How I Raised £1M And Built A Contract Software For Non-Lawyers

Charles Brecque

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Published: October 2nd, 2022

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Charles Brecque

Founder, Legislate

$5K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Legislate

legislate.tech

from Oxford, UK

started April 2020

$5,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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platform

Webflow

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Ahrefs

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Charles Brecque, the founder and CEO of Legislate, a legal tech company that makes it easy for non-lawyers to safely create lawyer-approved contracts, and track the data they contain.

Legislate’s software platform offers a suite of contract templates that can be tailored to specific requirements by answering simple questions and electronically signing all within the platform. Post contract signature, the data can be easily tracked and queried.

Legislate is now a team of 12 and we have over 120 paying clients split between property and employment.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

Although I’m not a lawyer, I spent half my time processing contracts when I was doing business development at a startup. Creating, negotiating, and tracking contracts was unnecessarily slow and painful because the contracts were not machine-readable.

Instead, the contracts were lawyer-readable which meant that time-poor lawyers needed to review them. After losing deals due to slow processing, I wanted to find a way to make contracts machine-readable so that they could be processed more efficiently with technology.

I identified knowledge graphs as a great way to make contracts machine-readable and that was the idea that helped me secure some initial angel funding (£150k) to get started. Knowledge graphs are great at modeling tangled information and contracts contain hyper-tangled information which is why knowledge graphs are a great fit.

I started building an MVP in April 2020 with some contractors and managed to secure some early customers on the property who didn’t want to sign contracts with their tenants in person during the lockdown. The customers were very happy, and as a result, we were able to raise £1M in March 2021.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Before writing any code, we spent a couple of weeks iterating on envision to design the screens and optimize the user experience. We deliberately constrained ourselves to design a mobile-first experience even though we anticipated contracts to be created on Desktop.

This would ensure that the app would look good on Desktop and work on mobile devices. After we built the first version and released it to users, we quickly identified gaps and unnecessary complexities in our product workflows.

After 3 months we decided to go back to the drawing board and redesign the core workflows which had issues to make them more intuitive for users. We also had to redesign the app to take into account client feedback such as teams and user management. The following screenshot is an example of our “mobile-first” invision board.

Describe the process of getting your first few customers

We never “launched” as we started early on with beta customers and made iterations continuously so never scheduled a formal launch. We found our first customers by going through our personal and angel investor network.

Our initial customers were interested in our digital contracting technology because it was the beginning of lockdown and they didn’t want to meet their counterparties in person. Whilst this was a great opportunity to test the product, the users were interested in a value proposition that was slightly different from what we set out to do which is to make the data in contracts usable.

This meant that we would ultimately need to educate these customers about the true value of our product and work with them to understand how we could translate our value proposition in their own words to prospective customers.

We offered free trials to our early customers until they felt that they were unlocking significant value from our SaaS product. We then worked with them to define the right price.

When things don’t go to plan, it’s essential to view setbacks as an opportunity to do things in a radically different way and better.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

In terms of our go-to-market strategy, we consistently published content from day 1 which after a couple of months led to meaningful traffic and inbound leads. I would initially publish the content on medium to reach a wider audience but switched back to our blog when our website started to rank.

If I were to start again, I would publish our content on the website first and redistribute it to medium to get the best of SEO and social distribution. Regardless of whether anyone reads content, it’s important to show search engines that you care about your website and regularly keeps it up-to-date. Doing this might have brought us 1-2 months ahead of our SEO journey.

Our most successful go-to-market strategy to date has been SEO. We dabbled in Facebook and google ads but ultimately were not ready to spend enough on ads to properly assess paid advertising as a valid channel.

We’ve developed our SEO strategies in-house and consistently posting content has been our best strategy so far. Had advertising worked for us, it might have been interesting in the early days to acquire some beta users this way to help test and shape the product. The early days of SEO results can be viewed in the following screenshot.

In 2021 we published on average 1 article every other day and in 2022 we’ve been posting on average between 1 and 2 articles a day. Everyone in the team is tasked to write an article that allows us to maintain our publishing velocity and cover a broad range of topics that will appeal to our target audience.

Whilst inbound customers are not always the most communicative, they have significantly shaped our product thanks to product analytics. Understanding, where inbound customers drop off or get blocked has been essential for improving the product and making it more foolproof.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

The business is venture-backed and not profitable because we are prioritizing growth. We still have a lot of things to build and opportunities to explore which is why we do not envisage profitability in the near future.

In particular, we have been working on our Public API so that third-party software platforms can integrate Legislate contract creation capabilities into their apps.

Building an API version of our product has been a great way to go back to the basics of how our app works. Selling to product managers and developers has also been an interesting experience compared to selling Legislate to our existing clients in property and employment.

As the API will require development time to implement, we’ve made the API documentation as user-friendly as possible and have created guides and tutorials to minimize the time it takes to integrate contracts into their software applications.

As we expand our reach through API integrations and partnerships, we aim to add more contract types to our platform so that we can cover a broader range of industries and contract use cases. This will also include expanding to other jurisdictions as we are currently only focused on England and Wales.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Hiring the right talent for your startup and keeping them motivated as the company goes through different stages of growth will always be a challenge.

The employees who are willing to bet on a startup when it’s just an idea are not necessarily the same employees who are willing to join a startup with revenue, a team, and established processes.

It’s important to be able to understand the attributes of both types of candidates to optimize the recruitment process.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My favorite tool is Webflow which we use to build and host our website. Webflow community templates are great for launching quickly and I love that I can iterate on the live website quickly without needing to get engineers involved. I think Webflow is also great for SEO as they offer a lot of control over SEO features like meta tags which are either locked or require a plug-in with other CMS platforms.

We use GoSquared to track website analytics because it’s easier to digest daily than Google Analytics. We use ahrefs to monitor our SEO performance and quickly identify potential problems with our website such as broken links or pages missing key SEO information.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

The most influential books I’ve read are Never split the difference by Chris Voss and Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Both books offer practical advice which has shaped how I view and interact with the world.

The two main podcasts I listen to are:

Panic with friends by Howard lindzon: Howard is a great investor with an even better sense of humor. He brings on a diverse range of influential guests and the conversations are a joy to listen to.
20-minute VC: a classic podcast for founders and investors which provides very actionable advice in every episode.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Being an entrepreneur is lonely so I would recommend joining founder societies or building a network of founders and mentors as they will ultimately be the only ones who can relate to your success and failure. When things don’t go to plan, it’s essential to view setbacks as an opportunity to do things in a radically different way and better.

Another key piece of advice is to persevere patiently. It took us a whole year before noticing any meaningful results from our SEO efforts. Consistent work will compound in time and quickly snowball when you least expect it!

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We are hiring paid roles in sales and marketing over the next 6 months. Not all roles are advertised so reach out to [email protected] if you are interested in finding out more!