William Leonard
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. My name is William Leonard, your host for today. I’m excited to sit down with one of Valor’s newest portfolio founders, Jake Soffer, who is the founder and CEO of FirmPilot. Jake, welcome to the podcast.
Jake Soffer
Thanks for having me, William.
William Leonard
Jake, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover today, but let’s start with your background. You have such a unique combination of experiences from what you studied in undergrad to what you recently did before FirmPilot, but I’ll let you tell that more to the audience.
Jake Soffer
I was fortunate to attend two great universities where I just focused on Computer Engineering, RPI, and NYU, and via different hackathons and sponsored projects just fell into an LP, again, just lucky there. This was before the big LLM boom that’s going on right now, very basic, natural language processing stuff, and just really enjoyed it. From there, as you know, I had another startup Rollio, which is still up and running and doing great. Another NLP company. Last 10 years, that’s been my focus. And then when I was getting ready for my next adventure and leaving the Rollio team, I knew I still wanted to stay in this space. It was just so familiar to me, but I didn’t want to force it. And of course, with all the LLM stuff going on, and NLP having its moment, I knew I wanted to stay in it. But again, I didn’t want to force it. Luckily, my brother, who is the attorney in the family, asked me to help him with his online marketing. That’s what I was introduced to this set of activities that goes on into building a growing and scalable firm, and just had this big Aha! lightbulb moment, where I realized we could put the two together and automate the activities that it takes to scale a firm, get more leads, and build an online presence as a local service-based business, but also do it at a much higher level of performance using data.
William Leonard
That’s awesome, man. Give us an overview of what FirmPilot is doing and the core set of customers that you’re looking to target.
Jake Soffer
Absolutely. In one sentence, we are a high-performing AI agency in a box. What that means is rather than just blog blindly, create pretty social media posts, or do some ad campaigns and hope they work, we rely on data. The first thing we do is understand and build a semantic bubble of what are the keywords. What are the Google searches? What trends look like to get you clients and not just clients, but clients that you want. Those types of leads. We have to understand, what are they searching for, and how they pick the firms that they pick or the businesses that they pick to work with. And then from there, we can start to analyze what it takes to be seen, to rank high, not just based on blog content or website content, based on best practices, but look at a myriad, I mean, hundreds of attributes of the high-performing content. This is where our AI agency comes into play. Being able to do everything I just described in minutes or really seconds, and use all that data to craft not just content that looks nice, but is predicted to rank high and get you the clicks, the calls, the views, and the clients that you want.
William Leonard
It’s so fascinating because as I’ve been on the hunt for deals this year, I just saw a plethora of legal AI companies that were doing one thing and that was document generation and kind of document summarization for lawyers, right? While that’s an interesting use case, it’s certainly not the only use case for legal software to leverage AI. Our team had built the thesis around AI that can enhance legal activities, but the high dollar, high margin, legal activities. I think you and I connected over the summer and I was just like, this is incredible what you’re able to do for the clients that you have now. Curious to hear how law firms are using marketing agencies today in a sort of antiquated fashion to win business and why are you convicted that the future of law firm marketing is going to be AI-driven and AI enabled?
Jake Soffer
Totally. First off, we’ve been paying a lot of attention to a lot of the other AI tools in the legal space from demand letters to case management, there’s some incredible stuff going on. But what we realized was, that there’s no law firm without clients. It is very, very competitive. If we go back 10 to 15 years, you could blog, do social media, do some basic ads, and you would likely find some success. But there are 460,000+ firms in the US. 83% of which are doing this set marketing activities, it’s available to them. I mean, that is a lot that you’re competing with, even if you start to cut it up by practice, area, and geolocation. It is competitive. It’s not good enough to just do marketing best practices anymore. They’re all these little edges, and vertical edges, and advantages that we look for. So what we want to do before we even just begin writing content for you, is understand what it takes to get you to the first page, keywords that are going to get you clients, analyzing who’s there, what’s their page load speed, what’s the format of the images, keywords, and links, and I can go on and on and on. But by being able to use all this data, we can have such a higher level of conviction. You’re going to be where you need to be to get clients or where those potential clients are looking for legal help or to answer a legal question. It’s that edge. That’s why we see AI as the answer and the next step.
William Leonard
I love it. I love that. I think we’re gonna see this happen across many industries. We’ll talk about that a little bit later. But given the early success of FirmPilot when I first met you, I was looking back at our first messages and contacts with each other. It was on July 19 and when we had that first conversation, I think two days later, the speed and velocity at which you were able to sell and close customers was something we had almost like never seen before. You came out the gate selling products and selling fast and efficiently. You are scaling revenue incredibly quickly. I want to dive into that more and understand what your secret or non-obvious growth hack is to unlock your first half a million in annual recurring revenue in less than 12 months.
Jake Soffer
Scars. I’ve done it so many times, I’ve been hung up on, I’ve gotten emails that say some nasty words, and never contacted me again. It’s just repetition and just doing. You can spend so much time trying to get to the perfect product before you sell or trying to craft the perfect HubSpot or Salesforce workflow or sales message, but just go, like just go. I have the same tools as everybody else. Write down what we should be doing, our team says, okay, let’s do with these projects, but at the same time, let’s spend a good amount of our time today, just emailing, and calling. You should be doing that every single day and, especially as one of the founders, it should be you. There’s the old saying, that the founder has to get the first 10 deals. Even at a million in ARR, 2 million, 3 million, you still don’t have scalable processes where you can just hire SDRs or AEs and put their butts in seats and say, okay, do what I did. Because you got those first 10, 15, even 30 customers in so many different ways. One, do it yourself, and two, just try everything that you can do quickly.
William Leonard
I think I speak with a lot of founders who are at the seed stage, pre-seed, looking to raise a round whatever it may be, and they get into the use of funds and now they want to hire a head of sales at the seed stage. You’re crushing it with founder-led sales. What are your thoughts on that? Curious to hear what you’re thinking about the balance of founder-led sales and kind of thinking about account executives and SDRs. What are your thoughts on that?
Jake Soffer
I’ve done a lot of that with different startups I’ve been involved with. Sometimes it works great at this early stage, and many times it doesn’t. But why risk that? If you’re the founder, and you’re selling, just keep going until you don’t have the capacity. You shouldn’t stop selling, because you don’t want to. It should be, I don’t have the time because we have so many demos on my calendar, and so many deals in the pipeline, and I don’t have the capacity. That’s the signal. It’s really funny. Some back office SaaS tools that we’re looking at purchasing, I booked the demo. They have 800 customers, and the CEO showed up and did our demo. I was kind of like, what the heck are you doing here? And he said, we have AEs, we have SDRs. Slowly, we’re starting to add them on, but I still can do this. Why wouldn’t I? When you’re the founder, no one’s gonna sell as good as you. They just don’t know the story. It’s not because they’re a good or bad salesperson. They just don’t know the story like you and connect with it. That’s why you started the company, hopefully, because you connect with it. So again, don’t stop selling.
William Leonard
I think the bandwidth constraint is always a conversation that happens as you begin to find product market fit or even as you’re scaling well into product market fit as well. I love your thoughts on the previous point of just hustling and getting reps and shots on goal. Lisa is always saying to me, I’m trying to get my first no of the day by like 7 am. If I’m not getting that, and I’m not working hard enough, I’m not talking to enough people. I think that’s a strong mentality to have, especially when you’re the founder of a firm, or the founder of a startup, whatever it may be, there has to be hustle and grind from the leadership and leadership on down. I resonate with that. You’ve been hustling, it’s been working early on, curious to hear your thoughts on within your first 5-10 customers or so, how you were able to get a conviction with being such a young company that maybe you just don’t have a lot of proof points, a lot of case studies. How do you get a conviction from your first, second, and third customers to just try out your product? \
Jake Soffer
It comes down to solving a pain. It is difficult to sell something that is a vitamin or nice to have, or just make something better. Something that we’ve realized is we’re not just in the marketing business, we are in the customer business, and businesses need customers. We’ve completely changed our message and we’ve noticed that the introductory calls, the sales calls, discovery calls, whatever you want to call them, have gotten so much better when we’ve taken this new direction of not trying to dissect what’s wrong with your marketing, but what are your goals for your business. You’re just not going to sell to everybody. There are many calls where we say, hey, totally get it, we’re not a fit for you, you don’t really need us. Even if they do sign a contract, they’re probably going to churn and just take up a lot of time. Just focusing on the ones that say the magic words that you know, are a pain point that your solution solves. If your solution doesn’t solve a pain point, that’s a whole other problem. But when your solution solves a pain point, it’s not just getting a yes, which is very hard. But the yes that resonates with that pain point and that’s when we click and it’s great, we know how to sell it, we also know who to sell to, let’s spend our time selling to look-alikes of this client, the same problem, who we know we solved.
William Leonard
I think a lot of that comes down to the depth of customer discovery that was done early on before the product was in the market or in pilot or whatever it may be. Because, man, I see a lot of founders who are building products searching for a problem to apply their product to instead of building a product specifically around a problem that exists in the market today that hundreds or thousands of customers have voiced to you in your initial discovery that hey if you can build X, Y, and Z product around X, Y and Z problem or this workflow for us, we’ll buy your product immediately. I think people get the order of operations for customer discovery wrong quite often. That’s why it takes so long to get your first few customers to then get to product market fit. I think that’s why we see a lot of pivots because there’s not a lot of customer discovery that’s done, but not to say that you’re pivoting because there’s a lack of customer discovery. I think there’s also the dynamic of market timing, or whatever it may be. I certainly resonate with that.
Jake Soffer
As you were saying, William, two things really came to mind. No code tools might not be the architecture and foundation to build a big scalable enterprise solution, but we iterate with features, and ideas on no-code platforms, like Bubble all the time. I wish stuff like that existed a long time ago. Before we wrote a line of code, I heard a really good piece of advice, act as the technology. You don’t need to spend $100,000 or $500,000 to build it, build a front end in an hour and a half, and then you just get a message or a Google form, and you perform the actions and send it back. Doing customer discovery and understanding there was a pain point of law firms paying a lot for marketing and many don’t see any fruit from it. Great, walk us through that process and just keep pulling, even when you hear something that’s painful, keep pulling understand more and more and more. And then when you feel you have enough to act on, don’t go off, raise a big round, and spend all this money because you still might not be totally spot on. Build something super lightweight. We built the first version of FirmPilot, I think, in 14 days. Yeah. Obviously, we’re way past that now. But it was just super lean, super fast, testing before we invest in something, because the last thing you want to do is invest that time, invest that money, and it wasn’t right.
William Leonard
That’s awesome. Build the first version of the product in 14 days, and I think just when you have a cadence of building, and a cadence of shipping products, weekly, almost daily, whatever it is, I think that just sets the tone for how the company is going to grow and progress. I think that’s why you and the FirmPilot team have just seen such great progression throughout 2023. I’m excited about that. I want to shift the conversation a bit. I think this AI boom now is exploratory for a lot of people. They were once building in Web3 or in blockchain when those two words were hot. But one of the things that I really liked about our first conversation was that you’ve been entrenched in the world of AI and NLP for years, including your time at Rollio. I want to get into your mind a bit, Jake, about what’s different about AI and natural language processing now versus when you were building Rollio some time ago?
Jake Soffer
The technology just moved so fast. You need to set up a way where you don’t get left behind. What used to be the type of innovation that used to take years, sometimes even months was, I don’t want to say easy to keep up with, but easier than what it is today. I mean, a new LLM method or tool update, that makes one better than the other and back and forth, and back and forth, almost every week. One of the best things that we’ve done so far, is built a very, very modular architecture. I’m not just talking about LLM but everything we do. Even the proprietary pieces that we’ve built in our building we can scrap them, edit them, and move them without changing out the whole system. I know that kind of goes against the whole iterative, super quick, scrappy way. Sometimes when you’re thinking, hey, let’s build a good foundation before we build the really fun, exciting stuff, but it pays off to do it. Once you have some indication of product market fit and you’re solving a pain, then it makes more sense. Like we’re now at a place where we are selling. We’re not going to slow down but we’re also being bought which is awesome. People coming in and now we’re getting referrals from customers. We know we have a good indication that we’re onto something. We’re not 100% there yet, but we have some good indicators. Now we’re ready to invest in that architecture, that foundation, where if there’s some new AI thing that comes out in a few weeks or a month that no one saw coming, we’ll be in a place where we can quickly adapt. I would hate to say, well, we have to scrap everything and start over.
William Leonard
I think there’s just a paramount difference in how technology was deployed just what, 2017 was six years ago, versus now. I think you and the team are a true testament to how you can build more efficiently, more modular, and achieve success with a small nimble team. I think the team is pretty, pretty lean right now and you all are high-level.
Jake Soffer
We are really about talent. Building a team that, I trust this person to go do something that I want to do myself. But building a team like that is how you do things quickly, ironically, not just hiring a huge team, and you’re spending all this time training and half of them don’t work out and you don’t build that bond, where you can just move like a well-oiled machine
William Leonard
I know the team is pretty lean in nature today, but how do you think about hiring? Eventually, you’re gonna have to scale the team. You just raised the seed round that we lead. But what are your thoughts about hiring? Do you have system systematic processes around that? How do you suss out who’s an AI guru or who’s not? Who knows their stuff and who doesn’t and fits as well?
Jake Soffer
Lean on your network. Luckily, I have a bit of that background, but still, I’m not an expert like the people that we want to hire. We want to hire people that are smarter than us. That’s how you keep upping the talent on the team. The average EQ and IQ should keep going up at all times. Hire people that you think, oh, shoot, this person could take my job. Lean on your network to help vet. We’re now looking for a Chief of Staff. Again, just looking for high performers and grinder. We’re hiring mechanics that can swing a hammer at a high level of execution and just grind and can just figure stuff out and get stuff done. Rather than the typical, hey, let’s hire a bunch of SDRs, a marketing person, AE, and if it didn’t work out, well, why not? Hiring high performers and vetting them with your network. For this Chief of Staff, we have our investors vet them. A lot of the roles we have, our investors, Jean-Luc from Valor have been involved in our CTO search. Collin, from SaaS Ventures, is helping us with our Chief of Staff. These people didn’t just give you money. They’re really smart people so rely on them to help vet.
William Leonard
Shout out to Collin and the team at SaaS. We’ve now co-invested on two deals together so it’s really good to work with those guys and that team. You all are still closing customers, even here late in December. What is the vision for FirmPilot? I mean, you all are building right now and it’s a $30 billion Legal Marketing vertical, but what is the grand vision for FirmPilot as the company and technology continue to evolve?
Jake Soffer
There are a couple of themes that are super important to us and we reiterate them all the time in our strategy and leadership meetings. One, everything should be so simple. We’re trying to democratize marketing, where it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg, and you don’t have to be an absolute expert. We always say, as simple as a click. That’s the experience we want to build. On top of that. we want to expand horizontally, where you don’t have to go to all these different vendors and tools and systems. That’s where we see this going. The single ubiquitous solution for local, service-based businesses, everything, and client growth. The status quo has always been, I’m going to focus on ads for a little, now I’m going to focus on SEO and website, and maybe I’ll do some billboards next quarter. Because they’re also time-consuming and money-consuming. Rather, it should be this cohesive, multi-layered marketing strategy. That’s when they work the best when it’s all the wheels on the train running at the same time, and the best part about our data-centric approach is we can use SEO data for billboards for TV or TV data for ads. It should all be one and the same. I kind of just hinted at some of the places that we really want to go with this.
William Leonard
I love that. I think that’s one of the things that got us excited, as we were thinking about the company in diligence and digging into the current TAM and the prospective TAM as you expand horizontally. I’m excited about that, Jake. How can someone who’s listening to the podcast today get in touch with you or someone on the FirmPilot team? What’s the best way to do that?
Jake Soffer
Ping us anywhere– LinkedIn, email. We are inbox addicts. We check every message, it doesn’t matter where you’re based, or what time it’s at. We’re crazy in that sense. One of my OCD things is Inbox Zero, almost to a fault. I look at almost every single email. Message us, or anyone on our team on LinkedIn, and we will look.
William Leonard
Jake, that’s a great place to wrap. Appreciate your time, man, and looking forward to supporting you and the FirmPilot team on this journey.
Jake Soffer
Absolutely. Thank you, William.
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