Why we invested in PocketLaw — finally, legal peace of mind for SMBs
🤝 We couldn’t be more excited about the fact that PocketLaw chose us as an investor! Leading Kira’s & Olga’s $11m Series A is an absolute privilege, and we’re thrilled to have an amazing group of angels on board as well — SMB SaaS leaders such as Allison Pickens (Gainsight, dbt), Hanno Renner, Jonas Rieke (Personio), Christian Reber (Pitch / Wunderlist), Jeppe & Louise Rindom (Pleo), and Gloria Baeuerlein (Index, Kry, Back), and existing investors such as Cristina Stenbeck & Sanna Campbell.
🤿 Let’s dive right into why we all invested, and take you on a journey to the wonderful world of legal for SMBs!
Legal in SMBs — it’s a mess
🥴 Imagine you’re a small business owner — you’re passionate about your craft, your products, and the customer relationships you’re building. After all, that’s why you decided to start the business — to bake the most delicious pastries, sell the best software, or to build the most beautiful art deco chandeliers. Whilst you want to spend time on your core business purpose, you’ll realize quickly: The pain and time sink that business owners can’t avoid and most certainly don’t enjoy, are all things legal. It takes up so much time, mind share, and money. And because you’re small, you can’t solve every legal problem by making an expensive call to your lawyer.
😬 Therefore, chance is that your legal setup looks like this: you got your employee contract from another entrepreneur friend of yours, your customer contracts from an industry association, and the NDA you’re using is something your lawyer gave you “for free” because you paid them a ton of money already. Now you have to set up a new contract: you’ll spend 20 min finding the most recent ”template”, do a quick find & replace search for names in Word, and pray for the best. If you need that contract again, maybe you’ll find it in a box in the attic, or somewhere on your laptop — but remind me again, how long was Jack’s probation period and has Jane signed an NDA so I send confidential material over to her?
🧐 This is a mess. You either have to call your lawyer for true peace of mind, or embrace the chaos you created. Both are terrible options. Business owners deserve so much better.
PocketLaw — first principles thinking leads to legal peace of mind
👊 Kira & Olga, two childhood friends from Stockholm with impressive careers in law & consulting respectively, have had countless conversations with business owners and heard the same complaints, worries, and doubts on legal every time, over and over again. But how could these be solved? LegalTech has come a long way, and there have been many iterations of software trying to solve custom templates, contract management, e-signing, etc — but if you ask small business owners, you’ll quickly realize that the problem is still around. LegalTech has failed to live up to its promise for SMBs. The SaaS solutions in the market are too horizontal (boilerplate templates for everyone!), or too narrow & enterprise-focussed (here’s a custom contract builder & contract management, but yes you need to hire a GC to use the software), or sell to law firms (but what do I get as a small business owner?).
😇 Kira & Olga are solving this problem by applying first principles thinking: How should legal work for SMBs? The end goal was to optimize for legal peace of mind: You can’t avoid contracts, but dealing with them doesn’t need to be painful. You should be able to understand the terms you put in your contracts, and you should sleep well at night without any doubts about whether your contracts are actually correct and secure. Plus, you should be able to delegate contract work to other team members with confidence.
➡️ The result of their hard work is ✨PocketLaw✨, a beautiful and easy-to-use SaaS for your everyday legal needs: You’ll find reviewed templates of contracts, can fill them out without needing a business law course, send contracts out for e-signature, store the signed versions, view analytics & insights on top, and get a snapshot of the most important terms you have agreed on. Let’s be honest: This might sound so simple, but that’s exactly the beauty of it! Legal should be simple.
☎️ In order to fully understand how PocketLaw transforms legal for SMBs, we spoke to 10+ small business owners — pub owners, tech entrepreneurs, food entrepreneurs, and the manager of an accounting firm. This is a fairly standard procedure in our diligence process. But wow — this time, it was truly special: Customers wanted to immediately jump on a call to tell us how much they love the tool, and prospects wanted to get in touch with the founders immediately. You wouldn’t believe that you could see so much product love for legal software! No wonder PocketLaw’s metrics are best-in-class.
SMB software — so simple but so difficult
After learning all of this, the decision in favor of partnering up with PocketLaw was incredibly easy. We believe that
🤕 Legal for SMBs is broken
👩🔧 PocketLaw is the software to fix it
🥇 PocketLaw fixes it better than any other tool, any combination of tools, or substitutes in the market
✌️ SMB legal will see a similar development to HR, data tooling, accounting, or financial planning — dedicated SMB tools producing massive winners
👩⚖️ PocketLaw can become an integral legal system of record for SMBs
🌎 The market they are going after is massive — particularly as they have proven to successfully internationalize by going from Sweden to the UK already
👩🏻🤝👩🏼 Kira & Olga are absolutely incredible
🤩 Investing in SMB software has a raw and beautiful simplicity to it. The status quo of the system landscape is most often absolutely crowded, but absolutely horrible — which is great, as long as you stand out & grow fast. Next-generation software needs to 1. Truly innovate on product, and 2. crack go-to-market, including self-serve / product-led adoption. If you additionally, 3., have a plan on how to solve SMB-inherent churn, you’re golden. As an optionality, you can (but don’t have to!), 4., have a credible strategy on how to move up-market. In an upcoming blog series, we will explore these in detail, and draw patterns from other successful SMB software companies like Pipedrive, Personio, and Katana.
✅ Needless to say, PocketLaw checks all these boxes!
Storytime — no windows, just vision & execution
🪟 I first met Kira & Olga in a window-less room that they scrappily sublet for free from Kira’s old employer Mannheimer Swartling after they just raised their first small angel round. It was even darker than usual in Stockholm, but the product vision was already so clearly visible.
Kira and Olga are incredibly ambitious, display original and contrarian thinking, and can fill even the smallest & darkest Stockholm meeting room with pure excitement and energy.
📈 After that initial meeting, we were absolutely hooked — but foolishly made the mistake (in hindsight!) of wanting to see more proof points before committing to a round. Niklas, Ben, and me then had the pleasure to see the team growing over 1.5y, launching & winning in the UK, overdelivering on every growth & product promise, and making stellar impressive hires. This long-standing relationship made it incredibly easy for us to find conviction, as they had proven so much of their original thesis.
🇸🇪 On a side note, we’re so happy to be investing in Sweden again! We have invested in Skype, Klarna, Truecaller & Mapillary — and we have so many local friends as angels into PocketLaw. It does feel great to be more active in the region!
👋 Välkommen, Kira, Olga & PocketLaw! Let’s help business owners by turning legal from a time sink into a business enabler, and giving them peace of mind. They finally deserve it.
