He quit his $50M ARR startup to work as a paralegal—then raised a $60M Series A. | Dan Mishin, Founder of Manifest

Dan Mishin (00:00:00) : I don't think you can hack referrals. I think you can incrementally improve referrals by making it easier. But at the end of the day, if you're not building something that the world needs, then no hacking tools are going to help you. I believe in value led customer acquisition and not just ads. We're overloaded with information, we see ads everywhere. Value ad 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. Previous Guests (00:00:35) : That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. Pablo Srugo (00:00:48) : 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 out 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. Dan, welcome to the show, dude. Dan Mishin (00:01:03) : Hey, good to see you, man. Pablo Srugo (00:01:05) : You launched Manifest OS, you recently raised $60 million in a Series A, and you're building a very different company. We're going to talk about that, but we always start on the Product Market Fit Show with the Product Market Fit moment. So tell me, when did you feel things were really working? When did you feel you kind of found initial Product Market Fit? Dan Mishin (00:01:22) : I knew that there was a pain point before I started the company, and the pain point was so acute. So what Manifest OS does is, just to contextualize this, Manifest OS powers individual lawyers with their AI native practices. So we help incredible, experienced attorneys launch their AI native legal practices from scratch and scale them to become market leaders. So the idea of legal services being too slow, too expensive, too unpredictable, too much of a black box. That was kind of like, I knew that there was a pain point. There is a difference between creating software to solve a problem that most people don't know exists or 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 focus on building businesses around existing pain points and replacing existing players. Then the product market fit question becomes a little bit less acute. Because you're not like, "Hey, I'm going to build software that people didn't know they need." You know what I mean? The PMF was never a question. The bigger question was, can we get supply? Can we get demand at a price that makes sense? Does customer acquisition cost make sense? Those are the pieces that we needed to figure out. Pablo Srugo (00:02:32) : 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. People want money. So when I say you're going to get a loan, everybody puts their hands up. I have no worry about that. I'm worried about, are my metrics are going to make sense, et cetera. That's going to 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? Dan Mishin (00:03:01) : That's a good question. I think acquiring lawyers was my biggest concern and fear going into this company. Before I started ManifestOS, 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 actual lawyers who were practicing law, the conviction got greater and greater and greater that there was a pain point. They actually had a real pain point. It's in the details, it's in the weeds, it's in the nuances, but you build that conviction by actually observing their work and it just became obvious to me that there was a real pain point. And I remember how this one lawyer, the first lawyer that ever partnered with us and helped us, sort of was the first client actually. That first lawyer started working with us, and within a month they referred a second lawyer. And I was like, "Oh wow, OK, this is actually working, we're solving a real pain point and adding value to them." So now they wanted to refer us to their friends. Pablo Srugo (00:03:56) : I love that, the referral piece is a big one. Everybody wants referrals, and a lot of the question is, "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 delivering that through the product. Frankly, what do you refer? You refer products that you love, not the ones that pay $20 to do so. Dan Mishin (00:04:17) : And exactly, and I remember Steve Jobs' phrase was, "We're never going to 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 at the end of the day, if you're not building something that the world needs, then no hacking tools are going to help you. So in our case, we are solving acute pain points for lawyers. If you're an attorney and you've been practicing for twelve years, you kind of have two options. You're either pursuing a partner track at a large law firm, chasing billable hours and check this out. The average attorney at an Am Law 100, has to bill for two thousand one hundred 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 a typical human works forty hour weeks, and that's like two thousand eighty hours a year, and a typical law firm partner has to bill for two thousand one hundred hours per year. So I'm like, OK, that's unsustainable. That's a crazy track. Pablo Srugo (00:05:29) : Because that's your billable. Then you got to eat, go to the bathroom, and then do non billable work on top of that. Dan Mishin (00:05:35) : Correct, so you end up either working four thousand hours to actually bill for two thousand one hundred hours. Or I'm missing something. I'm not making any accusations. Pablo Srugo (00:05:45) : Yeah, the math doesn't matter otherwise. So it's tough. Dan Mishin (00:05:48) : 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 sixty percent of your time doing non billable work. You're chasing clients, you're doing business development, you're running around to conferences, you're recording TikTok podcasts and the truth is, a person goes to law school, accumulates $300,000 of student loans, and then they end up doing work that doesn't require a law 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 experience are very acute, and the PMF was so strong because the pain point itself was so strong. Pablo Srugo (00:06:34) : Now that we know that moment, when things were starting to work and you were starting to get referrals. Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start Manifest OS and what were you doing? Not necessarily your whole background, but the few years before you started and before you had the idea of what was going on? Dan Mishin (00:06:47) : So I was building a company in real estate tech, which was my company number three at that point. Pablo Srugo (00:06:53) : What year is this? Dan Mishin (00:06:54) : 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, two hundred employees, 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. But there is a lack of sense of purpose. Because that business for me was just, you know, we were 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 thirties, my most active years, on solving that pain point. So I started thinking about transitioning myself out of the business. Pablo Srugo (00:07:49) : And now you're what, '21, 2020? When you start having these thoughts? Dan Mishin (00:07:53) : I can't remember the exact year, but like, and it was also. There was no one aha eureka moment. It was slowly building up. Pablo Srugo (00:00:00) : But more or less just to give a sense of kind of timeline. Dan Mishin (00:08:02) : I transitioned into Manifest OS in 2024. Pablo Srugo (00:08:03) : OK, so somewhere a couple of years before that. Dan Mishin (00:08:07) : And I started working with my team, and basically building the leadership team to sort of plan for the 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 managed this transition, which was actually an interesting experience. I've never done that before, and the new CEO took over in August 2023. And I started basically thinking more deeply about this idea of building Manifest OS. Pablo Srugo (00:08:36) : 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? Dan Mishin (00:08:44) : 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 make or break situations in human lives. I don't mean to sound overly dramatic, but it's actually true. Pablo Srugo (00:09:08) : Or at least it can be. I mean, some stuff is little, you know, whatever contracts. But they can get serious. Dan Mishin (00:09:13) : It can get serious. Ask a healthy person what they want in life, they tell you a thousand things. Ask a sick person what they want in life, and they say one thing, right? Same applies to legal situations. If somebody's getting sued, if somebody is in litigation, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is going through divorce, that's top of mind for them. If somebody is 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 the reality is, if you're building a company. Which is freaking hard, you know, you might as well work on something that actually matters. I knew I didn't want to build enterprise SaaS. I knew I didn't want to go and build a GPT wrapper that does something fun. I wanted to solve a meaty, difficult problem in a regulated industry, and legal just perfectly fit those criteria. Pablo Srugo (00:09:57) : That, by the way, is not to be taken lightly. 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 going to work. And then you get it to a point, like you said, $50 million ARR. This is a solid working business, and then for you to, and obviously some people do, you know, transition. But you transition out because you have another idea that you just can't stop thinking about. It's like, OK, I can, I understand that, I get it. But for you to just say, ah, it's just not enough for me, I'll start from scratch. I don't know what this next thing is, maybe it'll completely blow up and it'll be a tenth as big as this thing. Because I don't even know what it's going to be, but you know, screw it. I just can't see myself. It's just not worth my time to be here. I want to do something more impactful. It's not small, it's not a small decision. Dan Mishin (00:10:43) : 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. People are embarrassed to talk about it, but why? I have no issue to admit that, my first company, which I started at eleven. I started because I was broke and poor, and financially hungry. And that was the real reason, or you can be motivated by your team. And there is nothing wrong with that. People can be building in the most, I don't want to call them boring categories, but like. Pablo Srugo (00:11:15) : You could say, yeah. There are some boring categories. Dan Mishin (00:11:22) : There are boring categories and then, people get motivation from working with other smart people and 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, ad if you look at the greatest timeless books, 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 a hundred billion dollar company business. You can still make a lot of money and achieve a lot of success. But, 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 one hundred percent of the time from this place. Sometimes I make decisions because I'm competitive and I want to kick ass of the next guy. Or I want to achieve the next milestone to unlock the next round. That still all happens, but when you start making decisions from the place of this very clear, clean, 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 ManifestOSing 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 going to launch, but I knew that I'm going to be building something meaningful. Pablo Srugo (00:13:12) : So you leave, you know you want to do something legal. What are the customer discovery type things you do to figure out what that's going to be? Dan Mishin (00:13:19) : I started with the pain point that I understood the most, which is immigration and immigration is this very interesting thing that I'm actually obsessed about right now. Because if you think about, sort of immigration on a human level is 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. Pablo Srugo (00:13:39) : It's massive. Dan Mishin (00:13:39) : It's massive. If you think about it from, and again this is going to sound grandiose. But if you think about it from a societal stand point of view. I'm a big patriot of America because it gave me everything that I have and I'm like, I think it's a great country, and this is an unpopular opinion sometimes. And people are ashamed to say this, but the U.S. 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 attract the best talent from around the world. And that boils down to how attractive we are as a destination. And we're sort of still doing a pretty good job in that. But it's also like how easy it is, 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 the best AI engineers in the world are in China today. They should be in the U.S. because that's how countries enter into rivalry today and I'm motivated by the idea. And I'm motivated by the impact that Manifest OS 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. That gives me a source of motivation. Pablo Srugo (00:14:59) : 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. 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, OK, it was money. I can make a hundred million here, I'm good. You know, whereas 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. Dan Mishin (00:15:33) : Yeah I agree and, you know, Elon Musk came up with those big meaty goals for his life, and he has that intrinsic motivation that probably will never evaporate. Because he can never actually achieve his goal, and that's the beauty of his goal. But yeah, 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. Manifest OS doesn't empower 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 the government, and you're helping a company sponsor a thousand employees for their visas. That basically creates real technology leverage because you can achieve very interesting levels of automation and we're seeing this all the time. Where a lawyer used to spend forty hours on preparing a visa case. Today, they spend ten. Tomorrow, they're going to spend four. The day after tomorrow, they're going to 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 fifteen minute check in, let me give you an update on everything that happened this week, let me tell you what's going to 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. Manifest OS gives them technology that eliminates busy work and gives them the time back to work on strategy. Pablo Srugo (00:17:06) : But did you land on this immigration idea just from deduction or did you have a lot of conversations? How did you kind of get to this conclusion? Dan Mishin (00:17:14) : Well, it was multiple fold. One is just I knew the problem because I went through the problem. I lived the problem firsthand. All my friends lived the problem. So 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 part of legal for two months. Actually doing the work before I started the company and it was amazing because nobody could tell me how it works. I knew how it works. I knew what product to build. I knew where technology would have leverage and where it wouldn't have leverage. It's just the best thing to do. Look, if you are thinking of starting an AI native services business, or any AI company, go and work in an actual entry level job in that sector. You're going to get the level of signal at the deepest possible, most granular level. Nobody can tell you what to do anymore because you're going to understand the underlying kind of workflows and issues. Pablo Srugo (00:18:01) : Now that you know, OK, you've worked as a paralegal, you've seen the problems. You want to do something in immigration law. The classic things these days are, you could do an AI native roll up and buy a few of these and Ad AI. You could do services as software and start your own law firm that's 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, as far as I can see, it doesn't really fit any of those three buckets. What is it that you did and how did you end up there? That's not an easy kind of link. Dan Mishin (00:18:30) : Imagine you're a lawyer, you have twelve 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 twelve years of working in the industry. I work eighty 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 Manifest OS will reach out to you, screen you extremely hard. 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 going to say, let us help you launch a practice. We're going to give you one unified brand. So you're going to operate under ManifestOS brand, which means that you're going to 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 going to give you a centralized back office, so you don't have to worry about hiring a paralegal. We're going to give you an AI native paralegal that does the work. We're going to handle your billing, we're going to handle your collections, we're going to handle administrative work. We are, everything is centralized to one place, and we are going to staff you with the necessary personnel, right? So you don't have to waste your time. We're going to give you a unified marketing engine, so we're going to 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 fifty 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 one unified software layer, that will replace your traditional Microsoft Office and Outlook. 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 we've eliminated so much of the manual, repetitive workflows that 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 Manifest OS, 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 this decentralized organization in a lot of ways. Where 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 (00:20:59) : Was there an analog of this type of model somewhere else, that you kind of got inspired by? It's pretty unique. I mean, franchise is kind of what comes to mind but it's different. It's very different than this. Dan Mishin (00:21:07) : 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 arrived at this business model through first principles thinking, I would imagine. We didn't copy anyone, we didn't look at other industries, we just were 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 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. Pablo Srugo (00:21:49) : And tell me a bit more about the customer discovery side. You knew immigration, you knew you wanted to do that. You got to this model you mentioned through conversations, and you worked as a paralegal for two months, but that's the depth. There you don't get the breadth of all these different opinions and the problems. How many of these lawyers did you talk to? How did you manage that side of it? Dan Mishin (00:22:04) : So I spoke, before I started the company and in the first couple of months. I did the intake for about one thousand clients who actually wanted to procure legal services. At the end of one thousand calls, I knew this market and psychology so well. And I didn't care what some smart VC is going to tell me because I had signal at a much lower level, much more granular. Pablo Srugo (00:22:25) : I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for ten, twenty, thirty minutes now. Clearly, you like it and the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're going to miss it. You're going to miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. Doing one 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 out very well informed and know what not to build. But how do you get those one thousand calls? What was the framing and the setup? And were you selling or was it customer discovery? What was the structure? Dan Mishin (00:22:55) : It was intake for a law firm where, 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. 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 the lawyer, and then the lawyer makes a decision if they can help this person with their case or not. That's what intake is. So I did intake calls and I was very clear about what the pain points are, what type of cases people are dealing with, what the psychology is. A lot of marketers know the tools. A lot of growth people know the tools. They know how to spin up landing pages. They know how to spin up Google Ads. They know how to do SEO or AI optimization. But what they miss most of the time is the forest behind the trees. They miss the psychology of a buyer, and the 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. Pablo Srugo (00:23:53) : But in your case, is the buyer a lawyer or the buyer is somebody with a legal problem? Dan Mishin (00:23:57) : In that case, it was 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. The best thing 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 actually getting the lowest level signal before you take venture capital, before you take the risk, before you take the dilution. You could avoid so many pivots. Pablo Srugo (00:24:23) : We talk about these three levels of customer discovery. Frankly, what most people do, unfortunately, is talk to twelve people and ask them if it's a good idea. But the real first level, first degree would be to do five hundred customer discovery conversations with your ICP. Then the other level is, which is what LaGuardia 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. Become the customer and then you'll know all the subtleties, and the details, and what you build will be way more on point. Dan Mishin (00:24:54) : And when you're exploring a new idea, it's like an onion, right? So you've got to peel different layers. The interesting stuff is never at the surface. 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 going to do it, but I'm committed to solving this problem." And then you just go layer. Pablo Srugo (00:25:20) : You don't know the wedge. You don't even know what aspect. You're like, "I'm going to solve immigration." Well, you're not going to solve immigration, but then you start winding down until you find the thing that you could actually make an impact on. Dan Mishin (00:25:27) : And the thing that ended up working is not the same thing that I thought we would get to. And, it's so weird when you talk to especially early stage pre seed and seed investors. Who are passing on the idea because of the attributes of the idea and they're like, "Hey, I don't think your, whatever, go to market strategy makes sense." You don't know what the go to market strategy will be. You have no clue, you're so early. Even Series A, you don't really know. So I think that a smart person committed to a problem and everything else is details. Everything else is going to shift. Everything else is going to change. The go to market is going to change. The product is going to change. The team composition is going to 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 the true gold. One of the main problems that we are solving is the problem that legal services are so unpredictable. Let's say, God forbid, somebody is going through a divorce. 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 fifteen 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? What questions am I supposed to ask? If I'm talking to a lawyer, like, "Hey, I don't know, tell me about your similar cases." How do you know? It's so confusing. So Manifest OS Law brand, in my vision, is the new gold standard of what legal services should look like and then Manifest OS as a technology company powers those attorneys to enable them to provide that quality. Pablo Srugo (00:28:12) : Why did you choose this model? Given everything you've told me, the obvious thing would have been. You have your brand, Manifest OS, you've got your AI, and then you just hire some lawyers. And they're in the background. I don't even know who I'm dealing with. I'm just dealing with Manifest OS. That would have been the obvious model. What's the advantage for you to having the lawyers have their own independent practices? Dan Mishin (00:28:34) : Well, I mean, we had a couple of choices. Choice number one, let's go and sell software to existing law firms. Pablo Srugo (00:28:39) : Sure Dan Mishin (00:28:39) : That was the most obvious choice. I've seen, I've heard that feedback from early stage investors as I was starting the company. Pablo Srugo (00:28:46) : That's the Harvey, the Legora, Spellbook, whatever name. There's a lot of them. Dan Mishin (00:28:50) : And as I was starting this company, people knew me from my previous businesses. So I had some relationship. They're like, dude, what are you doing? Just go and sell software to lawyers. It's so obvious. 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 twenty one hundred 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," You know, I'm adopting this fancy AI software, so I'm more efficient." And the reality is they probably don't, or don't do that as frequently as they should. So there's 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's so much politics. 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, 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 U.S., it's a highly regulated market, and U.S. is a highly regulated market. And 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. Pablo Srugo (00:30:21) : 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. You have five million people in these communities. Tell me just everything about that. What’s the strategy there, and then how do you actually implement this kind of selling through communities motion? Dan Mishin (00:30:40) : If we take a step back, I believe in value led customer acquisition and not just ads. Value ad customer acquisition, in my opinion, is the gold standard. OK, so I'm an immigrant. I'm on a visa that's dependent and tied to my employer. I want to have independence. Maybe I want to change a job. Maybe I want to start a business. To transition into a self sponsored visa, like an O 1 visa or an EB 1 visa or an EB 2 NIW 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 ManifestOS 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 mentors coach them to apply for those visas. We provide them a ton of information, tons of content, tons of curated videos. We invite former U.S. 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. 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. We're not promoting Manifest OS in that community. It's not even called Manifest OS Community. It's called Extraordinary Ability Club. People join, people get a ton of value. If they get so much value and Manifest OS 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 going to buy from ManifestOS Law Attorney. Because you already have the relationship, you've built the trust, you got a lot of value upfront, and you're just going to proceed with it. Pablo Srugo (00:33:03) : Does this work in B2B as well or just B2C? Dan Mishin (00:33:06) : We have the exact same community for B2B buyers. So who manages immigration? An HR manager that handles mobility inside a large company. Some companies have thirty, forty, fifty people in that department. Small companies have one or zero point five, or it's the CEO who does it. We built a community called Mission by ManifestOS. And Mission by ManifestOS 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 what does that mean for their business. Weekly webinars, monthly in person meetups, annual conferences, and we've gotten vast majority of Fortune 500 company representatives to be in that community. These are our buyers. These are buyers of legal services from ManifestOS Law attorneys. They build relationships with ManifestOS. ManifestOS doesn't charge them anything. It's totally free and we give them so much value upfront. They meet ManifestOS 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 going to cold call you and see if you want to buy my services. And then if you don't, I'm going to cold call you again and annoy you. 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 (00:34:25) : I love this communities thing. I'm also part of many communities that have gone nowhere, right? Where you get invited to this Slack group, and it's like, cool. And then it just, there's just no activity. There's nothing. Imagine, I'm a founder and I'm like, yeah, Dan, you know what? I want to sell through communities. I think it makes sense but tactically, how do you do it? Take HR managers. HR managers are my buyers. I want to do a community for them. What are the key ingredients and the key things you have to do to at least get the core right? And then I'm sure it gets easier and easier. Dan Mishin (00:34:52) : I mean, the worst thing is that you post a message in a Slack group, nobody responds and it's a weird feeling. So early on, 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 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. And now we have wonderful people who do this, who are moderators and who are community influencers. Who enable and basically keep the motion going. So people get value out of this community all the time. But as a founder, in the beginning, you have to do it yourself. Pablo Srugo (00:35:29) : How do you get people? Because that's the other thing that matters is, who you get into that community matters. There's different, especially on the HR manager’s side, that’s the thing about community. It’s like, who else is in there? And then that drives a lot of the value of the content. Dan Mishin (00:35:42) : Look, I mean, every market is different. In our market, we just went to conferences and we were like, hey, 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. Do you see value in this? And maybe it's not even for every industry. 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. Pablo Srugo (00:36:06) : But for you guys, how did you do? Is that how you do? You went to a conference, you found the right people and just kind of pulled them into your community? Dan Mishin (00:36:11) : We went to one conference, we met a hundred people, we spoke. We became friends with twenty, and we were like, this is the vision. This is what we want to do. Is this valuable or not? 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. There's been 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, 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 that dissimilar from managing a group chat with your friends. If you're planning a bachelor's party and you have forty people in a group chat. How do you get the group chat going? Maybe you are awkwardly posting yourself for the first ten posts and maybe you post jokes that people don't find funny and you're like brutally embarrassed about it. But ten jokes in it starts going, there is a call, you've solved the cold start problem. You were not afraid to be awkward. Pablo Srugo (00:37:22) : 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 fifty influencers, and then you find that getting PR. Earned media, is something that's a little bit underrated. I know a few founders that care about it, but I will say of a hundred founders, probably ninety five don't even consider that as a way to really get traction. What have you done on that side? What's worked? Dan Mishin (00:37:48) : I would say my psychology, generally in capital allocation when it comes to go to market. Is that every dollar that I invest in go to market, I want it to increase defensibility of the business. Let me give you an example. The best dollar is investing in the channel that will never churn. That doesn't exist, but I mentioned that that would exist. 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. Because, you were investing dollars upfront, and then it had zero cost of goods sold. Pablo Srugo (00:38:22) : Well, this is like, you're building an asset instead of an expense. Makes total sense. Dan Mishin (00:38:25) : Exactly, and the worst dollar is obviously paid marketing. Paid social is the worst on that spectrum. So to me, I always try to invest in assets, and earned media is an incredible asset. It's highly scalable, it compounds, it doesn't have the added cost associated with it, and you can be so creative in getting it. Small media, you know, ManifestOS 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 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 (00:39:18) : That’s what you have now, and I’m sure you have content writers and all this stuff. At the beginning where you were kind of an unknown entity, 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. How do you actually get that thing distributed? Dan Mishin (00:39:35) : 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 irrelevant right now. For us, it was early on with a lot of SEO. In SEO, you just start with low hanging fruit. 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 (00:39:53) : But that was more blogging than actually necessarily having to be earned media. Dan Mishin (00:39:57) : 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 earned media, and then earned 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 Claude can do that so well right now. For ManifestOS 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, a local 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 (00:40:52) : In the pitching side? You just go into your industry, figure out what the publications are and you send them the article, and say, hey, do you want to publish this? Dan Mishin (00:40:59) : You have platforms where, ask a reporter anything. I forgot what. Pablo Srugo (00:41:04) : Oh yes, right. Dan Mishin (00:41:04) : Yeah, 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 cold email every single reporter in the world, and it doesn't take long. Pablo Srugo (00:41:17) : Is it a numbers game or is it a quality game? Like invest, if you think about a founder. Invest a lot of time in having just a great piece and then that’ll get published or just keep churning out things. Email one hundred people every time and cross your fingers, like what’s the model? Dan Mishin (00:41:30) : I think it depends on the stage. I think the first P zero is understand the psychology of a user. 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. In our experience, there was this piece around 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 same tables and slightly prettier designs. There was no first principles thinking and the first principles 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 embarrassed to even make this as an example. But, 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 Search Engine anymore. So, I think the superpower that we have at ManifestOS 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 fifteen 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 first principles, user behavior based questions. And people miss this all the time. I interviewed the fanciest marketers from the fanciest companies with the best degrees in the world who totally fail in understanding user psychology. Pablo Srugo (00:43:26) : Perfect. 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. Dan Mishin (00:43:30) : That was a lot of fun. Pablo Srugo (00:43:32) : 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.