkedIn live, which is literally on LinkedIn. You're going live like you would on Instagram or X. You tell people that you're gonna do it, you create a simple post about it, just highlighting what it is going to be about…”

“One of our co-founders, Rob, he's literally giving his personal number to every single one of our users So they can make sure that they're using the tool, right? That they feel supported.”

“To build Clio, actually, we use Claude and Claude code. Then we use next.js for the TypeScript for the code, then Varsal and Varsal chat, then Varsal again for hosting, and then Clark for authentication.”

“For the operations and monetization, we use Slack for communication. We use loops for emails, Calendly for onboarding calls, and then Fernand for managing those emails for support.”

“They added FinTech into work for him and they raised a three billion and then they added AI to their product in the last year and legal for legal case management, five billion. Founded in 2008, 2008.”

“And this is actually a strategy that we used for our own SaaS tool, Clio. And in fact, we also used it for our other SaaS tool, Mentions. So we know that it works because we ran it twice, and in both cases, we were able to grow to 60 K MRR for Clio and 20 K of…”

“And the other one was Clio, which Raised it five billion in legal tech. It attached to AI in a different way. This is a company founded in 2008 that found its way in the AI era, right? It added FinTech payments, got up to three billion now at five billion.”

“Clio, which just raised it three billion when they added fintech and payments more to their legal tech”

“And they're at two hundred million in revenue and accelerating, two hundred million ARR. So it's a 10 X ARR deal, two billion-ish pre, right? Two something B. High for today's world, but not, not out of line.”

“17 years for liquidity. How long is the nominal fund life? 10 years. It doesn't match up. Doesn't match up. Yeah, you get two one year extensions.”

“80% of the legal market is lawyers practicing in firms of one to 10 lawyers. And fully half of all lawyers practice in, in small firm in, in a solo environment with maybe one or two support staff.”

“What we were able to do in this early customer development process is, is just put prototypes in front of solo and small firm lawyers and say, Hey, based on this wireframe and based on the capabilities that this product would deliver to you, Would you give me …”

“The friction point we introduced was you sign up for the beta and to get into the beta, you need to attend a 30 minute live Webinar with one of me or Ryan, and we would walk you through the product, teach you how to use it, give you a bit of a tour, and give t…”

“The, you know, the communication overhead that comes with even a five person team ends up being enormous compared to the kind of velocity that a really small team can move when you've got the clarity of vision of what you need to build.”

“Clio was really the first cloud-based practice management system to launch in, in beta form and in, in full form later in October in the world.”

“So our marketing budget for the first year of our launch for over 2008 was basically, you know, a few hundred dollars per month that we were spending You know, on, on some very experimental Google ads and otherwise free you know, just with this PR effort.”

“Hired an actual PR firm, got on a retainer that felt extremely expensive to us at the time, which was 4000 dollars a month committing to, you know, a quarter of intense PR over, over Q four of 2008”

“I think we felt like we had true product market fit when we had our first beta customer using the product to run her law firm and was really using Clio to make Money for herself and depending on Clio in a production environment.”

“We often think about building for 10 or a hundred or a thousand customers, but often if you laser focus on the right single customer and just make sure your product is really singing for them, again, you can find 10, you can find a hundred, you can find a thou…”

“So they are a practice management company, and they have over 40,000 users just in California that are attorneys that pay them for their service.”