Why do we work with lawyers instead of trying to replacing them or sell a software to them?
I'm still convinced that execution is more important than strategy. However, some strategic decisions can make or break your business.
One key decision is choosing the industry you want to enter. Many years ago at Kellogg, I read a statistic that stuck with me: 50% of a business's success depends on the industry you choose.
Another crucial decision is your business plan and positioning. Even though we chose to work in immigration, we could have gone in different directions, like selling software to lawyers or automating the immigration process to replace lawyers. Each option would lead to very different business models, clients, company types, required skills, and economic implications.
Today, I'll focus on why we chose to work with lawyers instead of the other options.
Why Not Sell to Lawyers
To make a significant impact in the industry, we need to address the biggest pain points, which are not with the lawyers, but with the immigrants. After interviewing many lawyers and immigrants, it became clear that immigrants face the most challenges: inefficient processes, lack of visibility, slow responses, stress, and uncertainty. While lawyers could benefit from better technology, we believe we can make a bigger impact by working directly with immigrants.
Additionally, we think that the current pain points experienced by immigrants can't be solved by software alone. It requires a combination of software and operations. Great lawyers are part of solving the operations piece, but bringing in business best practices from other industries can make a huge difference as well.
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Why Not Replace Lawyers
We believe that involving immigration lawyers from the start is essential to providing the best service to immigrants. Immigration law is complex and often not clear-cut. You need the expertise and judgment of an experienced lawyer. While many steps in the process can be automated, there are key moments where a lawyer's input is crucial, such as:
Additionally, obtaining a visa or a green card is a life-changing event, and people want a team they can rely on, someone to chat with and answer their questions. Our vision of the best immigration experience is the opposite of a self-service, impersonal experience with an AI. We believe in providing a warm, supportive environment with real human interaction.
Our Value Proposition
People often ask, "If you still have lawyers on your team, why should I work with Tukki instead of going directly to a lawyer?"
Our value proposition is combining the best of both worlds: expert knowledge from great lawyers and a highly efficient, customer-focused process enabled by our technology. Neither can deliver the best experience to immigrants alone; you need both.
This approach didn't come without its challenges. It’s far more complicated to acquire customers, service them, get great lawyers, manage operations end-to-end, and build a great product than just focusing on a section of the journey. Scaling is also much easier when you're just dealing with a B2B SaaS solution compared to managing operations. That's why, since day one, we have obsessively focused on streamlining operations with technology to become exponentially more efficient and scalable than the status quo.
If you want to truly reinvent an industry, you need to go all in, and that's what we signed up for.