- Duration: 30 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JT6C7A83CWVHXB8MTK9JAG7V (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JT6C7A83CWVHXB8MTK9JAG7V)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: How are you doing, man? [Arpan Nanavati]: Good. How are you, Michael? [Michael Houck]: I’m good. [Michael Houck]: I apologize if I’m a little groggy. I’m in Hawaii, and I woke up five minutes ago. [Arpan Nanavati]: Oh, dang. What part of Hawaii? [Michael Houck]: I’m just on Oahu for a wedding. [Arpan Nanavati]: Oh, cool, cool, cool. We’re actually going to Hawaii four weeks from now. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, nice. [Arpan Nanavati]: Where are you going? Maui. Hi, Kiki. Yeah, I’ll be good with the kids. [Michael Houck]: I love that. [Michael Houck]: Maui’s great, man. [Arpan Nanavati]: Maui’s the best. Awesome. Well, look, good to meet you. I’ve been reading your letters. And they’re awesome. They’re on point. Oh, thanks, Ben. [Michael Houck]: I’m glad you enjoy it. Good to meet. And yeah, I mean, thanks for grabbing some time and also being able to move this around a little bit. So yeah, let me know. I guess, I mean, I saw symphony. So what you guys are working on. So give me some context that I might not be able to find on no LinkedIn or whatever and goals for content and sort of how we can maybe help. [Arpan Nanavati]: Yes, I think the context is we’ve been, we’re a modern law firm, AI law firm. I don’t know how long you’ve been in the Valley, but think of this as Atrium. If you’ve heard of Atrium back in the day, but this is Atrium builder on LLM. So this is Atrium 2.0. Essentially, where we’re fulfilling the promise around the pain points of high cost and predictable cost, all of that stuff. And in turn, we’re a tech-enabled law firm, but we’re still human in the loop. Our clients still interact with a human attorney, and then the human attorney does all this work. So human in the loop is not the customer. The human in the loop in our case is our lawyer. Because that’s actually a better human in the loop than having the customer be the human in the loop. We started in December of 23. We’ve onboarded more than a thousand clients so far, and a big goal for this, I mean, it’s still been, you know, through my network, through our investors’ networks, through referrals, et cetera. We have not made a splash noise, any of that. Like, you see my LinkedIn, or anything about us, like it’s very quiet on social. So the next bit of growth for us, now that we have a good handle on our engagement model, our unit economics, all of that, so we feel good, now we wanna pour more into making some noise around it. So we’re doing a bunch of PR type of relationship building so that we can get those things out. We’re also looking to boost our own social profiles. Say, to get more clients. It’s not about thought leadership. We don’t give a shit about thought leadership. It’s just straight up better legal service, which is a line for the AI era. And that’s it. That’s our punchline. So all the content we want to build, we want to target is towards conversion of getting us engaged versus someone engaging. Gunderson, Cooley, Wilson, standard platforms that they would engage. So that’s kind of the context here. Hopefully that makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I mean, you know, we normally work with people who either want, you know, just like awareness and impressions or followers or leads for their business. And when it’s very clearly one of those three things, it makes it a lot easier on us. So I appreciate that you guys have a clear goal in mind. But yeah, that makes sense. Sounds like a good deal for founders as well. So you said LinkedIn, are you also interested in X, or is it like you just think LinkedIn is where the customers are? [Arpan Nanavati]: It’s just a lot of shit out there. It’s just a lot of trolls, a lot of just random people. Real focus on LinkedIn. Obviously, we’re not going to ignore X, but just think of it as copy-paste of whatever we do on LinkedIn. Put that on Twitter, but we don’t want to focus with Twitter and Vine. It’s just, for our type of audience, there’s just too much shit going on. There’s too many trolls, too many fake profiles. It’s just not a fun environment. Yeah. Okay. It makes sense. [Michael Houck]: So we will treat LinkedIn like a primary and then sort of everything we do there, we can just copy paste and cross post and call it a day. Yep. Okay. Cool. Sounds good. I can give you some context around how we work, if that’s helpful. [Arpan Nanavati]: Yeah. Another piece of thing here is, so I want to do this for both me and my co-founder, who’s the lawyer. We know our tonality, and we always want to focus on the what and the why, which helps us to make the leads. And the tonality is a bit aggressive. Like, I don’t want to be passive, persuasive, of that shit. Like, it’s… Atrium kind of cut their aggressive stance a bit. Like, he was always like, we’re not replacing lawyers, blah, blah, blah type of stuff. Like, no, we’re on a mission to replace big law. It’s just clear and simple. So just, like, giving you some more context. And in that sense, what I’d want to do is have some pieces of content for me, and then have a couple of pieces of content that we would post for My co-founder. And number two is we don’t care about the comments or any of that. We don’t want to engage in a debate on social media. We just want to put it out there. Whoever wants us will click on us. We’ll go through our call to action, book a meeting with us. Whoever is trolling, whoever agrees, disagrees, we don’t give a shit about them either. [Michael Houck]: We don’t want to engage on comments at all. Okay. That’s helpful. I think you know being more provocatively into controversy a little bit is fun We can drive impressions that way and you know, hopefully drive leads that way, too we’ll go really deep on sort of the voice and ICP and things like that when I bring our writer on to like a kickoff call that we do I will spend a whole like, you know, 45 minutes on on that stuff there But helpful to know We can definitely do that have a couple people mind on the team who I think could be good fits for that. We actually have worked with legal tech startups before, so we have someone on the team who’s very familiar with that niche. [Arpan Nanavati]: I think it’s a bit different. We’re not a legal tech. We’re legal services, right? All legal tech is building for lawyers. We’re not building for lawyers. We’re competing with other law firms directly on this same page as their peers for customers, for clients to engage with us for direct services. So that’s a big nuance. It’s a new model. It’s a unique model in that sense. There’s like immigration startups and so on and so forth that are doing this, but there’s no one full-service corporate law firm that is a tech-enabled law firm. So just keep that in mind. Like what I’ve noticed with other legal tech people or who have experience in legal tech, they kind of get pigeonholed into building for lawyers. And positioning it as this is for lawyers. This is like Like a different side of the coin altogether. So um Yeah, that’s okay. That’s helpful framing. [Michael Houck]: Um, we’ll make sure to keep that in mind and can see if The person I was thinking of could be the best fit or if someone else on the team would be a would be a better fit Yeah, and this is very common like we we get slotted even from investors We get slotted in legal tech and have to like correct that no, we’re not legal tech We’re not building tech. [Arpan Nanavati]: Consumers don’t even experience our tech at all. They experience the human. Uh, right. [Michael Houck]: So is that just so I totally understand that is the, is the sort of model for you guys that your lawyers can service more clients because, okay, got it. Yeah. Yeah. [Arpan Nanavati]: Like for example, if a partner at a firm is able to service 10 clients in a quarter, we’re able to do hundreds of clients in a quarter. So it just makes our margins, our operations really fast. And not only that, what this means is because it’s powered by tech, LLMs, et cetera, customers get fast service. And because our margins are high, we’re able to pass those margins back to the customer such that their bill gets cut in half. Versus them consuming Gundersen or Corey or one of these firms, everyone is a human who’s doing some work on billable hours. Versus here, there’s just one partner. Everyone below the partner is an AI persona, which is managed by the legal partner. It’s not managed by the customer. [Michael Houck]: That’s a killer model. [Michael Houck]: That’s a really good model. I’m a big fan. I mean, you’ve probably seen it for the news. I’m a big fan of sort of the service model, but hypercharged by AI tools and LLMs. And yeah, the fact you guys are able to pull that off with going from 10 to hundreds per partner, that’s That’s pretty cool, man. [Arpan Nanavati]: Yeah, no, we’re excited about this. We just want to scale this off and then see where it lands Yeah, we want to be in the marketplace It’s still hard to get clients because they don’t know about us. [Michael Houck]: They haven’t heard about us, you know, unless it’s a referral from someone But Yes, our process is pretty simple You know, we work with founders, so we’re not trying to put a ton of money meetings on your calendar or anything like that. If you want to do the content interview style, we can do that. But for most clients, we’re able to pull it off without needing to have recurring calls. So basically, the way it works is that we’ll do one kickoff at the beginning. You’ll fill out an onboarding form about the voice and the ICP and things like that. We’ll do research based on that leading up to a kickoff call. And we’ll have some questions that we’ll run through to go deeper on those. After that, we pop into Slack. We have a Slack connect channel between us. And every week, the writer who you’re sort of paired with, who’s like your partner, it’s not like some pool where whoever’s available takes your stuff. You have one guy who’s your guy. They’ll send over questions that came up during their research every Monday about topics that seem interesting to them. Obviously, if you have topics you want us to write about, you can always send them in Slack. But that’s not on you. We will be doing that. Research proactively. And then we’ll drop those in Slack on Monday. If we get like voice notes back from you by midweek to two, three minutes, four minutes, whatever, the more rambly you get, the better, because that’s how we get the sort of emotion and intonation and nuances and all that. So if we get those back from you by midweek, then that gets incorporated in that week’s batch of content, which will be delivered by end of week. And yeah, we’ll work early on to get a couple weeks ahead so that we’re not sort of scrambling from week to week. But yeah, that’s it. You can do edits after that if you’d like, Early on, probably more editing. As we go on, we nail the voice, less editing. And then we have a content ops team that’ll go in there and they’ll handle scheduling, they’ll handle profile optimization, anything else you sort of want us to do. I know you don’t want us to do engagements. That’s totally fine. Uh, normally they would go in and also do engagements because that can sort of help boost the impressions of a post because the platforms think that like a conversation is happening and they’re like, Oh, well, let’s surface this conversation, but there’s no obligation for us to do that. So we can, um, we can totally avoid that too. [Arpan Nanavati]: It’s, it’s not a huge impact. Um, I’ll tell you what, and I’ll tell you the reasoning too, like why we don’t want to engage is when we’re posting on LinkedIn like this is such a provocative concept that there’s a bunch of butthurt lawyers that keep on like challenging and then it turns into this fight even if we don’t engage between people that are pro AI and it’s very apparent in legal services versus any other industry. Lawyers are just assholes. And like, we’re able to get that service done and like half the cost and they’re like, well, where’s the ethics? Like, it’s just a complete nonsense nuance. They’re scared. Yeah. So it turns into that and it turns into like, who are you? And it just gets personal. So like, that’s why I don’t want to get into that debate at all, because there’s also these lower communities who are out there who are trying to like troll. Attempt at every single AI legal startup that is saying we’re going to want to replace lawyers. They just like come like crazy, uh, on all social platforms. So that’s kind of why I just want to avoid the whole engagement piece. We will, we will 100% avoid it. [Michael Houck]: But also if we’re going to get that many comments from angry lawyers, like that’s going to drive impressions on its own. So that’s great. [Arpan Nanavati]: Well, it’s going to drive impressions for lawyers. It’s not going to drive impressions for, Our ICP, which is the founder who’s looking to hire a law firm, right? The algorithm works that, so it’s like, it kind of reinforces the type of people and it’s like, no, we don’t want to appeal to the lawyers at all. We’re not building for lawyers at all. We’re building only for founders. So that’s kind of where we need to draw a line. [Michael Houck]: So should we then, if we’re getting those comments, should we go in and proactively like block those accounts then so that they’re not leaving more comments in the future? [Arpan Nanavati]: Is there a way to like do a post with no comments? [Michael Houck]: Um on linkedin, I don’t think there is On x on x I believe you can yeah on x you can mute replies, but on linkedin. I don’t think you can Got it. [Arpan Nanavati]: Let’s just play with it. Let’s roll with it. Uh With the stance that we’re not going to respond or engage with any of the comments Um, and then see where it lands up Okay, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Um So yeah, I mean, pretty much that’s how we would work then. We’d hop in Slack. Again, if you want to hop on calls with the writer, you’re more than welcome to, but that’s not our default model. And I’m trying to think if there’s anything else worth calling out. No, I mean, the writing team, these are folks I’ve worked with for a while in various capacities. The way we work internally, just for context, is it’s myself and Blakey Moll, who you might also have seen around social. He has like 90-something thousand on Twitter and 30 something thousand on LinkedIn. He was the first CMO at Copy AI. He’s like our editor in chief. So everything that we send to you will have already been edited by him. And then in a lot of cases, I’ll take a look at as well, especially early on when we’re trying to nail the voice and things like that. But I’m your primary contact for anything that goes on. So if you’re like having an issue with something or if you want to give us feedback or if you want to check in on like goals and metrics and stuff like that, you and I can sync up on that. So, um, we’ll be tracking performance from our side. Obviously we won’t have the context of like conversion to customer. So we rely on you to, to share that with us, but, um, we’ll have like a reporting dashboard that we share with you too. [Arpan Nanavati]: Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay. Um, one last thing, jumping ahead on the pricing side, we want to do this as a longer engagement, like a 12 month thing and not a month to month thing. So I don’t know. If you want to discuss that right now, or if you want to discuss that later. I know you’re in Hawaii. Just get your coffee, get your fruit, papaya, whatever. Think about it as to what makes sense to sharpen the pencils there. And we can sign whatever annual contract or whatever that is, just to make sense of the numbers for you as well. Well, sounds good. [Michael Houck]: What I can do then is I’ll send Dylan, you said you and your co-founder, give me a sense of frequency that you want on the two accounts. Like, is this, do we want to do like, you know, the full? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Either me or either him, once a week. [Arpan Nanavati]: Sorry, so just one post a week? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, just like, isn’t that what the model is? [Michael Houck]: One post a week is usually lower than we, typically the way we work is that our standard is three long form per week, and then equivalent short form. So if you’re like, oh, I don’t want long form, then we do daily short form. We can also do two. If we’re just doing one post total between the two of you per week, I mean, since it’s long term, we might be able to do it, but I would need to see if the writer recognizes it. [Arpan Nanavati]: Maybe it’s too much, is what I feel. Um, so if anything, one post from me, one post from him on a weekly basis, uh, so at least from the point of symphony and from the point of customer, they’re saying two posts, uh, about why they should use symphony and not hire other lawyers or whatever that is. Sure. Um, couldn’t be a good cadence. [Michael Houck]: That could work cause then that could fit into our, our sort of normal two posts. Per week model. So yeah, let me send over a notion doc that does have all options lined up. Since we’re doing long term, I can do a discount off of what our normal rate would be for two posts a week. And I will go from there. Give me a sense of like, are these like long form? Like how long do we want these posts to be? Just so I can have a sense of that. [Arpan Nanavati]: I don’t know. Not like a blog post or a sub stack type of thing. I don’t know, maybe a paragraph, worst case two paragraph. I have no idea what, what works well. I don’t know. You’re the expert. You tell me. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: My guess would be that we’ll want to experiment over the first couple of months and, and see what performs best. But usually if we want to go provocative, usually it’ll be a little bit, like, I’d say medium to long length. So like a couple, I mean, we’ll break it up. So like, it’ll be one line per, per paragraph, basically. But in terms of actual length, you know, a couple paragraphs, and then we’d, we’d, yeah, we’d space it out. So that makes sense. [Arpan Nanavati]: Okay. Yeah, like, whatever works, I don’t know this model. And like I said, like, it’s not about top leadership, it’s just straight up, maybe some examples go in, even, you know, fake examples of founders running issues. And we’ve put that in there, so that type of content, which is question and answer, and then why you should use Symfony and not someone else. [Michael Houck]: Cool. That sounds good. But yeah, OK, so for context, our standard pricing in this case would be $2,500 per month for two. But we can drop that down to $1,995 in this case, especially since we’re not going to be doing a ton of engaging on the posts as well. And yeah, and because it’s long-term too, so that’s fine. Okay. So 2000. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Arpan Nanavati]: All right, let’s do it. Send me that form, whatever we can start putting in the details in there and we can get this rolling. Cool. [Michael Houck]: And if you want to send over like a formal company name and address and things like that, I’ll get like a PandaDoc. Set up for us as well. [Arpan Nanavati]: Okay, cool. Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Awesome, man. [Michael Houck]: Thank you so much Michael Excited for this. Let’s uh, let’s go replace some lawyers Full full offer let’s take Wilson’s and see me down. [Arpan Nanavati]: Let’s take a let’s take them all down. Awesome. All right. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks, man Talk soon, dude. Bye