Julian: Hey everyone. Thank you so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have Zeb Anderson, co-founder and CEO of LegalQ. LegalQ removes the pain of finding an attorney with an app that connects users to attorneys on demand via voice, video, or chat for a free consultation. Zeb, so excited to chat with you.

I'm, I'm always excited to chat with founders who've worked in a, a particular industry for a certain amount of time. You know, create this, this amazing product that's really challenging or innovating or, or even just creating a new point of access for the a user base. And you know, we really love to get to the, into the weeds of, of, you know, how you conceive the idea and, and where you are now.

But before we get into all that good stuff, what were you doing before you started LegalQ?  

Zeb: Yeah. And Julian, thank you so much for the awesome intro. I appreciate you and looking forward to this. Yeah. Before LegalQ, I you know, lifelong developer love to do web apps and just kind of get my Feet wet with that.

Had a startup in like oh nine around like location based couponing apps when like, location based. Everything was sexy, right? Yeah. And it was fun to do. We, we had a little exit, nothing crazy on that. But then afterwards I wanted more punishment, so I went to law school and became a lawyer. And I, I love conflict resolution, right?

Like, how do you. Get people into a room and not have 'em hate each other at the end of a litigation or just, you know, trying to solve something and you know, got the tools from that. And then after law school went to work at a big MedTech company called Medtronic and they do or my roles there were started in compliance, right?

It's kinda like half it nerd stuff. Half legal. And then I did internal audit, which was cool cuz I got to learn. , you know, everything from like order to cash, procure to pay, like all these like enterprise kind of processes and operations. Vastly different than a startup, right? But also same principles apply, just bigger scale, which is cool.

And then final or second to final, I guess, role was I led an analytics team for channel management and corporate strategy. Saw a bunch of cool ways to do that globally and just trying to get people access to therapies at a simpler. And then I did some like developer relations kind of roles as well.

So that's pre LegalQ.  

Julian: Yeah, it's incredible. I, I love founders and chatting with founders who've worked at larger companies and really seen the internal mechanics. I think it, it brings, you know, maybe a level of maturity to their startup. And I, I'm curious in terms of your experience, you know, at Medtronic learning the inner workings of, of a large and successful organization.

What, what, what we're doing, are they doing right that maybe has influenced how you built or, or think about when, when you are building LegalQ and, and structuring your company, is there anything that you took away that they did well or didn't do well that, that you're kind of using for that experience now?

Zeb: Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I think couple things they did well was, so first off, everybody that joins Medtronic has basically like drinks a Kool-Aid a little bit. This thing called the Mission, which is literally like, kind of like a, a, you know, different tenants that apply to the success of the company.

It was written by the, the old CEO like 50 years ago. You literally like get a medallion. So like it's a little cheesy on some things, but it, people actually do like appreciate it, right? And it's like, look to that as kind of like the, the constitution of like, what is the culture of the company? And use that to kind of define buy-in and like success of like how to do that effectively.

And I think just having that kind of touch point of like, everybody is behind this one mission, right? And moving the ball forward is, is kind of nice. To, to kind of drive culture and, and positive impact on from that lens. So I think that from a culture lens was a really cool way to do it. Yeah. They also do a good job of just making sure the at least from like the, the angles that I've looked at, at, you know, from like a technical standpoint you know, it's, it's a massive a hundred thousand person company.

And so like they have to have these pretty enterprise grade e r P systems and, you know, focusing everything together. And behind the scenes it you, I know maybe be surprised or not surprised, but a lot of it's still duct tape, right? Getting like this data to get to this system and everything in between.

So like you don't be afraid of that as a startup, right? Because like it's still even as a 30 billion revenue company mm-hmm. fighting some of those same battles. And obviously you want to minimize the amount of tech debt you have, like the amount of. Legacy systems that cause pain down the road. But at the same point, you know, if, if it takes you know, some duct tape to get the product to the right person at the right time, like use the damn duct tape.

So I think that's, that's helpful.  

Julian: Yeah. They use duct tape on the Apollo 12, so it must be doing something right.  

Zeb: Exactly, exactly. It's a miracle product.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. But besides, obviously the product is different, but what is, I guess, and in your eyes, what's different about your previous startup from now and, and what are the, the, the lessons you learned that you think maybe impact what you're doing now at LegaLQ?

Zeb: Yeah. Yeah, that's another good question. I think the biggest difference was probably, Kind of my maturity in the, the product phases, in different elements to that. I still didn't get it right by the way, with LegalQ cuz I overbuilt way too much. And you know, we had, I don't know damn near 30% of the product overbuilt.

Right? And, but with the first startup yapa, basically we didn't have any customer feedback from the start. We just kind of, you know, put our finger in the air like, The world needs a location based couponing app, so let's build it. And then we forgot to ask the customers or you know, either side of the market.

And I guess I have a flaw in that both of my startups are dual sided market places, which are very, very painful. Yeah. But I think just the maturity on the product side to know, like you do need that customer feedback early and if you don't get that right away, you are gonna be unless you're Steve Jobs, you know, at the whim of literally.

Doing it wrong and you gotta rebuild and move back and forth, and that's a painful process too. So I think just learning a little bit more to trust that the people you're gonna sell to are the ultimate people that should help Define. The characteristics of that product.  

Julian: Yeah. And what, and what are the conversations like when you're, you know, I, I run a company, which is a two sided marketplace as well, and we oftentimes, I think, you know, should be asking more questions.

So what, from, from what you've learned, what are the conversations you're having with both sides of the marketplace and when do you define is the right time to have those conversations? Is it at certain periods or is it all the time? What's that conversation like?  

Zeb: Yeah. I love that question because we're, we're still working through that, to be honest, on the best practices.

I think the, the earlier you get it, I mean, you need to have some concept, right? Like this is. You know, we wanna help attorneys find a simpler way to get connected to people. Because it's 2022, it shouldn't be this hard. We have this fun thing called the internet that can help this process, you know?

And then on the user side, like it sucks to try to figure out who, which attorney to talk to, right? Like if you're in a new city or you just don't have a, a lawyer friend to refer you to somebody, like it's a painful process today to try to Google it. You're on hold for half of 'em. And then like, Maybe the first one sucks, so you gotta go with a different one, right?

And that's just a bad process too. So you can start from that pain point and then it, it helps if you give them some direction, right? Like, we're thinking of a technical solution, like here's the wire frame of a web app that we're thinking about implementing for this. Would this be helpful? Where do you see the pain points?

So I think giving them enough of like a flavor of the problem set and the people that are directly affected by that, but also giving. A starting point, right? Blank sheet of paper is great, but at the same point, that can get you some pretty divergent answers that you just don't need and you're wasting time with.

So if you can give 'em the semblance of a structure first, then they can say like, I like this flow, or I like the fact that I can talk to them after three screens. Or you know, like it's maybe one screen too many or something. Yeah. Then it gives them kind of a, a touch point that they can build on the thing that you have.

Hopefully your first instincts were close enough that you. Build on that to, to get 'em to ultimately what they want. Yeah. Is that align to like what you guys use?  

Julian: No. Yes. Yes. So we would build a process and then we have maybe an hypothesis, then we go through like a polling system cuz we hold our community and telegram.

And we can Oh, nice. Build on that, that community and those polling questions kind of help guide. Okay. What would be helpful? What would not be helpful in the degree to what it would actually be impactful. Obviously if it hits a certain threshold, then we have to at least go down the rabbit hole and start building it out, which has led us to, you know, do a lot of very specific improvements.

But micro improvements that I think have compounded on on themselves, which, which is Sounds easy, but it's probably the, the hardest thing to do.  

Zeb: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel you.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I, going, going back to, you know, your background you know, you mentioned that, you know, in the notes before the show that you know, there was something particularly interesting about going through an accelerator.

You've been through a few accelerators. What was, I guess, the benefits of going through that as, as a founder and building out this product versus if you didn't go through it, and I'm assuming you know, in your first startup you just kind of went in full bore into it. But what, what were the benefits about going through an accelerator and.

What would be your advice to startups who are thinking about it?  

Zeb: Yeah. It's, it's you learn a lot, right? So we did actually technically three of 'em. So the first one is called beta. It's like a non-dilutive, you know, you don't give 'em equity kind of company or accelerator that just kind of your feet wet, learn the, some of the fundamentals of company building.

Like you, you just kinda have these like micro sessions of different. Topic areas, which was helpful, and I think it really helped us kind of think about the areas that we were probably lacking in those different spaces. Yeah. But, you know, you didn't really have like a, a, a productive kind of raise point at the end of that.

Right. It was more of a. Company building, learning how to, to do it well. And then we did Techstars, which is much more formal, you know, a lot more rigor around kind of their processes on everything. It was a hybrid program, so it was two weeks in in Iowa. That's where the, the program was at.

And then we did remote and then we did another week there for the demo day. And so it's, it's a lot. Kind of in the weeds company building stuff, right? Like there's a week called Mentor Madness, which is literally like a hundred some different mentors like speed dating through like all these different questions.

So like at the end of this, damn I'm saying you're like, I know my business value prop by heart, right? Yeah. And so like, it's, it's cool on that. They do a good job. Keeping you accountable to like OKRs, KPIs, like you have a weekly call check in with the rest of the cohort. Who is by the way, awesome. Like every company there was super supportive, super kind.

Like I still have a Slack channel with a lot of 'em and you know, we just trade helpful advice when we can and they're supportive and So I think from that lens, like it is really helpful. They give you a hundred k in a convertible and then 20 K grant, so you can, you know, use that to extend your runway a little bit.

And then basically at the end you have your demo day, which is you know, hopefully kind of the catalyst to, to get your raise process started raise, process started. But we actually. We didn't raise at the outset of it, a lot of that was, we kind of had a product shift about halfway through

So that's a little bit of tricky to, you know, get the engineering to the point where it should be good enough to do it. And our traction wasn't there at that time either, to be fair. So but you make a lot of great connections with that. Yeah. Yeah. And then the third one we did this spring was the launch Acceler.

This is Jason Cal can's. He's the this Weekend Startups guy amongst other stuff. They are a lot more focused on just like the raise process. Mm-hmm. . So every week you you have your cohort of seven companies and you basically do a pitch in front of 10 to 15 VCs, angels, syndicates, and you have like a three minute pitch and then two minute q and a session.

And so basically, kind of similar to like the Techstars Mentor Madness, where you just like beat you, you know, these processes. It's by the end of it, like you can literally do it blindfolded and it it's really good way to just meet a bunch of VCs, get your network built. and you know, it sets you up for a pretty good chance for raise at the  

Julian: end of it.

Incredible. And, and just focusing on LegalQ and, and kind of the inspiration for the idea, what was, what was the inspiration or the catalyst that you felt needed, you know, to connect people with resources and, and, and just to be fair, we've had a lot of guests on the show who have two sided marketplace connecting to different.

That particularly, you know, are, are, are made to be connected, but in a lot of ways there's so many barriers to actually getting access. And you know, we had, we had the the, the founder of Zocdoc on here and he was facing a similar issue with just like balancing out thet sided marketplace. But back to it, what was the catalyst to the idea?

And then where, what, what are, what are the interesting or exciting parts about building the two sided marketplace?  

Zeb: Yeah, love that. So the, I think the initial catalyst was when I was at Medtronic, like a lot of my job was to try to see how we can go directly from Medtronic to the end user or the hospital and cut out the middle men, right?

Because all these middle men were just taking their chunk. Yeah. And it was literally like causing people to lose access to life saving therapies, right? Yeah. Like if you have to increase the product. 20000% like that pacemaker is now maybe out of reach for some people. And so like, literally people are dying.

And so pretty, pretty important thing, right? To try to find a more efficient way to get people connected in a simple way. And, you know, I, I had the legal training, the background, and it started seeing other areas where it's just too hard today to find these connection points. Yeah. And I think from an access to justice standpoint, right, it's, you know two-thirds of Americans have an ongoing legal issue at any given time.

Literally two thirds of all Americans at any given time. Wow. In the last four years. And like in California alone, it's insane. Yeah. Right. Yeah. In California alone, 85% of legal circumstances are never fully resolved. So like you have this complex system that nobody truly understands, tons of regulatory capture, tons of bullshit, and truly, , the, the middle men are kind of inhibiting access to justice along that path.

Mm-hmm. . And so, you know, I started thinking through what does that look like to make that process simpler. And so obviously apps, you know, control most of my life. Millennials, you know, gonna millennial and it's just an easier way to do this, right. Like you could. Basically, if you give people the tools to be successful in that complex system, you know, I forget who said it, but like a big VC once said, like, if you, if you want the best successful startups, like pick an industry that has a super low NPS score.

Yeah. And that's highly regulated. And then just like do anything small at that and you'll be a success. Right. Yeah. Because it's such a frustrating process. Today, legal is, Almost by definition just like this cumbersome process to get through. But if you can take a piece of that and make it available and accessible to people, you can start the conversation of like, how do we make this whole system a little bit more efficient?

Mm-hmm. . And if attorneys are paying, you know, 25% less for their customer acquisition costs, you know, over time they can pass that along to the customers themselves. Mm-hmm. . And so, you know, that's kind of my hope is to like take some of. You know, froth in the system today, cut out the middlemen and hopefully the end user can have that same access that that patient had at Medtronic to that pacemaker, you know, through legal help.

Yeah. Mixing metaphors a little bit, but that's the goal for it. Yeah. And I, sorry. No, no, continue, please. I, I think the, the question about the, the dual side of marketplace as a whole, like what things have surprised me is just a yeah, I should have seen it coming cuz I am a lawyer, but like, it's so hard to sell to lawyers, right?

Like they literally are the most risk averse group of humans on the planet and rightfully so, right? Like, you want your lawyer to be. Here's the things to do to minimize risk. Yeah. And then to try to sell them, you know, left of the adoption curve of, Hey, this is a new product, check this out. It's a simpler way to do this.

Like you truly need, like market education. You need to show some proof points, you need to have word of mouth, you know, and then over time, once they get accustomed to that, then you can start, you know, getting over that hump on the adoption curve a little bit more, but. Yeah, I just, I underestimated how hard it is to sell to attorneys, I think is my biggest learning point.

Julian: Yeah. What, what's been like, you know, we talk about one founder literally today said so I'll try not to use the word, but he's like challenges or problems stressed up. Is there any problems that have been particularly difficult around building. Whether it's the product in particular or in just startups in general, that either, you know, the solution took longer than you expected, or it, it was, you had to find a different avenue to maybe go move past or around that problem.

Zeb: Oh man. How much time do you got ? , it's, it's so like, it, everything is a, is is some flavor of a problem, and to be honest, Doing a startup, like you don't, you can't sugarcoat it like it sucks a lot of the times. It's like fighting an uphill battle on an untested product in an untested marketplace that you have to literally convince the world that you have built a better mouse trap for a cheaper price.

Right? Yeah. Like that alone is why 97% of startups fail. Yeah. After two or three years, I think. But that aside, like if you are still crazy enough to try it and still, you know, have the, the belief. In the the ultimate mission, right, which just goes back to the why that's important of what you're doing is actually gonna be impactful to the level that you can fight through those battles like, A little choked up, like it's legitimately the thing that we'll see you through.

Yeah. And so I think from everything from Engineering Challenges, right? Because it's, we, I think over the course of three years at LegalQ, we've had three and a half kind of main development sources, you know, and everybody has their own way to do it. Everybody hates the last way that the last person did it.

And so, you know, just all those challenges that add to the timelines of. You have your just operations challenges, right? Like if you can get someone to the top of the funnel, what's the next step to get 'em, you know, mid-funnel? What's the next step to get 'em onboarded? Yeah. What's the next step to keep them happy on a customer success side?

And so each one of those is a. It's a brand new process. Like it's a brand new way of building out those, and they're gonna fail along the way. And so then you gotta figure out, you know, where in those processes do you have the bandwidth to, to put time and effort into, to resolve it? Because you have to have 'em all.

But at the same point, it's, you know, it's gonna break. And then just some, you know, the funding is always a challenge, right? . I don't think LegalQ is ever, like, we've raised about 600 k I think so far. And I don't think we've ever had more than like three or four months of actual runway, you know, before you're at desk door.

Yeah. And so, you know, just that constant challenge of like needing to get to the next standpoint. And then the pieces that are challenging about that is if you're truly, if you don't have the capacity to have kind of. Strategic vision, right? You're always gonna be at the mercy of these tactical decisions along the way to put a Band-Aid on it, to fix it, to get it to that next stage.

And everything I said earlier about duct tape or band-aids or whatever you wanna use like is true, and you gotta use those. But at some point you need a structural process to say like, what is the actual strategic way we should think about this? And if you don't have the funding to. Kind of breathing room to, you know, try and fail on that.

It, it adds us to the, to the challenge.  

Julian: Yeah. Speaking about, you know, LegalQ right now and where you are, tell us a little bit about the traction, you know, how many users are using, how many attorneys are now, you know, available to, to, and lawyers are available to get access to. What areas are you in?

What are you seeing month to month growth wise? Give us some of the numbers that, that you find exciting  

Zeb: Yeah. So throughout the whole kind of beta process and up to today, we've had 7,500 downloads on iOS and Android from a user side. Ranging from, and this is again, back to the mission, like one of the.

If, if you wanna get motivated, like read some of these questions that people have for these attorneys and like obviously I'll be confidential cause I, you know, really that's a core belief of mine, but they're heartbreaking. Some of them are just soul crushing and, you know, these are people with actual legal and sometimes life or death problems on, you know, this platform.

And to that end, like we have to take every single one of these so seriously. And. , you can't minimize, like, we're not selling socks, right? If someone misses a payment on their, or someone doesn't get their shipment of socks, like, it sucks, but you're gonna be okay. Like, if somebody misses a court date, they could literally go to jail, you know?

And so it's, it's, it's that kind of onus on us to do right by those customers. Yeah. And so on the attorney side I don't have the exact number all in. We're probably about 120 attorneys across all the. Areas of law and the different platforms. We have basically tried to realign those to specific categories of law and jurisdictions as what we've learned along the way is that if you're too kind of scatter shot with your approach, like it's just, it, the Cs are too high because then, you know, if you have to do performance marketing for this niche kind of area in this small town, for this area of.

You're not gonna be able to get your LTV to justify, you know what, you have to cost charge for that. So we've learned to kind of centralize those a little bit more on specific states and areas of law. And that's helped a lot on the tax side to Yeah, to bring that down and ultimately get the attorney a cheaper price for. What they pay us.  

Julian: Yeah. How do you balance, like, you know, a lot of founders when I, when I chat with them, you know, the big concept of mental health comes up because not only is it, you know, a, a challenge to always have to solve problems every day, but also when you're dealing with, I'm sure a little bit more of a, a heavier interaction with your user base.

How, how are you kind of, do you find ways to mitigate the, you know, overall effects or the heaviness that comes with the decisions you have to make or, or the priorities that you have to have, you know, I'm sure that there's some things that you, you can address right away, but you will, and, and, but they, they might still kind of stay resonant In your mind, how do you kind of manage that mental health process?

Zeb: Yeah, I, I love this question. Thanks for asking. Like, it's truly like one of the things I'm passionate about of late, because I struggle with it truly, like I have been in the past three months, depressed Yeah. Quite a few times. And, you know, it's, it's, it's, it sucks and it's, you just have to find out what your triggers are and like how to enable.

you to kind of stay healthier throughout these processes. And a lot of this is due, as I say, not as I do to be honest, . But I think ultimately what I've found to be helpful is just consistent. You know, therapy is, is, is clutch you and to the, to that extent as a leader, right? Like I. Like I used to kind of hide behind it, like an outta office thing on my calendar or something, but now I'm like, no, I'm going to therapy.

Like this is important. Like, yeah, everybody else do the same because it's, it's impactful, right? Yeah. And everybody struggles and everybody has down days and especially when, to your point, like the. The heaviness of the material that you're interacting with is, is really hard to internalize, let alone, you know, customers telling you no all day long.

Yeah. VC is telling you no all day long. You know, like there's a lot to, to handle that. You don't have like a buffer to internalize that in, like say I'm a failure versus. This, you know, system of raising money is a failure. You know what I mean? Yeah. Right, right. I think just helping to get to the place where you can you know, offload some of that stress to a therapist is helpful or a beers with buddies, you know, or whatever that looks like, friends, to just take some of that stressor off it and, and get outside of the bubble, like get outside of the startup is like, it, it reminds me of a lot of like school.

I was a terrible student. So like at the end of the day, I would like, I always have this dread of like the homework that I didn't do throughout the day, like kind of hanging over me. So like, even if I, you know, was out you know, hanging out with, with friends or something, like, I would still have that kind of dread of like, oh shit, I gotta go do my homework, you know, at the end of this thing.

Like if that's what your process is for a startup too, at the end of the day, you can't get out of that. That just hanging over you. So you know, find your time box times when you're at work and you're diligent and you're doing it really well. And then find your bot time box times to just not think about it for a minute.

You know, get out of it, get outta your space and just do something different. And I think that really helps compartmentalize kind of those different. Work life balance, if you wanna call it that, issues. Yeah.  

Julian: No, I appreciate you, you sharing that. And, and I love the, the transparency behind it and especially I've chatted with some founders who, who develop and products around mental health and it's, they repeatedly say it's the consistency of being conscious of where you are and also the, the consistent practice that really kind of mitigates a lot of.

Reaction, stress or reaction kind of feelings that we have that, that may or may not be true or, or may or not be as, as heavy or as as as detrimental sometimes as, as we may perceive them. So it's, it's awesome to see that you continue that practice. More focused on, on legal cue, what are some of the biggest challenges that you face today.

Zeb: Yeah. And and thanks for, for making that light. I appreciate that a lot. Not a lot of it's honestly not talked about enough. Yeah. And I, I really appreciate you bringing that to light, man, so thank you. Of course. On the challenges side, I think the biggest right now is just this is this kind of chicken or the ink thing that we have of like, How much revenue we have that's gonna drive, like what the kind of KPIs that the VCs are looking for to get to that next level of our, our raise.

And then just like one drives the other, but then you kinda have to have like a little bit of both at the same time to make it happen in the, in the order it said. And it's, the other part of it is just you know, knowing what's enough on a product side to be. And I've, I've probably not done a great job of this, to be honest.

Early was like, I think I you know, overbuilt a little bit too much and then kind of had to walk it back and then reexamine like how much of the product we should build for this version to get to the customers that can pay us to like, keep driving that growth And. I think just knowing when it's good enough, right?

Like this is, it gets the job done. You know, you, you're always gonna see all the, all the, the scars and the awards behind the scenes of the product itself. But it's, it's, there's, there's value in it, you know? And I think if, if anybody is kind of struggling with that, just launch it and then fix it along the way.

Especially your early adopters. Yeah. They're gonna be a lot more patient with you, especially. . And in some ways it's a good thing, right? Because then they feel like they have, your customers have ownership of part of the product, right? Like they have, you know, helped define, you know, some of these aspects of it that are maybe not as, as helpful or broken.

And just I think using that is, is there's something human about getting that buy-in Yeah. With the thing that you're using is, is helpful. So yeah, those are probably two challenges today.  

Julian: Yeah. Long-term, if everything goes well, what's the long term vision for LegalQ? .  

Zeb: Yeah. This is the exciting part. It's, it's, we literally have the ability to get everybody on the planet globally access to justice. So there's two, two things with that. One is 73% of the globe uses a civil law system, which is different from like the common law system that is in started like in England and the Commonwealth countries and the US has it.

Basically you have to use judicial law from back in time, stare decisis to say, here's the big messy rule of law. Does this case apply? Does this case apply? How does legislation apply? It's messy. Civil law systems basically say everything under the sun has a rule, right? Like, here's a big book of rules from Napoleonic Law, from Roman Law back in the day.

So everything is, you know Julian's situation legally, here's the area that applies to, it's a one-to-one match, right? And so one of the things we're doing at LegalQ is, if you think about it, these users are asking these legal questions based on the jurisdiction, based on the category, and the attorneys are answering them in, you know, the best way they can by the category and by these areas of law.

And so over time, what emphatically what that's creating is a corpus for machine learning. An AI algorithm to say, Hey, the last 5,000 times this question's been asked in California, here's the best answer to it. Right? And so now the attorneys look like a genius because they're able to quickly and effectively, yeah, give the best answer to that.

But even further in the future, you know, we can turn that into an API license that, to Google and say, Hey, everybody that has legal questions now has access to that on demand. You know, hopefully we can truly help drive access to justice in a simple way and, and just make an impact on the people that need access to, to simple legal help and yeah, and hopefully kick off that process.

Julian: Incredible. I love that. And I always like to ask this question, one for selfish research, but also for my audience as well. Whether it was early in your career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?  

Zeb: Yeah, love this question. I'm gonna look over at the bookshelf . I so I think the, from a business standpoint I think so there's, I'm gonna give you two of 'em and then selfishly a couple others.

So Zero to One is, is seminal, like, in my mind, it's just easy to say. It's almost like this, this brutalist way of thinking about business, right? Like all the cruft decide, like Peter Thiel is very like, this is the facts of life. If you wanna start a business, right? Like get all that fluffy shit outta here.

Like this is what you gotta do to be a successful, and I mean, this is coming from somebody that's definitely loves culture and defining like how do we kumbaya all this stuff? Sometimes you need that kind of just brutally honest, like, here's what you do to be successful. And I think those are some of the good ways to do that along the way.

Another book I've recommended recently is called The Mom Test. Have you read that one? No, I haven't. No. It's, it's basically a book that helps you for what we were talking about earlier. Like ask intelligent questions about your, your product, your business in a way that elicits productive feedback, right?

Because the premise is like, you ask your mom like what she thinks about something. She's like, oh, babe, this is awesome. I love it. This is the best thing you've ever done. It's so good. But that's not helpful feedback, right? Like you need to say like, Hey what are some qualifications to this problem set?

You know, that actually you can elicit helpful feedback and, and grow your product through that way. So those are two I really recommended. And honestly, I love fantasy books like Tolkin Sanderson, like all the old school ones. It helps you just escape, you know, get outta your own head for a little bit.

Helps you think about some fun, scary things in the future, and like it's just, I think that's really important.  

Julian: Incredible. I know we're coming close to the end of the episode, and, and I really appreciate you taking the time to dive into your background, your experience, the challenges that you face now, and all the lessons you've learned and all the information that you, you find inspirational.

But last little bit is I always like to give my guests a chance to give us your plugs. Where can we find you? Where can we support, where can we be part of the mission and the vision of LegalQ? What's your website, your LinkedIn, your Twitters, where can we be a part of, of you and your journey?  

Zeb: Julian, you're your great host. I truly enjoyed this so much and I, I really appreciate that. Yeah, if you wanna check out LegalQ you're either an attorney or somebody that needs legal help, you can check us out legalq.io. It, I don't remember our exact social, so you just search for LegalQ and you'll, you'll find it on 'em.

We didn't get the good ones. Somebody took 'em like 10 years ago. But yeah, it's, we're on a mission to just help people find a simple way to get answers to their legal questions. And then on the attorney's side, we just want a simpler way to find potential clients. We we think that we do a pretty good job at, at both, and we'd love to, to have you.

So thank you.  

Julian: Amazing. Amazing. Well, hope you enjoy yourself and that Thank you again for being on the show.  

Zeb: Thank you, Julian. This was great.  

Julian: Awesome.