First mistake was trying to market to _students_
Not sure how long this person has been out of school, but students are notoriously cheap. I’m not surprised there was no interest when monetizing/charging.
Maybe a collab between law schools and including the tool there. Students get it “free” and you get paid by the law school.
I agree they're not an ideal target but I've been surprised to hear indie projects that succeed with students as customers.
Mitchell Hashimoto created a service that students at UW could use to find out when registration slots were open for high-demand classes and made $160k/yr from it.[0]
Aaron Francis sold a study guide for an accounting class at Texas A&M[1] and made a lot from it, though I can't find a public source on it.
> Not sure how long this person has been out of school, but students are notoriously cheap.
If you aren't in the US, you wouldn't know, but law students aren't your standard student, and they aren't notoriously cheap. My law school had an overpriced café in the basement that targeted only students, and it was packed with us every day. We're paying for an education well in excess of $100,000 in tuition alone.
My journal kept our office stocked with tons of treats, just like a dot com startup. We were on the top floor of the building, had a good view, had lots of privacy and quiet, a ton of floor space, couches, a TV, etc.
My journal charged $60/yr and had a circulation of around 1500.
I can't remember what the printing cost was, but that's $90,000 in revenue and zero labor costs. Law students do this work for free because it's the second best thing you can have on your job applications aside from graduating at the top of the class.
So yeah, law students could afford a few subscriptions. :)
Because lawyer salaries in the US have a bimodal distribution, I would not be surprised if the disposable income of law students does as well.
If that's true, then segmenting for one mode or the other might make sense...and conversely just targeting "law students" as a single segment might not.
For example, students with money to eat at the high end cafe would tend to expect a high end experience and expect to pay accordingly, while ramen students would seek a value price and accept a less luxurious experience.
Or to put it another way, some segments are a choice between bread and cake. Other segments are a choice between bread and nothing.
I think the wider point is that, yes, it takes a bit of access to money to be $150k in debt, but when you've got a choice of selling labour-saving stuff to individuals who aren't in work or an adjacent market composed of firms whose hourly rates mean they save the $120 annual subscription cost in about ten minutes...
I don't agree with this - law students still skew more frugal than white collar adults. Definitely less frugal than undergrads - folks coming from the workforce generally have some savings, and I do think there were more students coming from an affluent background than in undergrad. But the spending pattern of the average student was still quite frugal - housing was almost always student housing, many students did not use a car, most were taking significant loans etc.
My wife attended a school ranked ~30th in the US, and was in a leadership position at her school's flagship journal, which was in a dingy room with the only amenity being a microwave.
Maybe it looks different at a T14 school, but the vast majority of journal students I know would have balked at a >$10/month subscription like this
> students are notoriously cheap
if you're going to law school you're already spending a gazillion $ to get through school, and are willing to pay a bit more for a tool that actually saves you time and your sanity
Yeah, explored options like that. The schools and teachers that teach legal writing don't think about giving students experience with the tools they'll have in the workforce - they think that every student needs to learn how to do things by hand. It's an unfortunate way of thinking that I wasn't able to get them out of the mindset of.
That's surprising to me, as the school I went to had reps from the big legal research/writing services with offices on campus, we got free training in using them, and the idea was we'd be hooked on those very expensive services when we were out in the real world!
First mistake was trying to market to _students_
And yet there's something to it. Of course it's a nothing market, from the standpoint of immediate revenue. But the students will become professionals in just a few years, and if you can get them to not only use your tools, but to be thinking "this is just how its done" -- that, in theory, can help you establish your market.
This was Venmo's strategy, apparently -- there's was a completely different vertical, of course, but they went for the "long game" in this regard, and it seems to have paid off for them.
Inspiring story. TL;DR: Built a legal tech for students, tried selling for a while, didnt get a lot of traction and then ultimately sold the project to someone else.
I think you did a lot of things the right way but probably went after a tough market. Students. Students are the most broke category and then comes indiehackers :). I would usually refrain from selling to these 2.
"A quick market-sizing exercise: there are ~110k law students in the US, ~25% of whom are in journals, and half of those are 2nd years. If I could penetrate even 10% of that market at $10/month, I’d be at $165k in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)"
Haha. This is a classic newbie founder mistake thinking all you need is a % of the market. We all have made it. Now you know. Market estimate should be made bottom up, not top down.
"find the connectors"
This is so key. If you are in a niche industry, finding the right connections who can open doors can be huge.
"Don't be a solo founder"
As a solo founder (even though with a small team), I couldn't agree more. I know having co-founders brings in risks of conflict etc but I am so ready to build a fresh team with cofounders who are thinking about the business 24-7 like I do. If you have a team like that and you work well together, that's a dream.
Tell us more about your next thing.
> Haha. This is a classic newbie founder mistake thinking all you need is a % of the market. We all have made it. Now you know. Market estimate should be made bottom up, not top down.
dang, my goal was 3% of my market. what should i be doing instead?
get 10 customers and aim to grow it by 100%. Then repeat. Again. And. Again.
oh well then that was already a goal
Thank you! Glad you found it interesting and it resonated with you.
You can find out more about the next thing here - https://mura-website.notion.site/Founding-Engineer-at-Mura-1...
tl;dr - helping commercial HVAC providers accelerate and automate their order-to-cash cycle. Big and interesting market with a lot of opportunities for efficiencies
Thanks. HVAC space is huge and as a home owner who literally just paid $1000 to replace a control board, I know how critical that market is. Will check it out.
It's targeting the self-styding people the same? Like tools to learn by themselves?
Doesn't Zotero already do this? See this LibGuide from the Unviersity of Hawa'ii Law School: https://law-hawaii.libguides.com/TLC_Research_Writing/Zotero
Interesting post. It's been a while since I was in law school (and it wasn't in the US) but I don't remember spending anything close to 10 hours a week doing citations. I don't remember it being a significant portion of my workload at all. I was on the editorial board of a journal where I was reviewing a lot of citations, but it was on the authors to actually do them, and if I found they weren't doing them correctly it was a simple matter of "please ensure your citations conform to our house style" (it wasn't Bluebook). I wouldn't have paid to use this software either, though it might have been a worthwhile investment for the journal itself to make (or the law school, as others have mentioned).
I’d note that most U.S. law journals work very differently from what you describe. Strict Bluebook compliance is their raison d'être, much more than legal scholarship. I am not exaggerating that. (And authors are not generally expected to get it right themselves, fleets of law student editors do the checking and correcting.)
Thanks for sharing. A refreshing, and more real perspective on business compared to other “indie hackers”.
How many active users did you have when you sold?
Was the sale price anything useful or just a small bandaid to not make the whole experience feel like a throwing savings in a hole?