25A – What’s Next?

Existing Market. 

My next move would be expansion into larger firms greater than four attorneys and multiple areas of practice.  The software will be more robust and powerful to handle more transactions and multiple profiles for many attorneys/users.  

Customer 1	She believes there is opportunity to version solutions based on practice areas and form partnerships with some of the independent solution providers.  For instance, there are solutions for standard forms that should be incorporated into my software solution.  She also felt we should be thinking about marketing and how we plan to get attorneys to buy our software.
Customer 2	He found our solution to be more comprehensive than he imagined and found it challenging to think of a next option for us and could not come up with any suggestions.  He thought we should be thinking about data security and encryption given the risk of client’s private information.
Customer 3	He believed there was an opportunity to integrate within a firm’s website.  When we talked about our idea for a client portal, he said he would like his entire web and software presence to be managed by one provider.  Thought we should be thinking about web design capabilities so we can provide an entire we package.

Given the feedback from customers in our existing market, I feel confident we are on the right track with our solution.  Some feedback suggests we should think about more integration/functionality, but I am certain that will add complexity and slow us down initially.  

I believe we should keep our current offering but enhance it to better suit the needs of a larger firm with many attorneys.  Our feedback has been limited to conceptual conversations and we need to develop a beta version to really accelerate development into this new segment.

  New Market.

My new market will be focused on larger firms beyond solo practitioners with more than four attorneys.   

  

Customer 1	Felt there was a need for consolidation of software and believes ours would be useful for them, especially if there was benchmarking across the firm.  Thought we should focus more on automation and social media plug-ins that allow them to focus more on lawyering and less on relationship maintenance.
Customer 2	Was hesitant about one software package doing everything and thought that caused significant risk.  If we were to become unavailable, her entire operation would stall.  She instead thought we should focus solely on case management and social.

What surprised me the most was the customer who was against one software solution handling everything.  I never thought of this point, and really felt that it had merit and is worth figuring out.  I was pleased to hear that our approach to consolidating customer/case management, accounting and marketing/social efforts were needed.  

This new market does not seem to value consolidation as much as the smaller firms.  They have paralegals and office staff to handle more of the administrative, marketing and financial tasks.  It does not seem to favor the consolidation.