Camara: Competitors struggle by designing for lawyers instead of paralegals
Adrian Camara · Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show · Jan 16, 2023 · at 10:51
Adrian Camara, founder of entity management platform Athennian, discusses why competitor startups launched by corporate lawyers struggle with product-market fit.
0:00 / 0:40exact quote · 40.3s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We have some competitors today and had a very similar origin story to me where corporate lawyers observed the problem. They missed that step of like, okay, we got to sit down and spend six months with the primary users of this product. And tear down their day to day at like a screen by screen, button by button level and understand the story and the business context behind every action they take. So we can get the full scope and prioritize of how we build this. And so we have competitors that missed that step and they built it from the, with the bias of how they look at the problem. And you have this huge disconnect. This product's being built from the perspective of a lawyer, but you got paralegals have to use it creates enormous disconnect. And then you obviously struggle from there.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Adrian Camara
Camara: Founders should not write code without six-figure deposit commitments
“My threshold, if I ever do this again, would be I would not start cutting a line of code unless I can get, you know, six figure order form deposits on the basis of a PowerPoint deck. If I'm unable to do that, I either have not identified a painful enough of a …”
Camara: Canada lacks a strong mid-market compared to the US
“Canada doesn't have a very big mid market, but the United States does. And I, you know, and I think that's one thing that, that, that does create some inefficiency in Canadian founders is in their home market. There's not a great mid market.”
Camara: Founders should extract the wisdom embedded in legacy software
“There's a lot of wisdom built in legacy systems. People dismiss them as old and clunky at the time they weren't. And at the time someone went through a product process. Over years and years and years to build something. And there's tons of wisdom in those lega…”
Camara: Delivery-contingent enterprise contracts create massive startup risk
“Our first, like our first iteration of our first customers, they were contracts with deposits, but the balance was due on delivery of the product, which is when you're selling into, you know, mid market enterprise, that's super high risk because the definition…”