Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, a thoughtful listener. What is your number one lead generation blocker had to up my influence slash quiz to find out right now that's up my influence.com/quiz and I'll share why you aren't getting the intros and sales you deserve. We're also actively seeking guests for this daily commercial free Entrepreneur Wisdom Podcast. Agency owners, consultants, coaches and B2B service providers head to my influence.com/guest and I'd love to promote your expertise to our amazing audience. Let's get on with the show. With us right now. It's Richard Mabey. Richard, you are the co-founder and CEO of Juro. And Juro is found on the web@0.com. That's j u r o. Richard, thank you so much for joining us.

Richard (00:01:11) - Great to be here.

Josh (00:01:12) - All right. Give us an overview. What is Juro?

Richard (00:01:16) - So Juro is the all in one contract automation platform. So we do something that is seemingly really simple, which is we take the process of agreeing legal contracts, which is usually done in, you know, word email, read lines, PDFs, and we condense that down to one platform, right? So you can create, negotiate, approve, assign, manage and track contracts in one place.

Richard (00:01:40) - And this is just faster and easier for the millions of people globally who use contracts every day.

Josh (00:01:47) - Yeah. And and so compared to other solutions that may be in the marketplace. How would you differentiate what Zero is doing compared to like a DocuSign or something like that?

Richard (00:02:01) - Yeah, totally. So DocuSign has been a massive pioneer in this market. So when I started out my career as an attorney, we used to print stuff and scan stuff, right? And you know, now with people working from home, like no one really has a scanner anymore. And DocuSign has comprehensively solved that whole issue of taking PDFs and signing stuff by hand and scanning it right? So they've been pioneers. Juro came into the market to say, Well, you know, signing isn't the only thing that's problematic about contracts, right? It's also very hard to create them. It's a very painful process to negotiate them. Even if you have the e-signature taken care of the whole lifecycle, the contract kind of sucks. And and so that's why we started the platform.

Richard (00:02:45) - And it's truly an end to end solution. At the moment, you need a contractor having a sign and safely stored away. You can do that all in zero.

Josh (00:02:53) - Well, what do you tell me more about the when you need a contract and you have to create something. I help me understand that a little bit, because you're right. Typically, it's like, I don't know, you kind of start with like someone else's template and then I could speak for myself. Yeah. And then you're like, okay. Then you just kind of go through it and then you're like, Yeah, but does this, is this legal now? Is this exactly what we need? So yeah, I mean that side of it is a pain.

Richard (00:03:22) - It totally is. And you know, one of the funny things about contracts, I come from a legal background, so I always used to think about contracts. This legal thing, it's kind of scary legal. Like, you know, there's paragraphs with like capitalized like fonts in this legal language that no one understands.

Richard (00:03:36) - But actually contracts are really for loads of different types of people. So if you're in sales, you're going to be sending out sales contracts. If you're in human resources, you can be sending out, you know, offer letters. If you're in procurement, you're going to be dealing with vendor contracts like actually, you know, contracts are not really a legal thing. They're a business thing. Right? And so so one of the things that we're able to do with Juro is allow lawyers to set up templates and then allow anyone in the business to create documents based on those templates. So sometimes that's with an integrated system like Salesforce.com, you just click a button in Salesforce.com, a contract gets created, it gets sent out for legal approval. So it's this dance between legal and the business and juro is kind of the glue that sits between that that relationship.

Josh (00:04:23) - Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. So. So let's say your company, there's going to be a lot of, I would say a good use case may not be necessarily for the independent contractor who everybody gets the same contract.

Josh (00:04:40) - But if we start thinking more mid-market where there's going to be perks like each contract is going to require some review, some adaptation, some customization. Um, yeah, that would be a mess, especially. Yeah. So that's cool. So that that solves some major problems.

Richard (00:04:59) - One of our clients, right as you know, processing 10,000 contracts a month. Oh my gosh. So that, you know, that headache you have when you're filling out that form and filling in a contract and it's like super manual, you just multiply that by 10,000 times and that turns into a critical business problem. And so our customers typically not people just need one contract, but a processing, you know, more than ten contracts a month without paying. They're just hitting their head against the brick wall time and time again. And so you can't be automate some of this and streamline it. And that's really where we become valuable.

Josh (00:05:33) - Yeah. Richard, one of the biggest things that, you know, I look at like, let's say that the, the contract is, you know, it's a sales contract or an engagement contract.

Josh (00:05:45) - One thing that always frustrates me is the additional friction that a contract can provide or that that can add into the sales process. So I'm always very sensitive about that. In what ways maybe is Juro a great solution to help reduce the friction when a contract is required?

Richard (00:06:07) - Totally. And I think this is probably the the thing juror can help with most, right. Which is if your sales cycle is 20 days and ten days of the sales contract negotiation process, you want to reduce that, right? You just, you know, you get it down and you're going to get paid faster. Right. And this becomes kind of a no brainer. So I gave you a couple of really practical examples. So because Xero is built in the cloud, right, as opposed to being an offline file rather than just like email someone a PDF, you can share a URL link to that contract in like a WhatsApp message, right? Or a messenger message or even in an SMS. And you can have an executive click once review on their cell phone and get it signed.

Richard (00:06:47) - Right? So this saves you like a day or two of someone finding their machine and having to figure it out. Um, you know, another example is you can get live comment notifications. So if you, if you work in Slack and someone comments on your contract, as soon as they comment, you're going to get a pop up notification in Slack. So you know, you can deal with it faster. Right? And so these little kind of friction points being removed all add up to a massive saving, whereas you're just going to just going to close new business faster. And if we can deliver that success for our clients, then they go, Well, you know, this has improved massively on the status quo.

Josh (00:07:23) - Yeah. Richard, how did how how did this come about? Like this back in 2016? Here, how did you know that this is something that you needed to move on?

Richard (00:07:35) - Yeah. So I'm an attorney, right? By background attorneys are not traditionally entrepreneurs, right? In many respects, the two things are kind of like polar opposites.

Richard (00:07:44) - You know, attorneys managing risk, super structured, super careful, and the entrepreneurs going out in the world and like grabbing, you know, changing markets and doing new stuff. And so for me, the genesis was really experiencing the problem myself, right? So I dealt with contracts all day, every day, and I realized that a ton of my time was going not into kind of legal work, the stuff I trained for years at law school to kind of figure out, but just process work, saving versions of word on my desktop and comparing them. And so so I saw that problem and, you know, had a segue in my career where, you know, I went off to business school, I went to work at LegalZoom for a little bit. Um, but then when I came back to it, I kind of knew in my heart of hearts that even though I was this lawyer and I'd never started anything before, I knew this was a critical business problem. And that was enough for me to just go out, get the courage, build something, get some customers, and then go out and scale the business.

Josh (00:08:43) - Yeah. And so have a great idea. How do you. Do you start it just. Did you just kind of go through the process of like, okay, I'm going to kind of create the concept, put it in a pitch deck, go meet with investors, get some investor capital, and then build the thing, or was that kind of how it went down?

Richard (00:09:01) - So we did it the other way around, actually. So what we did was we got the customers first. And so, you know, we went out into the world and we spoke to some folks and we said, you know, tell us about your contract process. And, you know, we asked like literally tens of people, probably 50 people, and they all said, well, it sucks, right? We you know, this process is getting in the way of business growth. And so that was our kind of initial research. And then eventually we started writing some code and we got to a point where we could say, well, this, this kind of works.

Richard (00:09:29) - So do you want to try this out in your business? And it was those kind of initial anchor customers, and we still have even our first customer, we still have that them as a customer today, five, six years later, we're like design partners for us, right? So, you know, didn't pay us much money. But what they did was they said, well, look, here's some feedback on what you've built so far, and this doesn't quite solve my problem. But if you did this, this would solve my problem. And so so by the time it came out building a pitch deck and pitching to investors, we could say these guys, these really serious companies are actually using zero already. And that made a massive difference. And because, you know, we built something that was valuable and people were willing to pay for it before we actually asked, you know, the VCs and the investors for cash.

Josh (00:10:16) - And then so what do you do today to, you know, in terms of like growing the company client acquisition? Like, how are you dominating the market space?

Richard (00:10:25) - Yeah.

Richard (00:10:26) - So we've grown quite a bit, right? So we started this this year at like 50 people think we're now at 115, 100. Wow. So we've got a grown headcount, a fair amount and you know, jurors and curious business where like most of our demand is generated from marketing. So, you know, folks searching online has been a major source of traffic. We also have a community. So we have this community of 800 corporate attorneys, all of whom kind of center around our events program and Slack group and have become the believers right in the product. So so we've done a kind of a lot of work around that and that's enabled us to go and go and really kind of scale, you know, quite aggressively. And you know, at the same time as a company, we have to keep up with the pressures of that growth, right? So thinking about how do you build a culture that's going to scale, you know, how do we make sure that we're operating in a responsible way? So we're definitely kind of shifting away from that early startup phase into true scale up phase.

Richard (00:11:25) - And it's different, right? It feels different. But, you know, our growth is is strong and we're capturing market share. And, you know, more importantly, we're solving problems, right? So one of the metrics I love is just how many contracts have been processed in jury, right? So we're just about to come up to the million contracts, Mark, where it means that 1 million contracts, which would have been in Microsoft Word and fiddling around and sending over email, have actually been processed in this browser native environment. And that's telling us that the market is shifting. A big behavioral shift is happening and that's just really exciting.

Josh (00:12:00) - Yeah, no kidding. All right, So when somebody goes to zero. What does like what is that process of engagement like? How do you typically assess whether or not this is going to be a good solution for them or, you know, kind of what struck me is it's you know, again, I don't think you're necessarily aimed at the solopreneur. This is a little bit more of a kind of a mid-tier solution.

Josh (00:12:25) - But what is that? What is that journey for someone who's like, Yeah, we'd love to figure out if maybe this can help us.

Richard (00:12:34) - So it's typically someone will find us online, they'll come to our website, they'll review our materials and decide you either want a demo or don't want a demo. And when they go to demo, we have a kind of sales team that's very consultative. So they will be like radically honest with the prospect from the get go where we kind of go through a brief consultation and we'll say, Look, you know, you're only signing two contracts a month. Like honestly, like you don't need to be paying for this solution or, you know, you're signing more than ten contracts a month or 50 contracts or whatever it is. And, you know, yeah, this is a critical business problem and then they'll be very rapidly shown the solution. So in a live like demo with with one of our sales folks and then when they become a customer, which typically they'll do within 20, 20 days or so, after that, they get onboarded extremely rapidly.

Richard (00:13:24) - So within 14 days, we aim to have the entire system configured, all of their templates set up and the problem solved. So a lot of that motion is is all about speed, because think a lot of the prospects who come to us have a burning need, right? So they want to get this solved yesterday. And for us, we try and accelerate that as much as we can.

Josh (00:13:46) - Yeah. So your website. What would you recommend? You know what happens in a demo?

Richard (00:13:54) - Yeah. Well, look, I think in sale. Mean sales has changed, right? A lot. You know, back back in the early days of sales, it's all about pushing a product. Right. And I think, you know, there's huge thinking over the last 20 years around discovery. Right? So we spend the first part of that, that demo actually just understanding and listening. Right. So a good half of that meeting is, you know, tell us what your business objectives are. Okay? You've got this business objective, which is you've got this huge revenue target.

Richard (00:14:24) - Okay? What what gets in the way of that revenue target? And they'll say, well, one of the things is that our, you know, our contracting process takes way too long and everyone's complaining. Okay, So if we understand that, what would be the impact of solving that? Right? So if we could reduce that by 30%, reduce that by 50%, what does that mean? Like, what does it mean for you? And they'll say, it means for me, work like one hour a day less. What would it mean for your team? My team won't leave. Right? Because they're all super unhappy with the process. What does it mean for the company? Oh, the company Sales cycles can reduce, and so revenue is going to grow. Okay. Okay. Well, now that we're aligned that there's a real problem to solve. Let's show you a couple of contract workflows and we'll tend to use the real template of the customer to just show them, like if you bought this tomorrow, what do you actually get? Let's just, you know, get to the point.

Richard (00:15:14) - And that, you know, works well because think, you know, there's so much software around, you know, people are very fatigued from being, you know, hearing these platitudes around, you know, hey, we're going to help you, like turbocharge your growth. You'll just want to know that you can solve that problem. That's really.

Josh (00:15:30) - Yeah. Yes, truly. Exactly. Well, good for you. So right on the front page there, it says, get a demo, click that green button and and chat with someone. Richard on chat with someone on your team. And let's let's figure out where we can improve things. So very, very exciting. Richard, maybe congratulations on your success and your quick, rapid scaling and solving some big problems in the marketplace.

Richard (00:15:59) - Well, thanks, Josh, for having me.

Josh (00:16:14) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up My Influence slash guest.

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