10 Lessons Learned on the Way to 400,000+ Businesses

As we celebrate the milestone of reaching 400,000 businesses on our platform, I am taking a moment to reflect on our journey and share the lessons learned along the way. These strategies have allowed us to adapt, grow, and create an impactful user experience, while laying the groundwork for what's next.

From being a trailblazer in creating a new category of legal solutions, Lawpath has progressed to becoming an increasingly indispensable resource for Australian business owners. Here's a few lessons I've learned along the way.

1. Freemium is Fundamental: Investing in a freemium model has proven invaluable for growth. The wider funnel facilitates robust testing, measuring, and learning. This enables continuous product optimisation to align with our users' evolving needs, along with plenty of extra opportunity for user activation.
2. Build Your Layer Cake: As a small team that prides itself on punching above our weight, we learned to go all in on one channel at a time – content, SEO, SEM, partnerships and beyond. After mastering one, we moved to the next, building a rich, multi-layered marketing strategy – akin to a layer cake where each layer adds depth and flavor.
3. Every Cake Needs Candles: Setting aside time for unique initiatives, experiments, and campaigns has infused our journey with innovation and renewed energy. These expose fresh opportunities and generated exciting outcomes. What is consistently working becomes a new layer to your cake.
4. Product-Led Growth: We empowered our free users with features that allowed them to introduce others to our platform. For Lawpath, this includes eSignatures, hosted documents, and shared cap tables to spark organic, user-driven growth. Elena Verna 's insightful content in this area has proven to be an invaluable guide for us.
5. Partnerships that Provide Value: Effective partnerships benefit all parties. We prioritised fostering relationships with brands that align with our user base, offering them value first, which subsequently facilitated traffic referrals to us. We've gone on to build incredible relationships with Westpac , GoDaddy , MYOB and over 500 referral partners.
6. Evergreen Promotion Opportunities: Channels such as podcasts, video features, and content marketing, are continuously active and constantly attract a stream of business.
7. Boring is Best: Some of the best uplifts in acquisition came from the simplest changes – reducing friction on landing pages, optimising structured data for SEO, structuring campaigns correctly, and integrating customer data into our advertising platforms. The 'shiny new thing' is rarely the best thing.
8. Quality vs Quantity: Our transition from 300,000 to 400,000 took slightly longer – and intentionally so. We focused on attracting the right users and refined our acquisition strategy accordingly. By leveraging cohort analysis and tracking conversion rates beyond the initial 30 days, we also improved our conversion rates and elevated the quality of our user acquisition.
9. Get the Long Tail Wagging: 亚马逊 's early realisation holds true for B2B SaaS as well - the long tail matters. Increasing our inventory (in our case, legal documents) has been instrumental in reaching new users who find direct solutions in our specific offerings.
10. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Rarely does an initiative or a feature roll out perfectly the first time. Consistent iteration, guided by feedback, analytics, and our own learnings, helps us fine-tune our offerings, making them more efficient, user-friendly, and valuable over time. This cycle of continuous improvement has been key to our sustained growth and user satisfaction.

There's plenty still to do, but it's always humbling to take a step back and appreciate what we've been able to achieve so far. Half a million here we come!

#Growth #Startup #UserAcquisition #BusinessLessons #ProductLedGrowth