I believe a major frustration is the costs of discrete advice or legal services. This is caused by a high fixed cost associated with even interacting with a lawyer. Calling, scheduling a meeting, signing paperwork, paying a retainer, going to an office, and so on.
I used to be the business intelligence lead at Yelp, and saw that people gravitate to products that make the entire experience of engaging local service providers as simple as possible.
With those problems in mind, I'm starting Lawdingo.com, a market for immediate legal advice delivered by lawyers over video chat, billed by the minute. The product is still in development, but I have some great startup lawyers on it if anyone would be interested in trying it out. Feedback on Lawdingo is much appreciated.
I have thought this to be a good idea in markets where there are many competitors (monopolistic competition). Assume you are one player in space with 5 others that customers choose basically randomly from, you'd get 20% market share. But introduce a clone to yourself, and you share goes up to 33%. That's the theory at least; I've never tried it for myself.
This was a great article. It's so easy to assume that there is a process that will get you to your goal. The goal is the goal and you alone need to figure out how to get there. Any proven process is a valuable tool but is not the focus of efforts.
Another major flaw in the presentation of this data has to do with the base rate fallacy. For example,
"founders of tech companies tend to be highly educated."
Observing that the majority of successful founders have college degrees tells you nothing about the effect of not having a college degree. If 1% of students drop out, 99% do not drop out, and of the founders from the 1%, 80% are successful and from the 99%, 20% are successful, we would still see the vast majority of successful companies coming from non-dropouts.
A very poor analysis published by a man with a pro-education agenda.
I used to be the business intelligence lead at Yelp, and saw that people gravitate to products that make the entire experience of engaging local service providers as simple as possible.
With those problems in mind, I'm starting Lawdingo.com, a market for immediate legal advice delivered by lawyers over video chat, billed by the minute. The product is still in development, but I have some great startup lawyers on it if anyone would be interested in trying it out. Feedback on Lawdingo is much appreciated.