EP 54 - How Spellbook Pivoted and 20x'd since Q1 2023 with Kurt Dunphy @ Spellbook

Speaker A: People have some context around Spellbook. And then if you want to expand too a little bit on who you guys target as well, that'd be helpful just to get a little bit of a comparison of, you know, who we're going after.

Speaker B: Absolutely. Yep. So we were the first AI, generative AI for law. We target only lawyers, so we sell just to. And specifically so lawyers like to be super broad strokes about it. You have like, governance lawyers, you have transactional, and you have lawyers go to court litigation. So we target just transactional lawyers. So we have a very specific set of the market that we hit. Um, and we're, we're a generative AI platform for lawyers. We live in word. It's a very. And this is maybe part of like later questions, uh, on like, how well it pivoted for us and like, what we did. But like, we're a very niche small product. And I don't say small as in, like, it has massive impact, but the sets of features and the offering is very defined and it's very like, encapsulated. And specifically helping transactional lawyers do legal work 10 times faster. Like, rather than spend hours reviewing a contract just to find small errors, you can do that instantly. Uh, and then you can go more to that strategy element and like, working with clients. And like, the reason lawyers got involved in law wasn't necessarily to do all nighters of contracts. Maybe some did, but I don't think most did. In my experience, most didn't. Um, it's to do like, strategic work and help clients and actually make a difference. And like, a lot of times lawyers are getting caught with a lot of the paperwork, um, and maybe digital paperwork now, but like, we streamline that like crazy. Because generative AI is insanely good at finding errors, omissions, problems in contracts, and drafting, you know, clauses. Of course, everything needs, um, a lawyer's oversight. It's like an electric bike. You know, you steer it, it just gets you there a lot faster.

Speaker A: I love that. I mean, I think the common use case would be that clearly lawyers are always reviewing red lines and all sorts of things and trying to assess risk, uh, for each of the different clients they work with or if they're an in lawyer for the, for the brand that they work with. And so to your point, you could have, I assume, spellbook come in and say, all right, based upon these red lines and these changes that need to be made to this contract, here are some of the potential risks as we understand your business. And I assume that there's even a base Layer of information that you can feed up into spellbook about like, hey, this is what our business looks like, this is what we do. These are some things that we generally wouldn't approve. And it can learn obviously from the types of things that you guys generally accept and don't accept. Is that, is that accurate?

Speaker B: That's perfectly accurate. Um, and that's also part of the magic of like the pivot, which I don't want to like, spoil the questions, but like, it's a very straightforward product to like grab, which is great for marketing, which is great for selling. Um, it's very well defined and encapsulated and like, it's just easy to pick up. Um, yeah, and like, it's also great like product wise. Uh, like a lot of our customers are small firms, like majority of them. So now we, we've grown to. We have like pretty big names, um, on the site. Like, we have like Fender, Securitas, Cascades, a toilet paper company. Um, Crocs, like massive companies are on it. But we kind of built um, our, our company on, on with small, small solo firms. And like, in a lot of cases, they're doing a lot of different contract types because they're taking a lot of different types of work in. They can work on NDAs one week, they can do even a family matter another week. Um, so you don't always have the time to become an expert in each one. And like, so instead of doing all this research and you should do research and understand the market and they do. They don't need me to say it, but it streamlines that. So like, okay, we have a new feature now. It's called benchmarkings. It'll compare your contract with like standards in a, uh, specific contract type. So like instantly you know what is market and what is normal. And like, it just streamlines a lot of the grunt work. It pretty much 95% of the value. Just like it takes away grunt work that no one wanted to do anyways.

Speaker A: Right, right.

Speaker B: Which is most of AI to be fair. Like, it's not like a novel idea, but it's fantastic. In law, similar. I don't know if you followed like coding AI like cursor and stuff, but like law is. I don't know if lawyers agree with this sentiment, but I find it's similar to coding where like there are rules and structure and AI does exceptionally well at that.

Speaker A: M. I want to jump to the, the pivot a little bit and I think help me with the timeline here because I know that you said I Believe in your post Q1 of 2023, I believe is when you were comparing a 20x increase and I assume revenue being the metric. But is that the right time period in terms of when that pivot occurred? Because where, where I want to start is not post pivot in terms of results, but what was going on like three months before the pivot and was that back at that date, Q1, 2023, just for, for perspective.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah. Um, so the pivot happened a little shortly before that. So I'm not going to be here and like, yeah, we launch it and we just crushed it immediately. Like it took time. Like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Um, probably it was three to five months before that. So originally we had a product called Rally and it was a really good product. It was like super smart, well built, well designed. But the sort of issue was it had a lot of different value props and like selling points. So we had like a document automation, we had client portal. We had a part where you could sell your legal services on your site. And these were all like super well thought out, well built pieces, but they were very broad. And so like the whole offering was like you were selling to all these different market types and the problem was when you got into each piece. So like you had like the client portal part and you would compete with companies who just did client portals and who were very good at it and they were like domain or category experts in that. Um, and that was a big part of the shift. So we launched about three to five months before that. Initially, like our, uh, co founder Scott, he kind of came up with the early concept on his weekends and evenings. And he was just coming up with the idea of maybe this could be a really good marketing lead magnet. And I was like, this is crazy. I can't believe you built this on your spare time. Founders don't have a lot of spare time. Um, so he was just plugging away at this for a few months and then we launched it and we tried like a whole whack of stuff to get like organic engagement. So we did like social stuff, Reddit, um, which we got some press. We did a whole, whole whack of things and we just experimented with like, how can we get this to M market. And uh, then it took us about. It was pretty quick though, I won't lie, maybe two or three months when we really started getting a critical mass of people of interest. And then we, we started growing it from there. And then you Started selling it because we had, uh, what did we have, seven day free trials at the beginning. So your cycle is a little lagged because you're starting off with a very small cohort that have it free for seven days. And if you've ever had to bring on early adopters, they're also trying to get it free for longer and they can kind of push you a bit. And they're like, yeah, give me 14 days. And then at the end of their seven days, they're like three need a couple weeks to test this. So we kind of like you bend a bit. But, uh, the uptick was really fast. And then the revenue came in, uh, a few months after that and then it just started climbing as per that graph.

Speaker A: So was the initial problem. Then you mentioned portals, is that going to go? Which I'm relatively familiar with, oddly enough. I worked for a business intelligence company that was building out, I think custom portals at one point for law firms. Uh, which is actually interesting, maybe related. But was the issue, like when you guys decided, hey, we need to do something different, One of the critical things you were noticing was that Spellbook was coming up against, or you mentioned another product name that would have been associated with before Rally. Yeah, but Rally was starting to come up against these portals. And so the issue was, hey, we don't want to be another portal. We don't want to compete with portals. And so therefore that's what led to the pivot. Or am I wrong about that being kind of the trigger that said, hey, we need to again, rebrand, lean into AI more and do some other things. What was that to expand on that again?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So it wasn't necessarily about, about the portals or, or anything. It was like, we're a startup and we're behaving like a startup. Our goal is to grow very quickly. We raise venture capital funding. You want to expand fast and honestly, like, no. So startups who don't die. Um, but to do that, you, in my experience, like you have to build a product people really love that is very straightforward and very easy to grab onto and has the market potential to grow exceptionally fast. So the problem, like we had a problem of getting critical mass customers and like proper product market fit with Rally. And I think part of it, it was a great product and it was a really well thought out product, but it had a lot, and I don't know if everyone shares this, this view on the team, but it had a lot of value props that were not net. Like in theory, the whole life cycle of A contract, they kind of flowed in that but slightly different. Um, so it wasn't easy to say, hey, this is what we do. Like if you ask what we do. It was sort of a long explanation. At the beginning of this call when I said what Spellbook did, you grabbed it immediately. You were like, oh yeah, I totally get that. For us it was like the true value was like this longer contract, life cycle management and client relationship. But it was very hard to really get that out very quickly. And like, almost like I find it. I, uh, in my opinion after seeing this, like, I think most startups that grow really fast start with a very well defined problem and solution set that you can almost say in like a, a bite, like, like one sound bite. And uh, it was just really broad and it was hard. We, we were sort of like doing that big enterprise play where you have like HubSpot, Like I'm sure you use HubSpot. It has everything. But starting from a new company to build everything is just exceptionally hard. And it's hard to like because you have to basically build and promote this category. We weren't necessarily like the category can explain it very quickly. Like contract lifecycle management is well understood, but we weren't exactly that. So it's like we had to create this category. But as a new company you're just trying to survive and you don't have that reach. Um, so it was just like we were spread thin. And when we were competing with like a portal or the document automation side of things, um, you would go up against companies that just did that, that were very, very good at it. And then in the customer's mind they're like, well these guys are the leaders in it. How do you beat them in just this one thing that they wanted? And it's like, well here the value is that like you can do everything with us, but they were just buying for this one specific thing. So it was a very difficult, it was a very difficult sales problem, it was a very difficult marketing problem. Even customer support. Well, customer support, I think it was quite good because they did love the product.

Speaker A: Right, okay, so far too broad in terms of the problem that you were solving or problems it sounds like. And value prop with rally and the fact that you were also coming up against other category leaders of which had established themselves for document portals and things of that nature for such a long time that it was kind of like, wait a minute, can Spellbook do all of these things already? Because otherwise I don't really see a need to move. And so the Idea was to say, all right, let's take a step back. We need to go more narrow on a problem that's likely underserved by document portals and other types of competitors, solve it in a different way that ultimately aligns with where the market's headed to with regards to AI and then come in and say here's the exact problem that we solved. So then that streamlines messaging, makes the website easier in terms of what you want to say, gives the product more focus. So okay, am I right on saying that?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like in my experience I'm a really firm believer in like the way that startups, the way that you win as a startup in most cases that I've seen is like you start with just this very niche defined thing that you can say in a sound bite that has real like market of real market. Like people really, they not only do they need the problem because like we solved the problem that everyone needed, but they didn't necessarily know that they needed it or care enough to move. And like I've thought about this a lot. I've been here for about five years and um, just seeing most companies that really blow up like, like I don't know, is this like too overdone to say? Like you look at Lululemon or Apple but like I don't know they, is it over comparing to them but like Lululemon started with like women's uh, pants. Like it was a super defined thing, right? Like the pants suck, yoga pants sucked. And then like they just had this really defined thing. Even Apple really just started off with like pre made home computers because at the time you were building these like overly comp. Like super complicated computer machines or like these homebrew home homebrew computer clubs that were like overly complicated. Apple came out with this very simple. All they came out with when they started was just a pre built computer and then eventually yeah, and everyone wants to be Apple now. So I don't want to compare too much to that.

Speaker A: I mean I think you're spot on. It's so interesting. There was a uh, AI based company that I won't name but uh, one that I was talking to just last week around this and their issue is that they're playing the role of having really an endless set of use cases in the way that they're allowing the platform to work, right. And so you could do theoretically anything. And so it's a really difficult one because that means now you're across industry, cross Persona across different sizes of companies, different use cases. And so now it's just very hard to stand out with that type of messaging. And so they're actually going through a pivot similar to yours right now where they're trying to say, all right, let's just pick one department or one group that we know really, really well that has this problem. And I think marketing is the one that they're going to choose for right now. And let's sol solve really one big use case for them and let's focus all of our energy just on that one use case. And, um, I'm very curious how it's going to turn out for them. I'm sure it's going to be great, assuming the problem's big enough to be solved and there's not too much competition around that problem. But to, uh, your point, I mean, I think it always comes back to these things that we talk about all the time on LinkedIn, where if you're not incredibly clear and specific in your ad, in your content, on your website, then people are just going to gloss over. It's like this nonsense where people say, uh, you know, what's your product too? Well, we're an advanced AI revolutionary enterprise tool for lawyers or for whatever it's like. Yeah, but what is it though? What does it do? You know? And I think I've seen some ads from you guys that I think are great just because I think you're attaching yourself to something people already know. But I think I've seen an ad that says like, ChatGPT for lawyers, like, pretty simple. And so I think that people have the understanding of generally what ChatGPT is, and so they can associate spellbook with that and say, okay, cool, so it must be something related to how you interact with ChatGPT, but more specific for lawyers and potentially more secure and all sorts of other things that might come into play versus just using ChatGPT out of the box. And so I think it's, it's so spot on and such a, It's a lesson that I think everyone overlooks, uh, far too often when they feel like getting vague and broad is better to stay open, when really they just need to get a lot more specific so people get it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I will like, to be fair, it is a gut wrenching process for founders and founding teams because like, they just. The unknown. Unknown is insane. It's like, do we focus on this thing and then potentially leave out all this market? Because maybe this market's good. And then it's like there's. They can go anywhere and there's, uh, there's guardrails for anything. There's no guardrails. It's just completely wide open. It's like saying, okay, we're not going to service this market at all is so hard. Like, it's insanely hard. And like, in the first part of your AI thing, a lot of startups start like, that. They're like, serving to everyone. And then like, huh, it's a marketer's nightmare. Like, how do you even define messaging? How do you figure out who to target? It's just like, we just sell to everyone. And like, a lot of times too, the messaging suffers. And like, in the early days, I think marketing is a really big role to play and found in, like, early companies. Um, I think has a role, big role playing every company. But, like, just having crystal clear, like, yeah, like, everyone knows what chat GPT is. So GPT for lawyers, it instantly hits. If I said, like, it's GPT, but for everyone or something. Like, it's like, yeah, okay, whatever. But like, you define a market and you talk to that market and then they're like, oh, okay, it's for me. So now what? And then you attach to something else people know, and that's a whole other. It's a whole other thing.

Speaker A: I think you're right that it is difficult. It is, it's, it's very challenging. And I think it's something we all talk about and I think we all say it easily. Uh, there's a lot of advice out there on LinkedIn and other channels where it's just like, well, yeah, you just have to focus. You know, what is your problem? Why aren't you focusing? I'd be curious though, like, when you were chatting with the founders, um, or founder, multiple founders, or just one founder.

Speaker B: There's. There's three.

Speaker A: Three. So when you were chatting with the founders, I'd be curious, how did you get over the hump of being okay with literally turning off marketing effectively in certain areas or deciding that, hey, we're going to rejigger the positioning and the messaging to be specific to this one type of use case? Was there any unlock there when you were going back and forth and arguing about it, or was it just like, hey, let's give it a shot, let's see. We're not seeing the results we want right now, so we clearly have to do something. Was there a trigger point?

Speaker B: Um, there was, you know, three years to the company before I joined, about two years. And then I was there for about two and a Half, three years before we switched. I'd love to say like there was this big debate, eureka moment, but maybe it's not genuine. It was just like we tried all these things. We tried to do the general thing, we tried to capture all these markets. We tried to get big law firms, small law firms, um, we tried to sell non law firms. We did all those things. And it's like one thing I think founders and founding teams learn really fast. M. Maybe it's not fast, maybe slow, but like when you wrestle. So like for a lot of the early days it felt like wrestling a bear. Like it was just so hard. Like everything was hard. Marketing was hard, uh, getting sales was hard, Sales conversations were hard, um, keeping customers was hard. So you kind of once. But once you. We tried a lot of things and like once you launch something that felt really good, you could just feel it. It was like riding a wave. Like you just knew it immediately. You're like, oh, this is, this is great. And we, we, we put our, we put our dues in like we, we struggle. We wrestled that bear for a long time and then once you found something that really worked, um, and we kind of found that the more we targeted stuff down, so we experimented with it too. So like we had, it was, it was kind of a nightmare. But we had like every value prop had like different marketing campaigns and they were all very like niche down specific. So we kind of proved that model. But again we were running so many um, so we knew that we should probably niche down into something and then just that feeling of like, oh, this is really good. And initially we were really focused just on lawyers who are just part of small teams. And then we uh, we're still only lawyers so we don't sell non lawyers for, for honestly for legal reasons and everything because it can be legal advice. And we're not set up like that. But um, we've expanded to bigger teams, but bigger teams with an asterisk because they're still small teams. We sell a lot of in house teams that like crocs, um, like some big firms but they all operate like small law firms. Which is funny because like you think of this massive team, but their law firm or their in house team is quite small. So actually the positioning hasn't changed all that much.

Speaker A: It's so funny to hear use the word feeling. And uh, I think in a world where we're all just so data driven and need to have the UTM parameter appended and need to see the CRM or the finance system, I think there's always this element of just following your gut, following your intuition, and the feeling of it working. Right. The excitement that a customer has when you've talked with them or when they've used your product, or when you're doing some QA with customer success or anything like that. And I think these signals sometimes just get overlooked because they're not as easy to bucket into a perfect dashboard. But to your point, sometimes when you make that shift or make that pivot, you just totally feel it, you know, it's working. And sometimes even the data won't tell you, uh, that exact thing. There was a client customer that we worked with for a long while that uh, ran a pretty profitable brand marketing campaign on Meta. And um, a lot of the data in Channel would have us to believe that it wasn't working or it wasn't as effective. But a lot of the stories that their clients told was, hey, I saw you, I, uh, saw that brand marketing ad, I saw that funny ad that you guys did. They spent a lot of money on this. It was like a really well done actors on set, the whole nine yards. And people were saying those things. And the CEO at one point, uh, told us via their VP of marketing that hey, we really need to push this a lot more because we're feeling that some of our audience isn't mentioning as much. And even though the data was leading us to completely different direction, it was really just like that qualitative kind of gut feel of people being excited and happy about it that ultimately they were following, which is just such an important thing. It's um, I think Jeff Bezos a while back had a, had a quote, something like that. I'll butcher it by saying it. But he, he had something related to like sometimes the anecdotes don't, don't match the data or something like that. And that uh, you know, you really need to follow the anecdotes of what people are saying and sometimes, uh, you know, just avoid looking at the data. In some cases I not ignore it completely, but you know, don't ignore those, those fluffy things. I think sometimes it's just hard to stand by those things. But it sounds like you guys clearly leaned into it, which is great.

Speaker B: Yeah. And we did have, you know, to be totally fair, we did have some good numbers behind it. But like, I think a big, like we had a lot of meetings that we were booking from it and then, but like if you've been on sales calls selling a product that people were like, it's not bad versus like they were like, can I get on this right now? Like, when can I get. Like, you just feel it. And like, I think sales calls in the early days are such a good measure of product market fit. And like I joined a lot. Like I joined, I joined. When I joined I was doing like BDR activity, like selling rally to people on LinkedIn and joining sales calls. And like you feel it when you have like people who are like, I want this now. And I was joining a lot of those early calls our founder was, um, taking. He booked his old calendar out for the first two to four months of just like meeting people. So he, he felt it too. Um, yeah, yeah, I agree with you though. You, um. And so a lot of the ad stuff, I don't know, I don't know. This podcast isn't about this. But the ad stuff is getting so crazy because like the attribution is getting so dark. Like we get, we attribute a lot to our ads. Um, and we can get mo. We get most of the data, but there's like 30ish, 40%. We're working on tightening it up. But there's a lot that'll always kind of be dark because people will see an ad or hear about you, um, from a popular channel. Like if you're, if you're founder or someone posts a lot on LinkedIn, you'll get a lot of like visibility there. And then this is like part marketers hate. Instead of just going and following the link, they'll go, forget about it, look at it the next day they'll go direct to your site, look, they'll search your brand name on Google. All this stuff is like, if you have a pretty broad, like we do pretty broad marketing strategy where you have your advertising on half dozen channels with 30, 40 campaigns, um, you can't attribute search term for your brand. But you know, someone didn't just wake up in the morning and look up your specific name or, or type in your URL. So that's true.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a whole podcast of talking about. But I'm 100% with you. I mean, I think that's the, I mean I'd say that most marketers, uh, would probably agree with you. There's certainly some that I think are stuck in like YouTube parameter world. But I think most want to measure m marketing in a more holistic way and use some other data points some maybe not even seen. But you know, again, just looking at broader trends from a direct and organic perspective. Right. Uh, where the amount of brand traffic coming in and Looking at that over time. And of course there's other brand metrics and whatnot to look at, but. Yeah, your point, it's, uh, it's a difficult one and, uh, I feel it. I mean, sometimes, um, you know, you go down these rabbit holes with ads to your point, we'll go off on one side and then want to pull us back. But you go off on these tangents where you say, all right, well, Google Ads had 10 conversions over the last 30 days. Where are those? In Salesforce and HubSpot, which in almost 90% of cases is a complete waste of time for the reasons that the attribution window is different than Google. And you've got cookie consent banners and you've got pixels that need to fire correctly and there's all sorts of things need to happen. Uh, sometimes there's view through conversions. Right. The ad platforms are pulling those as conversions. And so it's not always going to line up perfectly. And so I think it's really more, yeah, set up good conversion tracking, get everything set up as well, as good as you can for trackable events. But then the rest of it, you just have to keep a little bit of an open eye. And you know, some of those conversations the CEO is having in the first like two to four months, I mean, that's what I think. All founders should always be on some amount of sales calls just to stay close to the customer. Right. Otherwise you start losing the vibe for where people are, are going, what they're saying, whether, what, you know, what problems they have and all that stuff. But, um, but I want to move to the pivot, um, a little bit more. I think I've basically got it. But I just wanted to see if you wanted to add anything to this one point because you mentioned the words, right, rebrand, if I remember correctly. And you may have meant rebrand in the sense of really just updating positioning and messaging on the website. Did that also include anything related to things like colors, distinctive assets, the way that the site's organized, or other things that kind of typically like get in the brand bucket? Or was that more what you were talking about before, related to positioning, targeting, getting clear on, you know, one problem?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I don't know if I'll offend your viewers with this stuff. I don't know if they're like big on brand. Um, but so we did like the classic rebrand lately with the updated logo, the new site, but the real rebrand, okay, not that the other one wasn't real, but like the big company Rebrand, like, the way I think about brand is like, I don't really bucket in, like, the visual stuff, it's part of it, but it's mostly like, I like the, um, there's a writer, he's a really good marketing writer. He wrote Zig and Zag. Or no, it's called just Zag. And, uh, he says brand is basically what customers say about you. So, like, our big rebrand is part of our big pivot, which is part of our big company pivot, which was in probably around that time where the inflection happened. It was right around then when we basically changed the whole focus of the company and change our doing business as name to spellbook. We were no longer sort of this broad offering. We were a for transactional lawyers that lives in word and we sell to small teams. And that was a huge pivot. That was like. And that was pretty, pretty groundbreaking for the company. I mean, we went from a totally different business model, not same business model as SaaS, but like a totally different business to this. And we no longer worry about this full cycle thing. We are very specific. And that was the big rebrand. And I think that's the part that, like, it stands out to me. So, like, the new rebrand is really great and I'm not putting any thing down on it, but that's like, we changed what we meant for our customer base in that moment.

Speaker A: And how long did it take to execute the full rebrand? I think you or not. Well, let's call it the rebrand and pivot, right? Because I think if you remember correctly, your founder just was doing some tinkering, built some stuff in the back end, was moving really quickly. But from the point of saying, like, all right, cool, we've experimented along all these other things with a broad focus, multiple different problems, et cetera. Like, what was the timeline between, you know, let's do this to. Everything's updated and you guys are fully positioning yourselves in the new kind of version 2.0.

Speaker B: Um, maybe three months.

Speaker A: So quick.

Speaker B: It was quick. Oh, yeah, it was super fast. Like, I mean, like I said earlier, we've been wrestling a bear for two years. And we were like, holy crap. This has a ton of product market fit. Sales calls are great. Customers love it. People are talking about it. You felt it immediately. So, like, basically in. The company shifted in waves. So, like, I was probably the first to move over because I was in marketing and I was doing top of funnel stuff. So, like, I had to fill up the funnel for the salespeople. I moved my focus a few weeks after our initial test because we were like, holy crap, this is blowing up. And we, our founder is like, like the founders are all quite innovative and forward thinking. And um, Scott, who, who kind of came up with it, Scott Stevenson, he, he uh, was pretty ahead of his time on a lot of stuff. So he was pretty interested in like Ethereum. And initially when I met him in like a co working space like eight years ago, he was building like smart contracts over Ethereum. So he kind of has this good feeling for like, I gotta give him a lot of credit, um, he has this good feeling for like, what's the next big thing? And it felt like it was this. And worst case, we moved me over, it didn't work, I moved back. So I shifted my focus basically the first few weeks and then eventually brought more product. Salespeople, uh, were literally right after me. Like, as the funnel filled, they were like, right there, uh, developers, we brought them over quick and slow. So we brought a few over quite quick and then we kept maintaining the platform. So we didn't want to do this whole thing where like, you just drop the last product and like, good luck customers. Um, we still have rally customers and we still maintain the platform like three years later. Whether that makes good business sense or not is debatable. But we didn't want to just abandon our customers. Um, and we still have, for the first year or two of Spellbook, we still had a customer support person completely dedicated to the old. And I gotta get a lot of credit to Cody, she was the one doing that. She was on her island alone supporting these customers. Um, so it was quick though. Like the new website was up, we put it up within a week. Um, it wasn't like, I think this is another good one for founders if you have founders listening or founding teams. We didn't turn the website into this massive debate experience. We just, we took like, I'll be honest, we took a template, we put all our own content into it, we shaped, change it up and we launched it. And the conversion rate was super good because it was something people were really interested in. If we spent more time to make a really nice site, I actually think it would have been detrimental to us because we would have lost those months. We could have had marketing and in the early days, uh, it was like we were getting like. I don't know if you know much history about Newfoundland. Probably not. But in the early days people came here because there's a lot of cod and you could be fishing on a boat and you could put a net into the water and just grab cod. And in the early days you got leads so fast. So like, literally wasting a day was like insanely expensive. Um, so we moved. Yeah, we moved quite fast.

Speaker A: I love that. Let's go to. Because we're messed up on time and I want to hold you to it, make sure we cut off here in about five minutes or so. But I want to go to the point of kind of when you started to see those results. So you clearly had a amazing LinkedIn post. A lot of great results. Um, in terms of increases in revenue, I think 20x was the number used before. But how long from the point of shifting in those three months as you pivoted, when did that. Did you start to see that lift immediately? It sounds like the answer is yes. And what were some of the things, if any, that you were deploying from a demand gen marketing perspective in terms of what you were distributing, saying to the market, as you were seeing that growth, were there any changes and inflection points along the way, or was this purely just a repivoting, repositioning of the product and then really just seeing growth kind of pretty much go up into the right shortly after that, that launch.

Speaker B: Not a big believer in like, build it and they will come. So. And we had a good marketing infrastructure before that. So we had a lot of emails. So we were emailing all the, like our whole lead base about it. We were running ads. We had the infrastructure for that. It took a lot of communication work. It didn't just like launch a site and it blew up. I mean, most sites in the early days get zero visitors or like a few hundred a month. Like it was a brand new site and we were still a small company so we had to do a lot of the legwork. We were posting, I mean, some of our early stuff, we like posted on Reddit and got like a whole bunch of customers. Uh, we got some press, we got. We did ads, we did the classic, like social ads, we did search ads. We just kind of went. We had a lot of. Because I was there for two years, so we had a lot of the marketing infrastructure there. So we sort of like flipped the machine on for Spellbook and updated the content, updated the messaging. Um, you did have to put a lot of legwork in. I m would love to tell you that we changed the rebrand and then we got a bunch of press and it blew up. But it wasn't like that. It was a lot of work.

Speaker A: What are some of the main Channels today that you use to make sure people know who and what Spellbook does. What are the main channels you guys use today?

Speaker B: Well, we use social ads. I mean, you get our ads. Um, we use search ads. Uh, ads are quite big. Uh, we're getting really big into organic now. So I've just started launching our SEO and that is growing. It's like doubling every month. Um, actually this month is the only month it didn't double in the last six months. Um, so we're growing that pretty aggressively. We're one cool thing that's actually doubling, like every week is, uh, and it's sort of the result of SEO is AI SEO. So, like ChatGPT return. So if you ask it, we've been trying this, you might get a different answer. But if you ask it, like, what's the best, uh, legal AI tool for transactional lawyers? Give me one name, it'll probably give you Spellbook. There's a good chance it will. I'm pushing a lot into that because that's like the new search, in my opinion. It's like a new category of search. It's like ask. And I think that's going to be really big. I'm investing a ton in that. Um, ads are good, but, you know, eventually they, they, they. You give it a dollar, it spits out too. And sort of that. I'm trying to look for things that are ten to one. Um, we're doing more impressed lately, so we're getting more content, interesting things to push out. And then we're getting a little more cachet because we're getting a little larger. And then we're getting some word of mouth. And, you know, we have enough customers that if they talk to a few people a month, then it actually ends up with a fair amount of business.

Speaker A: Right. I just chat gpted and, uh, it is in the list. So, uh, to your point, man, uh, it is there. So, yeah, there's.

Speaker B: I'm glad you checked me. Live Good.

Speaker A: Exactly. Just to make it fun.

Speaker B: Right? Yep.

Speaker A: You're in the list. I don't know if Relativity and Everlaw and Luminance and Kira are also competitors. Really. But my might have been AI prompted it possibly.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, no. They're not really direct competitors. They're.

Speaker A: They're all right. What does Chat GPD know anyway?

Speaker B: Yeah, but a lot of that, A lot of our search is now coming from that. Every month it's doubling.

Speaker A: We've seen the same thing. We haven't invested as much. Um, right now I'm actually It's on my list of things to do. But we've started to see in the um, how did you hear about us Field and just people, you know, saying when we get on sales calls. Perplexity in ChatGPT have been kind of two that uh, continue to come up. And then of course you know, most of the rest of it's you know, LinkedIn right now, so organic and or paid. Uh, so yeah, very cool man. I love this story. So I know you're not able to share any other uh, like exact revenue metrics, but anything else in terms of just growth metrics that people could latch onto as it relates to kind of that graph you shared. I mean that was revenue, it was a 20x increase. Anything else that you guys were tracking, looking at that was interesting to share just in terms of a, a success metric before we wrap up?

Speaker B: Um, no, I mean we've, we've done the, the 20x which is pretty good. We've done the ideal startup. Triple, triple, double, double. Um, we get an insane amount of traffic on the site. I don't know if people want to know the amount like we've brought in since starting this like a hundred thousand leads. We. Our one uh, post I had that kind of blew up before was like we book about 4 ish hundred meetings a week, um, with, with the sales team of like most of those meet a lot of those meetings close.

Speaker A: Um, insane.

Speaker B: It's. Yeah, it's good at this point. Am I just bragging? It's just, it's good. Um, but you know, like I'm in the same boat as everyone else. Like now that we're here, how do we get, how do we 10 exit? And it's like that train never stops with VC. So like I'm in probably the same boat as someone just starting out. Like how do we also 10x this thing and keep it kind of growing at that pace?

Speaker A: Right. Well, good. Hats off to you, man. You should brag. I mean I think it's incredible and uh, clearly really strong product market fit. And I think there's some good timing too based off of when all that happened because this is kind of at the time when, you know, LLMs were still not used quite as much as they are today. And so I think, think there could be a potentially different world that you might be experiencing if you were to launch Spellbook in the way that it is right now. Today, uh, was, you know, a couple of years ago.

Speaker B: Uh, so it would be a totally different beast.

Speaker A: Things have changed so much.

Speaker B: Oh yeah. We wouldn't be able to start it the way we did it because it's so competitive right now. There's so many products out there. That's another thing of like just jumping onto sort of, I don't want to say trends, but like new ideas before everyone else jumps into it. It was, it was huge. We were the first, like not many people were playing with GPT2 and then GPT3 came and got pretty big. But we were the first one to use it in law. Like the first one to use generative AI in law. And like our real first competitor only came six months later, which in startup land is a lot of time.

Speaker A: It's a ton of time. Ton of time in Saster. I think last stat, uh, was 18 months of Runway for a SaaS SaaS brand anyway. And so six month could be, you know, half or a little bit less than that in terms of actual. Just typical Runway for a seed or series a brand. But uh, but I love this man. Thanks for walking me through it. I'm gonna have a post go out here in a little bit, um, around this. But yeah, thanks for coming on and sharing some stuff. And we'll have to go back to your point about attribution. I think on another episode, a whole, another rabbit hole that uh, is never ending.

Speaker B: It's a freaking nightmare. Like it's becoming more. I think before, like I've been advertising for a long time on social and stuff. Like 10, 12 years before, I think it was easier. Like it was more one to one. You saw where people are coming from now. It's like, I don't know, people block cookies a lot. People come from a whole bunch of different ways probably. It's always been hard for anyone who advertises at scale because people hear about you and then they come direct. Like, like we, we debate this a lot because we're working on attribution now. But like direct is like one of our biggest channels. M. And it's like, you know, there's a debate of like, oh well, maybe we're spending too much on advertising. And it's like direct comes from advertising. I don't know how else someone's gonna go right to the side. I don't wake up and go, I'm gonna go to nike.com today. Like I, if I do it's because I know the product. Like right. So it's, it's, it's a hard. And it's a hard debate. Uh, uh, and it's a good debate to have. Like we should be we should be judging advertising spend very critically. Um, um, but it's like becoming more. I think in the early days it was like a real art. Then it became a science. You know, 90s to 2000 you could really hone it down. And now it's going back to the art side of it. I think it's uh, because the other way you really win. I'm rambling here and I know you have to go, I have to go. But you, you win by having really cool in advertising and marketing, you win by having really cool big ide like that kind of go viral. And once it goes really big and gets like the 10 to 1 on the dollar spent, it's really hard to know where it comes from because you get a lot of like direct traffic, search traffic, AI traffic. It just pours in and you're like trying to count it as it comes in and it's like sand slipping through a strainer.

Speaker A: I think it's spot on. I'm going to invite you on all my uh, future uh, client customer calls by the way. Way so be prepared for some invites. Uh, I'm gonna have you and uh, you know, shed some reality on how people should be thinking about this stuff. But yeah, I do need to jump in. But this is great. I uh, love it. I'm gonna have you back on here hopefully soon. But um, but yeah, thanks again for, for jumping on for a bit.

Speaker B: Nice. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: I began. All right, well thanks for listening to another episode of the Demand podcast again. I'm Jonathan Bland, the co founder, founder of Omnilab. I'll also have with me Jason Steele who's the other co founder of Omnilab on this podcast as well. Uh, we're a demand gen agency for seed to Series B SaaS startups. Um, if you like this episode, uh, or you're looking for some help with demand gen, please feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn over a DM or you can go just directly to our website. That's omnilive consulting.com. otherwise uh, we look forward to to see you on the next episode where we'll be talking about all things dimension. Until then, thanks. Bye bye.