Stevenson: Automating legal doc creation fails; founders need human advisors
“What we realized is even if you could automate the creation of these documents for people, they still had no idea what they say. They still need someone to trust. They still need someone to explain it to them”
Stevenson: Rally required sub-12-month CAC payback to claim PMF
“The other way we measure PMF was CAC payback period. So we were just kind of a little bit religious about like, what's our CAC payback period, you doing this motion. And if the CAC payback period Wasn't clearly well under 12 months. We're like, okay, we don't …”
Rally tested over 100 landing pages and features to find PMF
“We roll Over a hundred landing pages with different value props, different, often there's a new feature, a little feature we built, you know, to angle the product in a certain way.”
Stevenson: The default outcome for new software feature launches is zero retention
“At our company, we say like, actually most things you launch, that's the pattern you see weeks, the wiggles of death. It's like, oh, the user's like, oh, it's a new feature. I'll play with it. And you see like a couple of little spikes of people using it and t…”
Stevenson: True PMF causes a physiological reaction and dilated pupils in customers
“We had very high conviction that like product market fit should feel having an almost physiological response from your customers where when they see the product, their pupils are dilating, you know, There's like a neurochemical reaction happening. And I rememb…”
Stevenson: Small teams iterate faster than 50-person teams during rapid experimentation
“I think a small number of people can do a lot, sometimes more than a larger number of people. If you have, if you're doing a new experiment every two weeks, very hard to get a 50 person team aligned on that. People get burned out pretty quick, but small team c…”
Stevenson: Startup breakthroughs come from weekend hacking, not board meeting roadmaps
“And that's like one pattern I had noticed in our successes is that they almost all arose from this sort of like evening and weekend hacking. They never arise from like the board meeting plan or like the quarterly plan. They always arise from like, oh, I'm goin…”
Stevenson: Rigid document templating fails because legal work is inherently bespoke
“The rigid templating approach to automating contracts just kind of sucked. And it should be too long to realize this from our customer feedback, but like every deal is unique. Manually massaging text and getting it right for your client really matters. Your cl…”
Stevenson: Spellbook's initial CAC payback was under one month
“All the KPIs were off the charts. You know, cap payback was like, you know, below one month. There was like immediate cap payback and usage was like we had never, ever seen before.”
Stevenson: Growing feature lists overwhelm customers and harm early products
“You get this feature cruft and your feature list growing is actually not a good thing. It actually overwhelms customers. It starts to feel like it's overlapping with other products they're using.”
Stevenson: Spellbook scaled from 100 to nearly 2,000 law firms in 18 months
“Rally, you know, we had around a hundred law firms. Now we're Close to 2000 law firms on blue around the world. Yeah. So yeah. And that's in, You know, a little over a year, you know, a year to year and a half, you know, we went to two, 2000 mall firms.”
Stevenson: Spellbook processes 1 to 2 million contracts annually
“We see two, one and two million contracts a year right now go through our system.”
Stevenson: Pre-PMF startups should launch separate brands for new experiments
“Everything doesn't have to bolt on the same product when you're in the pre PMF stage. It's a totally different game. It has nothing to do with the post PMF stage. Almost you're trying a bunch of stuff. So launch different apps, launch different brands. Don't g…”