An Insight Becomes a Business (+news)
Or, How one company's thesis aligned with my desire to teach.
Last week I encouraged you to build your business on an insight, and I promised a specific example.
That overlaps with some personal news so let’s get to it.
#personalnews
I’ve taken on a new role as Chief Community Officer at Law Insider.
This is a big deal both for me and for Law Insider. It’s reflective of my own ideas about community and Law Insider’s bet on content-based growth. Amid cries of constrained tech budgets and complaints about user attention, we’re pushing back. And for good reason.
Let me share the nature of the role, the insight it’s built upon, and how you can discover actionable insights of your own.
The Business Case for Educational Content
To understand this alignment between my mission and Law Insider’s, you first need to understand why Law Insider is unique.
A decade ago, Preston Clark and a fledgling team acted on an insight that became Law Insider. They realized that they could combine publicly available contracts data and modern search tools to generate massive internet traffic. Then they captured email addresses.
The original insight was based on a gap in the marketplace: cheap access to public contract data existed online, but it was disorganized and unusable as a sampling tool. If Law Insider did the difficult work of separating contracts from undifferentiated data sources, tagging metadata, creating a functioning search feature, and structuring it for public search engines like Google, traffic would come. That traffic became a large list of people interested in contracts.
Vital as that work was, a list on its own is not a business model. They needed a way to create a customer from their list. They needed an offer.
Several years into the building phase, Law Insider made a premium offer. They’d remove ads and, later, sell increased access to sample clauses and contracts. They validated that a healthy percentage of their traffic was interested in more than downloading a single document; they might be interested in the craft of contracting.
That’s when I came along. We began to make contract training offers to the list. In exchange for time and attention, subscribers would get accessible training in the form of YouTube videos, ebooks, and webinars (see what we’ve built here).
We learned some things as we shipped these forms of content. We saw that this list of contracts-interested folks contained a number of supernerds, people whose level of interest drove them to exchange time for learning.
So we made some more offers. We promoted additional content products that we developed as well as paid products and services from other companies. We learned that the list included a big chunk of people who’d pay to draft and understand contracts.
A database became traffic which became a list; that list provided data after receiving behavior triggers (the content); with data in hand, we can offer products customized to the interests of different list segments, including content products.
My role now is to create a system for teaching contracts at scale, both to engage current customers and to surface new buyers from our list with premium content. Law Insider’s need to create a buyer of premium content aligned with my desire to teach lawyers at scale.
An insight became a business model and I got on board a well-built train.
I’ll share more about the work we’ll be doing together, but let’s try to find an instructive model from Law Insider’s experience.
Finding Your Own Business-Building Insights
Let me propose a five-step framework for identifying insights that can turn into a business:
Identify a harm,
Conduct research,
Analyze findings,
Refine insights, and
Develop a business plan.
First, you want to find a gap in the market. The easiest way to do this is to scratch your own itch, but beware of the biases that engenders. A harm that annoys and a harm that’s worth spending cash to kill aren’t the same thing.
Second, talk to some people. Are you alone in feeling the harm? How much would people pay to relieve the harm? What are the current “good enough” solutions in the market? Are you poised to make something notably better or are there suitable replacements that are too established to beat? Where can you find people who are aware of the harm and have money to relieve it?
Third, look for patterns in your responses. If you’re seeing repeated complaints and can imagine solutions, that’s great. But hold the plot loosely. Customer feedback is filled with useless noise. Take it as one data point and keep stretching.
Fourth, go back to the harm and the gap in the market. Define a thesis: what is your problem-solution pair? Is it different from your original idea? If not, check again. It’s pretty rare that your original insight was 100% accurate so watch out for bias.
Fifth, craft a business plan. More important than how you solve a problem is how you create a customer. Where will you find prospective customers? How will you make offers to them? What allies and collaborators will you need to recruit in order to create supply for prospects’ demand?
While there is a lot of baggage behind each item on the list, always stay focused on tying a problem-solution pair to a traffic source. If you can’t connect with people who have the pain/will pay for the cure, you don’t have a business.
Test Your Insight as a Model First
This list is reminiscent of the Legal Innovation Canvas I created for Clio at the beginning of the pandemic (with a h/t to my friend John Grant). It’s similar to the Business Model Canvas you’re probably familiar with, but with a focus on individual insights (and, obviously, law firms).
There’s guidance in the piece I wrote for Clio on brainstorming so I encourage you to check it out if you’re in search of an idea.
Here’s a link to that resource.
The bottom line is this: as you build, hold yourself accountable for defining an insight. Business success is more often about people trends than tool upgrades. If you can find an unmet human need, you might have an idea worth pursuing.
We can pursue together.
Keep building.