ManifestOS

Referrals Cannot Be Hacked SPEAKER_01 0:00 I don't think you can hack referrals. I think you can incrementally improve referrals by making it easier. But like at the end of the day, if you're not building something that the world needs, then no hacking tools are gonna help you. I believe in value-led customer acquisition and not just ads. Ads are stupid. We're overloaded with information. We see the ads everywhere. Value add customer acquisition, in my opinion, is the gold standard. Getting clients is so much harder than building technology. The easier it is to build technology, the harder it is to get clients. I really encourage everyone to think about user psychology as the first step. That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Pablo Srugo 0:44 Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is product market fit. Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take up your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Meet Dan And Manifesto S Pablo Srugo 1:02 Dan, welcome to the show, dude. Hey, good to see you, man. You launched a Manifesto S. You recently raised $60 million a series A, and you're building a very different company. We're going to talk about that, but we always start on the Primarch Fit show with the product market fit moment. So tell me, when did you feel like things were really working? When did you feel like you kind of found initial product market fit? SPEAKER_01 1:22 I knew that there is a pain point before I started the company, and the pain point was so acute. So what Manifesto S does is Manifesto S powers, just to contextualize this, Manifesto S powers individual lawyers with their AI native practices. So we help like incredible experienced attorneys launch their AI native legal practices from scratch and scale them to become market leaders. So the idea of like legal services being too slow, too expensive, too unpredictable, too much of a black box, that was kind of like I knew that there is a pain point. There is a difference between creating a software to solve the problem that most people don't know exist, or like better executing and better solving a pain point that is already there. There is already a market, there is already a budget, there is already spend. People already use those services. And when you sort of like focus on building businesses around existing pain points and replacing existing players, then the product market fit question becomes a little bit less kind of acute because you're you're not like, hey, like I'm gonna build software that people didn't know they need. You know what I mean? The PMF PMF Proof Through Lawyer Referrals SPEAKER_01 2:22 was never a question. The bigger question was like, can we get supply? Can we get demand at the price that makes sense? Does customer acquisition cost make sense? Those are the pieces that we needed to figure out. Pablo Srugo 2:32 I agree, but like you said, no business has no risk, right? And it reminds me of a lot of the lending businesses that came up five years ago, where it was like, we're giving people money, like people want money. So when I say like you're gonna get a loan, like everybody puts hands up. I have no worry about that. I'm worried about are my metrics gonna make sense, etc. Like that's gonna mean the business works. So the same question then would be to you like, what was the biggest risk that you saw in this working and when did you see that kind of start to turn around? SPEAKER_01 3:00 That's a good question. I think acquiring lawyers was my biggest concern and the fear going into this company. Before I started manifest, I spent two months as a paralegal at a law firm observing how people actually practice law and how they do the work day to day. And as I was talking with like actual lawyers actually practicing law, the conviction got greater and greater and greater that like there is a pain point. They actually have a real pain point. It's in details, it's in the weeds, it's in nuances, but like you build that conviction by actually observing their work. And it just became obvious to me that there is a real pain point. And I remember how this like one lawyer, the first lawyer that ever partnered with us and helped us sort of um was was the first client, actually. That first lawyer started working with us, and in a month, they referred the second lawyer. And I was like, oh wow, okay, this is actually working. Like we're solving a real pain point and adding value to them. So now they want to refer us to their friends. Pablo Srugo 3:56 I love that the referral piece is a big one. Everybody wants referrals, and a lot of the questions are like, how do you drive more referrals? How do you drive more referrals? And it really comes down fundamentally to the wow moment and making that wow moment happen fast, happen big, and and delivering that through the product. Like, frankly, what do you refer? Like, you refer products that you love, not the ones that you know pay $20 to do so. And exactly. SPEAKER_01 4:18 And like I remember Steve Jobs' phrase who's like, we're never gonna talk about quality in Apple ads, because any company that talks about their quality in their ads generally means that they don't really have good quality. Japanese companies never talk about the quality of their products because they're just freaking high quality. That's all it is. So I don't think you can hack referrals. I think you can incrementally improve referrals by making it easier. But like at the end of the day, if you're not building something that the world needs, then no hacking tools are gonna The Acute Pain In Legal Work SPEAKER_01 4:45 help you. So in our case, we are solving acute pain points for lawyers. If you're an attorney and you graduate from and you've been practicing for 12 years, you kind of like have two options. You are either pursuing a partner track at a large law firm, chasing billable hours, and check this out. Every attorney at a MLA 100 has to bill for 2,100 hours a year, which means that you literally have to bill for every waking hour that you have per year. You cannot take vacations and you cannot have any unbilled time during the year. Because typical human works 40 hour weeks and that's like 2,080 hours a year. And a typical law firm partner has to build for 2,100 hours per year. So I'm like, okay, that's unsustainable. That's like a crazy track. Pablo Srugo 5:29 Because that's your billable. Like, then you gotta like, you know, eat, go to the bathroom, and then do non-billable work on top of that. SPEAKER_01 5:35 Correct. So you end up either working 4,000 hours to actually build for 2,100 hours, or you're just inflating hours, or I'm missing something. I'm not making any accusations, but yeah, the math doesn't math otherwise, so it's tough. So that's option one. Option two is you start your own business as an attorney. And if you start your own business, you spend 60% of your time doing non-billable legal work. You're chasing clients, you're doing business development, you're running around to conferences, you're recording TikTok podcasts. And like the truth is like a person goes to a law school, accumulates $300,000 of student loans, and then they end up doing the work that doesn't require a law firm license just to sort of become a glorified salesperson. So that is not a great path either, because people don't become lawyers to be salespeople. They want to help people with their legal needs. That's why they become lawyers. So the pain points that lawyers experienced are very acute. And the PMF was so strong because the sort of the pain point itself was so strong. Leaving A Big Company For Purpose Pablo Srugo 6:34 Now that we know that moment, like when things were starting to work and you're starting to get referrals, let's go maybe back to the beginning. When did you start Manifesto S and what were you doing? Not your necessarily a whole background, but like the few years before you started and before you had the idea what was going on. SPEAKER_01 6:47 So um, I was building a company in real estate tech, which was my company number three at that point. What year is this? Well, I started the company in 2017, late 2017, early 2018. It was two years ago. I was building that company. The company was growing fairly well. We were over $50 million in ARR, 200 employees, like a fairly large business, profitable. We raised $60 million of venture capital from pretty good names, like SoftBank was an investor. And I found myself in this weird situation where I'm not seeing purpose in all of this. I'm building a business on paper, it's growing well. I still have some invested stock. I could just stay, make tens of millions of dollars on that business. But there is a lack of sense of purpose because that business for me was just, you know, like we're helping real estate owners increase their earnings from their buildings. And as much as I could relate to that pain point, I didn't want to spend my 30s, my most active years on solving that pain point. So I started thinking about transitioning myself out of the business. And now you're what, 21, 2020, when you start having these thoughts? Uh I I can't remember the exact year, but like, and it was also there was no like one aha year a moment. It was like slowly building up, but more or less just to give a sense of kind of timeline. I transitioned into manifest in 2024. So okay, so somewhere a couple of years before that. And I started working with my team and basically building the leadership team to sort of plan for transition. And ultimately, my chief of staff, who was then COO, became the CEO. I trained him. We communicated with investors proactively for many, many months. We gave everyone a heads up. We like managed this like transition, which was actually a really interesting experience. I've never done that before. And uh the new CEO took over in August 2023. And I started basically thinking more deeply about this idea of building manifest. Pablo Srugo 8:36 Did you have this idea as you were transitioning, or you just knew you wanted out of what you were doing and would figure out what the new thing would be? SPEAKER_01 8:44 I knew that I wanted to build something in legal. I wasn't spending much time thinking about what that would be. I knew that legal is this interesting industry where it's an industry that matters for the world because legal services are fundamental to our society. It's not, you know, delivering burritos five minutes faster. It's actually like make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true. Pablo Srugo 9:08 Or at least it can be. I mean, some stuff is like little, you know, whatever contracts, but they can get serious. SPEAKER_01 9:13 It can get serious. Like ask a healthy person what they want in life, they tell you 1,000 things. Ask a sick person what they want in life and they say one thing, right? Same applies to legal situations. Like if somebody's getting sued, if somebody's in litigation, that's top of mind for them. If somebody's going through divorce, that's top of mind for them. If somebody's getting their visa or green card, that's top of mind for them. So for me, it was meaningful work. I knew that I wanted to build in this space because I felt like it's meaningful work. And reality is like if you're building a company, which is freaking hard, like you know, you might as well work on something that actually matters. I knew I don't want to build enterprise SaaS. I knew I don't want to go and like build like a GPT wrapper that does something fun. I wanted to solve an immediate difficult problem in a regulated industry. And legal just perfectly fit those criteria. Pablo Srugo 9:57 That by the way, it's not to be taken late, like it's actually pretty crazy. If you just think about when you're starting off, you're starting to be a founder, and you just dream and hope that this business is gonna work, and then you get it to a point, like you said, 50 million AR. This is a solid working business. And then for you to, and obviously some people do, you know, transit, but you transition out because you have another idea that you just can't stop thinking about it. It's like, okay, I could, I understand that, I get it. But for you to just say, uh, it's just not enough for me. I'll start from scratch, like I don't know what this next thing is. Maybe it'll completely blow up and it'll be like a tenth as big as this thing, because I don't even know what it's gonna be, but you know, screw it. Like, I just can't see myself, it's just not worth my time to be here. I want to do something more powerful. It's it's not small, like it's not a small decision. SPEAKER_01 10:43 But if you look at like, look, I don't mean to get all philosophical here, but actually, I think we as founders sometimes don't think about the timeless truth enough. And why are we building what we're building? And you can get motivation in so many different ways. You can get motivated by money, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like, people are embarrassed to talk about it, but why? Like, I have no issue to admit that like my first company, which I started at 11, I started because I was broke and poor and like financially hungry. And that was the real reason. Or you can be motivated by your team, and there is nothing wrong with that. Like, people can be building in the most I don't want to call them boring categories, but like you could say, yeah, there are some boring categories, and I'm boring categories. And then people get motivation from like working with other smart people and like being in the trenches together and the feeling of camaraderie, and it's a real source of motivation. Amazing, that works. But the deepest source of motivation that I've ever found in my career happened in this company. And the deepest source of motivation is the service to the community, the service of others. And if you look at like the greatest uh timeless books, like people find motivation in service to others. Every religious book speaks about getting pleasure and happiness from servicing others. Now, you can still win, you can still build a valuable company, you can still be a decacorn, whatever the new term is for uh like a hundred billion dollar company business. You can still make a lot of money and achieve a lot of success. But like if you're motivated by the desire to serve others, there is a very deep, meaningful unlock there that lets you persevere through some of the most difficult situations. Now, I don't make the decisions 100% of the time from this place. Sometimes I make decisions because I'm competitive and I want to kick ass off the next guy, or I want to achieve the next milestone to unlock the next round. That still all happens, but like when you start making decisions from the place of like this like very like clear, clean, uh pure motivation, the quality of decisions is so much better. So, what I knew is I knew that there was a pain point. And the pain point for me was I'm not doing meaningful work and life is too freaking short to work on problems that are not meaningful. And I knew that I need to solve it because it was uh it was manifesting itself every morning. I would wake up later, I wouldn't have the motivation to go to the gym, I would be sleepy and foggy, and my brain would shut off. And when that happens for an extended period of time, you're like, hmm, there is a signal in there. And the signal is, you know, maybe you need to make a change. So yeah, I didn't know the exact business that I'm gonna launch, but I knew that like I'm gonna be building something meaningful. Choosing Immigration For Leverage Pablo Srugo 13:12 So you leave, you know you want to do something in legal. What are the customer discovery type things you do to figure out what that's gonna be? SPEAKER_01 13:19 I started with the pain point that I understood the most, which is immigration. And immigration is this very interesting thing that like I'm actually obsessed about right now. Because if you think about sort of immigration on a human level, it's deeply human. A person who is moving from country A to country B, this is a very important decision. Their family is impacted, their kids are impacted. It's massive. It's massive. If you think about it as from, and again, this is gonna sound grandiose, but if you think about it from a societal standpoint of view, I'm a big patriot of America because it gave me everything that I have. And I'm like, I I think it's it's a great country. And this is an unpopular opinion sometimes, and people are ashamed to say this. But US is a great place and I love it. And I think that one of the main levers that we can pull as an American society is we can be, we can attract the best talent from around the world. And that boils down to how attractive we are as a destination, and we are sort of doing still doing a pretty good job in that. But it also like how easy it is, how how simple it is to move here. And I think we could be doing a better job here. And I think immigration could be a major lever that lets us bring the brightest talent from around the world. I'm upset about the fact that the vast majority of best AI engineers in the world are in China today. They should be in the US because that's how countries enter into rivalry today. And like I'm motivated by the idea and I'm motivated by the impact that Manifesto S can have on enabling lawyers to streamline immigration and what that means for American technology leadership. Again, this is the kind of things that startup founders are not supposed to be thinking about, but this is the kind of things that actually give me motivation. I feel like I'm serving a bigger purpose. And if we can solve that problem, if we can make immigration a proactive lever to attract the best talent around the world, that motivates me. Pablo Srugo 14:58 That gives me a source of motivation. You do, as a founder, have to have something that just keeps you going. I agree with you. It can be money, it can be team, it can be purpose. I will say the bar of success is almost commensurate to that. Like if it's money, unless you're like, I can't live with myself unless I make a billion dollars, you know, it's just hard to keep going past a certain point because you're like, okay, it was money, like I can make a hundred million here, I'm good. Like, you know, whereas if you're if your actual goal, like genuinely, you get up in the morning because you want to say, change the way immigration works across the globe, frankly, you're never done. And so then there is really no bar. SPEAKER_01 15:33 Yeah, I agree. And um, you know, like Elon Musk came up with those big, meaty goals for his life. And like, he has that intrinsic motivation that probably will never evaporate because like he can never actually achieve his goal. And that's the beauty of his goal. But yeah, and and the third reason why we chose immigration is that there is actual real technology leverage here. If you think about immigration law, what is it? It's somebody dealing with the government. Anytime you're dealing with the government, there is a predefined set of rules. There is a very clear kind of way that the government wants you to work with them. Manifesto S doesn't power lawyers that do bet the company multi-hundred million dollar litigation, because there you have the other side, and the other side could be creative and they could be sneaky and they could play by the rules, or maybe they won't be playing by the rules. AI leverage there is much lower than it is when you're dealing with the government. And if you're dealing with a government and you're helping a company sponsor a thousand employees for their visas, that basically creates uh real technology leverage because you can achieve a very interesting level of automation. And we're seeing this all the time where a lawyer used to spend 40 hours on preparing a visa case. Today they spend 10. Tomorrow they're gonna spend four. The day after tomorrow they're gonna spend two. And what can you do with that time? Well, a lawyer can now spend their time actually being proactive with their clients instead of reactive. They could have a weekly call with their client who's going through immigration and say, here's a 15-minute check-in. Let me give you an update on everything that happened this week. Let me tell you what's gonna happen next week. Lawyers don't do that because they don't have the time to do this and they don't have the mindset to do this. Manifesto S gives them technology that eliminates busy work and gives them the time back to work on strategy. Pablo Srugo 17:06 But did you land on this immigration idea just from like deduction, or did you have a lot of conversations? Like how did you kind of get to this conclusion? SPEAKER_01 17:14 Well, it was multiple fold. One is just I I knew the problem because I went through the problem. I lived the problem firsthand. All my friends lived the problem, so I it was I was not a stranger to it. And two, the business fundamentals for the industry were really good. And then to validate it, I just worked as a paralegal for two months, actually doing the work before I started the company. And it was amazing because like nobody could tell me how it works. I knew how it works, I knew what product to build, I knew where technology will have leverage and where it won't have leverage. It's just the best thing to do. Like, look, if you are thinking of starting an AI native services business and you're like, or any AI company, go and work in an actual entry-level job in that sector. You're gonna get the level of signal at the deepest possible, most granular level. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore because you're gonna understand the underlying kind of workflows and issues. The Networked AI-Native Law Practice Pablo Srugo 18:01 Now that you know, okay, you've worked as a paralegal, you've seen the problems, you want to do something in immigration law. The the classic things these days are like you could do an AI native like roll-up and buy a few of these and add AI. You could do services as you know, services as software and start your own law firm that's like AI first, or you could just classic AI and just sell AI to these companies and be like, hey, automate your stuff, fire some people, whatever. You did something like, as far as I can see, doesn't really fit any of those three buckets. What is it that you did and how did you end up there? Like that's not that's not an easy kind of link. SPEAKER_01 18:30 Imagine you're a lawyer, you have 12 years of experience, you're sick and tired of following the same path and working at the same four law firms that do immigration around the world. And you're like, I spend most of my time doing busy paperwork. I'm burned out after 12 years of working in the industry. I work 80 hour weeks, I feel like I'm doing a lot of stupid work, and I didn't join the space to do any of this. I joined to actually help people. So Manifesto S will reach out to you, screen you extremely hard, like really interview you in many different ways, test you, make sure that you have we're looking for very, very specific profiles of people to work with. And then we're gonna say, let us help you launch a practice. We're gonna give you one unified brand. So you're gonna operate under manifest brand, which means that you're gonna be kind of part of the same high-quality engine with a lot of checks and balances, with a lot of SLAs and controls. Two, we're gonna give you a centralized back office. So you don't have to worry about hiring power legal. We're gonna give you an AI-native paralegal that does the work. We're going to handle your billing, we're gonna handle your collections, we're gonna handle administrative work. We are everything is centralized to one place, and we are gonna stuff you with the necessary personnel, right? So you don't have to waste your time. We're gonna give you a unified marketing engine. So we're gonna bring you corporate clients, small businesses or large corporations that want to work with you and they will hire you. You can collaborate with other lawyers in the network to go and work on the same contract. Let's say there is a large Canadian business that wants to move 50 people to America, too much work for one lawyer. Two lawyers in the network could team up and go and do this. And we're going to give you a one unified software layer that will replace your traditional Microsoft offices of the world and Outlooks of the world. So you're going to communicate on the same platform, draft documents using AI, and you're going to be so much more productive because like we've eliminated so much of the manual repetitive workflows that like you're going in and you're just completing work faster, better. They handle the legal work. We handle everything that's non-legal in nature. So everything that's business, marketing, customer acquisition, back office, and support that's on uh Manifesto S. A legal judgment rests with the lawyer. And then all lawyers live in the same Slack community. They talk to each other, they collaborate, they go on weekly webinars, they go for drinks all the time. And it's like this like decentralized organization in a lot of ways, where like these lawyers are independent practitioners who team up and work on cases when there is a large client, or they work in their individual pods working on specific client matters, if they're well equipped to handle that. Pablo Srugo 20:59 Was there an analog of this type of model somewhere else that you kind of got inspired by? It's a pretty, it's pretty unique. I mean, franchise is kind of what comes to mind, but it's different, it's very different than this. SPEAKER_01 21:08 It's different because the quality control is so unified and because the software is all centralized and everybody uses the same software. I think we were we arrived at this business model through first principles thinking, I would imagine. Like we didn't copy anyone, we didn't look at other industries. We just were like constantly talking to users and asking them what would be a good solution to their problems. Now, the closest analogies that I would imagine exist, there are some businesses in the healthcare space, like a headway, for example, in the therapy business. There's been a bunch of businesses with a similar model in the therapy space. The difference is we are much more business focused and B2B focused than a lot of those consumer businesses in the therapy space and healthcare space. 1000 Intake Calls And Buyer Psychology Pablo Srugo 21:49 And tell me a bit more about the customer discovery side. Like you knew immigration, you knew you wanted to do that, you kind of got to this model you mentioned through conversations and you worked as a paralegal for two months, but that's the depth. Like, there, you don't get the breadth of all these different opinions. And the prompts. How many of these like lawyers did you talk to? How did you manage that side of it? SPEAKER_01 22:04 So I spoke before I started the company, and like the first couple of months, I did the intake for about 1,000 clients who actually wanted to procure legal services. At the end of 1,000 calls, I knew this market and psychology so well. And I didn't care what some smart VC is gonna tell me because I had signal at a much lower level, much more granular. Pablo Srugo 22:25 I'm really worried because listen, like you've been listening for like what, 10, 20, 30 minutes now. Clearly, you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. Doing a thousand calls, if you can do that in just about any problem set, either you'll come up with a solution or you at least come up who very well informed and know what not to build. But how do you get those thousand calls? What was the framing and the setup? And what did you were you selling, or was it customer discovery? What was the structure? SPEAKER_01 22:55 It was intake for a law firm where, like, I mean, typically intake is handled by non-lawyers who do the initial screening and collect the facts for a lawyer to make a decision if the client qualifies for a case. Like if you have a personal injury case and you call a personal injury law firm, there's typically a non-lawyer who's gathering all the facts, sharing them with a lawyer, and then the lawyer makes a decision if they can help this person with their case or not. That's what's intake. So I did intake calls, and I was very clear about like what the pain points are, what type of cases are people dealing with. What are the psychology? A lot of marketers know the tools. A lot of growth people know the tools. They know how to spin out lending pages, they know how to spin out Google Ads, they know how to do SEO or AEO optimization. But what they miss most of the time is the forest behind the trees. They miss the psychology of a buyer. And psychology of a buyer is if you don't understand the psychology of your buyer, it doesn't matter how good you are with tools because you're not connected. You don't know what this person is feeling right now. But in your case, is the buyer, lawyer, or the buyer somebody with a legal problem? In that case, it was like understanding the actual people that would then hire lawyers who would be the ultimate clients paying lawyers for their legal services. And that was incredible. Like the best thing I've I could have possibly done for this company. And I would recommend that if anyone is starting a business, I would recommend getting a job in the space first and going like and actually like getting the lowest level signal before you take venture capital, before you take the risk, before you take the dilution. Pablo Srugo 24:21 You could avoid so many pivots. We talk about there's these three levels of customer discovery. There's frankly, what most people do, unfortunately, is like talk to 12 people and ask them if it's a good idea. But you know, the real first level, first degree would be do like 500 customer discovery with your ICP. Then the other level is like, which is like what Lagora did. You're selling to law firms, go sit in a law firm and work at least alongside them. And the best one, which is what you did, which is just become the customer, whether it's a week or a month or three months, whatever it takes, like become the customer, and then you'll know all the subtleties and the details and what you build will be way more on point. SPEAKER_01 24:54 And when you're exploring a new idea, it's like an onion, right? So you got to peel different layers. The interesting stuff is never at the surface. Like if it was at the surface, it would have been done before. But if you go four or five layers deeper, and to do that, you have to commit to an industry. I think you commit to an industry or you commit to solving a problem. That's probably even better. Solving a problem, if you're like, I'm committed to solving this problem. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I'm committed to solving this problem. Pablo Srugo 25:19 And then you just go layer you don't know the wedge, you don't even know what aspect. You're like, I'm gonna solve immigration. Well, you're not gonna solve immigration, but then you start winding down until you find the thing that you could actually make an impact on. SPEAKER_01 25:27 And the thing that ended up working is not the same thing that I thought we would get to. And like, it's so weird when like you talk to especially early stage pre-seed and seed investors who are like passing on the idea because of the attributes of the idea, and they're like, hey, like, I don't think you're whatever, like go-to-market strategy makes sense. You don't know what the go-to-market strategy will be. Like, you have no clue. Like, you're so early, even like series A, you don't really know. So I think that like a smart person committed to a problem, and everything else is details. Everything else is gonna shift, everything else is gonna change, the GTM is gonna change, the product is gonna change, the team composition is gonna change, the underlying business could change. But I think there is something very powerful about committing to one problem and sticking with that one problem and unpeeling those layers over and over and over and over until you get to like the true How Manifest Makes Money And Controls Quality SPEAKER_01 26:19 gold. Pablo Srugo 26:19 And then the model that you have, you are the one I assume that charges for the legal work, and then you pay out the lawyers a percent or a fixed salary. Like, how what's the structure? SPEAKER_01 26:29 So clients hire manifesto as powered law firms to provide them for legal services, and those law firms pay us for our uh software back office and the brand license. Pablo Srugo 26:40 Because you're selling to somebody who's like, I want to start a practice. Do they have to pay you from day one or they kind of like get in and then they pay you over time as a percent? SPEAKER_01 26:46 It's not over as a percent, it's fixed fees they pay us for like specific services that we provide to them on back end. They exclusively operate on manifest platform, and that way we can control the quality and make sure that the quality is universally high across all the lawyers. And then when a client hires a manifest law attorney, that person gets really good service because they know exactly what to expect. One of the main problems that we are solving is the problem that legal services are so unpredictable. Like, let's say, God forbid somebody is going through a divorce. Like, how do you find a good lawyer? You ask a friend that got divorced. And maybe that one lawyer, because again, it's not product, it's service. That one lawyer could have solved this problem for their one client successfully one time, and then 15 other times they were unsuccessful. You have no data, you have no knowledge, you're operating based on instinct. And then how do you even interview a good lawyer as a client? Like, what questions am I supposed to ask? If I'm talking to a lawyer, like, hey, like, um, I don't know, like, tell me about your similar cases. How do you know? Like, it's so confusing. So, manifest law brand, in my vision, is the new golden standard of what legal services should look like. And then Manifesto S as a technology company powers those attorneys to enable them to provide that quality. Pablo Srugo 27:57 So that means there's kind of a startup cost for a lawyer. Like, if they want to go in their own practice, they want to run on manifest. SPEAKER_01 28:02 There is zero dollar cost, they don't have to pay us anything up front. We are there supporting them for free until they get to scale in their business. And once they scale, they pay us four hour services. Pablo Srugo 28:12 And why did you choose this model? Like, given everything you've told me, the obvious thing would have been you have your brand Manifesto S, you've got your AI, and then you just you just hire some lawyers and they're kind of like, they're in the background. I don't even know that I'm who I'm dealing with. I'm just dealing with Manifesto S. Like that would have been the probably obvious model. What's the advantage for you to having the the lawyers kind of have their own independent practices? SPEAKER_01 28:34 Well, I mean, we had a couple of choices. Choice number one, let's go and sell software to existing law firms. Sure. That was the most obvious choice. Um, I've seen I've heard that feedback from early stage investors as I was starting the company. That's the Harvey, the Lagora Spellbook, whatever name is, there's a lot of them. And um, as I was starting this company, people knew me from my previous businesses. So I had some a relationship. They're like, dude, what are you doing? Just go and sell software to lawyers. It's so obvious. Like, what is this weird construct that you're trying to build? The problem with that, going back to the mission, going back to the why, is that the fundamental system is flawed. When somebody has to bill for 2100 hours and you're selling them software that will reduce the amount of hours that they bill for, what is their incentive to buy it? Other than to tell their clients that, like, you know, I'm adopting this fancy AI software, so I'm more efficient. And reality is they probably don't or don't do that as frequently as they should. So there is a major misalignment of incentives. If somebody bills by the hour and their goal is to bill for as many hours as possible, there's not that much incentive to become more efficient. The other problem is that the whole kind of construct of how these law firms are created is not right. It's not the most customer-centric approach. There's so much legacy, there is so much politics. Uh, retrofitting existing systems is so hard. So that option was never a good option for me for that exact reason. That I just didn't think that it was solving the mission. The mission of like, how do you make legal services faster, better, more transparent for the end client? How do you actually improve the underlying experience? So that was not an option. The other option was to hire lawyers, but US it's a highly regulated market, and US is a highly regulated market. You can't just go and open a Delaware C Corp and hire a bunch of lawyers and provide legal services. It's a highly regulated market and you have to follow the law. Selling Through Communities With Free Value Pablo Srugo 30:21 Now let's talk a little bit about go-to-market because that's kind of the business model. That's how it's all going to work. You actually have to go out and source legal work. You mentioned that one of the ways you've done this is through communities. We have like five million people in these communities. Tell me just everything about that. Like what's the strategy there? And then how do you actually implement this kind of selling through communities motion? SPEAKER_01 30:40 If we take a step back, I believe in value-led customer acquisition and not just ads. Ads are stupid. We're overloaded with information. We see the ads everywhere. Value add customer acquisition, in my opinion, is the gold standard. Okay, so I'm an immigrant. I'm on a visa that's dependent and died to my employer. I want to have independence. Um maybe I want to change a job, maybe I want to start a business. To transition into a self-sponsored visa, like an 01 visa or an EB1 visa or an EB2 and IW visa, those are the three very popular visa types for people that want to be independent. I need to go ahead and do a lot of work in preparing for those cases because the requirements are really high. You need to be extraordinary in a certain field. So what Manifest has done is we've launched a Slack community for people that are not there yet, but who want to ultimately file for those extraordinary ability visas. And we've created free training programs that go every month. Every month there is a free training program for different people, for different cohorts who go through classes that teach them how to work on their careers in a way that enables them to apply for those extraordinary visas. We created a mentorship program where people get paired with each other. Somebody who went through the immigration obtained that visa with somebody who wants to do that. They get paired in couples and they work together and you know, mentors coach them to apply for those visas. We provide them a ton of information, tons of tons of content, tons of curated videos. We invite former US immigration officials to speak with them. We bring immigration judges to speak with them. That community is mind-blowing for people. There's so much value there. In-person meetups, events, and it's knowledge, it's motivation to build your case, it's training and it's community, just meeting people. You know, immigration is lonely. Like you meet people that way. This is not the most obvious marketing tactic because it's not about you're not selling anything to anyone. Like we're not promoting manifest in that community. It's not even called Manifest Community, called the is called Extraordinary Ability Club. People join, people get a ton of value. If they get so much value, and manifest lawyers go to that community, answer the questions for free, provide them with content, do webinars, do trainings, and do consultations. If you get a lot of value, you're probably gonna buy from manifest law attorney because you already have the relationship. You've built the trust, you got a lot of value up front, and you're just gonna proceed with it. Does this work in B2B as well or just B2C? We have an exact same community for B2B buyers. So who manages immigration? An HR manager that handles mobility inside a large company. Some companies have 30, 40, 50 people in that department. Small companies have one or 0.5, or it's the CEO who does it. We build a community called Mission by Manifest. And Mission by Manifest is the community for those people that manage mobility programs inside companies, Slack group. Anytime there is a news update or regulatory update, they all get together and talk about like what does that mean for their for their business? Weekly webinars, monthly in-person meetups, annual conferences, and we've gotten the vast majority of Fortune 500 company representatives to be in that community. These are our buyers. These are buyers of legal services from manifest law attorneys. And they build relationships with Manifest. Manifest doesn't charge them anything, it's totally free. And we give them so much value up front. They meet manifest law attorneys, they meet government officials, we help them understand changes in regulations for free. And nobody has ever done anything like this in this industry because it was always transactional. Hey, like I'm gonna call call you and see if you want to buy my services. And then if you don't, I'm gonna call call you again and annoy you. Like, I don't believe in annoying sales. I believe in sales where you give value, and then the person can choose to buy if they want to. Pablo Srugo 34:25 I love this communities thing. I'm also a part of many communities that have gone nowhere, right? Where you get invited, this lack group, and it's like, cool, and then it just, there's just no activity, there's nothing. Imagine, like, I'm a founder and and I'm like, yeah, Dan, you know what? I want to sell through communities think it makes sense. Like tactically, how do you do it? Like, take either take HR managers. HR managers are my buyers. I want to do a community for them. Like, what are the key ingredients and the key things you have to do to at least get like the core right? Cold Start Tactics For Active Communities Pablo Srugo 34:50 And and then and then I'm sure it gets easier and easier. SPEAKER_01 34:52 I mean, the worst thing is that you post a message in Slack group, nobody responds, and it's like a weird feeling. So early on, like a mobility manager would post a message. I would basically take that message, think about hey, which other mobility manager can actually help them answer that question? And I would like forward them the message and be like, hey, can you do me a favor and respond to this person? And I did that for a couple months. And that's how you solve the cold start problem. Uh we have wonderful people who do this, who are moderators and who are community influencers who like enable and like basically keep the motion going. So like people get very out of this community all the time. Pablo Srugo 35:26 But like as a founder, in the beginning, you have to do it yourself. How do you get people? Because that's the other thing that matters, is who you get into that community matters. Like there's different, you know, especially on the HR manager side, that's the thing about community. It's like who else is in there, right? And then and then that drives a lot of the value of the content. SPEAKER_01 35:42 Look, I mean, it's every market is different. In our market, we just went to conferences and we were like, hey, like this is what we want to do. Do you want to be a founding member? Help us build this thing together, help us figure it out. Like, do you see value in this? And maybe it's not even for every industry. Like, I don't know, maybe if you sell car parts and you're selling into car dealerships, maybe for car dealers that work at car dealerships, it's not valuable. Maybe that's already solved. But for you guys, how did you do this? You went to a conference, you found the right people and just kind of pulled them into your community. We went to one conference, we met a hundred people, we spoke, we became friends with 20, and we were like, This is the vision. This is what we want to do. Is this valuable or not? Like, would you use this if we build this? Would you be a part of this community if we build this? And they were like, some said yes, some said no. And then that became the founding member circle. Like, there's been like eight or nine of them, and then it grew and grew and grew and grew because they invited their friends, they told their friends. Nobody paid them to tell their friends, they just got a lot of value out of it. It's weird. Like, getting clients is so much harder than building technology. The easier it is to build technology, the harder it is to get clients. And I really encourage everyone to think about user psychology as the first step. If you're not connected with your user fully, then no amount of tools are going to help you. And it's not a dissimilar from managing a group chat with your friends. If you're playing a bachelor's party and you have 40 people in a group chat, how do you get the group chat going? Maybe you are awkwardly posting yourself for the first 10 posts, and maybe you post jokes that people don't find funny and you're like brutally embarrassed about it. But like 10 jokes in, it starts going. Like there is a call, you've solved the call to Earned Media That Compounds SPEAKER_01 37:20 start problem. Pablo Srugo 37:20 You are not afraid to be awkward. The other thing that we want to talk about, because the other thing that you did, I think on the go-to-market side that's worth going deep on is the PR side and working with influencers. I mean, you mentioned you work with 50 influencers and that you find that like getting PR-earned media is something that's a little bit underrated. You know, I know a few founders that care about it, but I will say of a hundred founders, probably 95 don't even kind of consider that as a way to really get traction. What have you done on that side? What's worked? SPEAKER_01 37:48 I would say my psychology general in um in capital allocation when it comes to go to market is that every dollar that I invest in go to market, I wanted to increase defensibility of the business. Let me give you an example. The best dollar is investing in the channel that will never turn. That doesn't exist, but imagine that that would exist. Like let's say two years ago there was SEO. If you could invest in SEO and then you stopped investing in SEO, then you basically the SEO kept going, whether or not you're putting dollars into it or not. And that was wonderful. Like, because like you were investing dollars up front and then it had zero cost of goods sold. Well, this is like you're building an asset instead of an expense, makes total sense. Exactly. And the worst dollar is obviously paid marketing, paid socials is the worst on that spectrum. So to me, like I always try to invest in assets, and earn media is an incredible asset. It's highly scalable, it uh compounds, it doesn't have the added cost associated with it, and you can be so creative and get in it. Small media, you know, we manifest law attorneys publish a monthly report that gets cited by hundreds of media outlets every month because that report has a unique point of view. That unique point of view is the differentiator. So if you're building a company that does, I don't know, AI for pest control, and you have a unique point of view of how AI helps with pest control, and that unique point of view, you actually you immerse yourself in the head of your buyer. You go hyper deep and you actually connect with them. And you know that this is what matters. This is going to be interesting to them. You can get any amount of media for free. Pablo Srugo 39:18 That's what you have now, and I'm sure you have content writers and all this stuff. Like at the beginning, where you were kind of an unknown entity, like what do you do at the beginning to get the first few articles of PR and get this? Because it's easy to well, you can have a point of view. I'm not saying that's easy, but then you write something up, you put it up, nobody reads it. Like, how do you actually get that thing distributed? SPEAKER_01 39:35 I did that a year and a half ago or two years ago, and the world has changed so much that my answer is probably relevant right now. For us, it was early on, it was a lot of SEO. And SEO, you just start with low-hanging foods. You're like, hey, there is a lot of search volume, not a lot of keyword difficulty to go after that specific keyword. You win that specific keyword because nobody cares about it. Pablo Srugo 39:53 But that was more blogging than like actually earn necessarily having to be earn media. SPEAKER_01 39:57 Right. But then when you have enough citations on the website and you have enough credibility and you have a high enough domain rating, then you write an interesting POV, you pitch it to earn media, and then earn media picks it up because they know that you're a credible resource. So they're intertwined. But if you talk about just earned media, some data slicing that's unique. You could even use public data. GPT and uh cloud co-work can do that so well right now. Uh for manifest law website, there was some research that was done around which states do immigrants mostly immigrate to. And that got picked up, and then you know, local or like newspaper from X state would cite that their state is the most likely state for immigrants to move to. And that got a ton of local media because it covered every single state. And we got publications in most states covering how that state ranks against other states in terms of how desirable it is as a place for immigrants to move to. Pablo Srugo 40:52 In the pitching side, like what do you just go into your industry, you figure out what the publications are, and you just send them the article and say, hey, like, do you want to publish this? SPEAKER_01 40:59 You have platforms where um ask a reporter anything. I forgot what a oh yes, right. Yeah, you uh Haro, help a reporter out, I think is what it's called. You've got platforms like this, you've got syndication platforms, you've got social media. You could literally scrape and call email like every single reporter in the world, and it's doesn't take long. Pablo Srugo 41:17 Is it a numbers game or is it a quality game? Like invest, if you if you think about a founder, like invest a lot of time in having just a great piece and then that'll get published, or just keep churning out things, you know, email 100 people every time and like cross your fingers. Like, what's the what's the model? I think it depends on the stage. SPEAKER_01 41:32 I think the first B zero is understand the psychology of a user. Like every market is different. There's no generic advice. If you understand the psychology of a user, try to solve their pain point with whatever content you're building. Like in our experience, like there was this piece around like every year, sorry, every month, US Department of State publishes what's called a Visa Bulletin. And a Visa Bulletin determines how long it will take for you to get your green card. The way they publish this is so confusing. It's so freaking hard to understand. It's insane. You've got spreadsheets with numbers, it's impossible to understand it. Instead of writing, and every single media piece about that topic was like just the same tables and slightly prettier designs. There was no first principle thinking. And the first principle thinking is like, I don't freaking understand this table in the first place. You build a simple PLG-led growth where you're saying, here's a calculator, enter your nationality, enter where you're from, and basically enter a date. And that spits out an answer for you. You don't need to look at the spreadsheet, you just need an answer to a fundamental question. And again, it's so basic. I'm I'm embarrassed to even make this as an example. But like, people don't ask themselves first principles questions. What's best for the user? What's best for the reader? And what's best for the reader is usually not what's best for Google engine anymore. So, like, I think the superpower that we have at Manifest is really two things. And we suck at so many things, but there are two things that we're probably good at. One is we're deeply focused on this market. We're not boiling the ocean, we're not going after 15 practice areas at the same time. We picked one, we stuck with one, and we just went hyper deep and we built such a nuanced expertise that there's nobody who understands this space better than us. And I'm very confident in saying this on every level of the company. And the second piece is we basically asked ourselves a lot of like first principles, user behavior-based questions. And people miss this all the time. I interviewed these fanciest marketers from the fanciest companies uh with the best degrees in the world who totally fail in understanding user psychology. Pablo Srugo 43:25 Perfect. Final Takeaways And Share Request Pablo Srugo 43:26 Well, Dan, I think that's a perfect place to end it, man. Thanks so much for jumping on the show, dude. It's been great. That was a lot of fun. Wow, what an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders, share it on that Slack channel, send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.