Legal Tech Blog: Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and you as a founder. What was your motivation to be come a legal tech founder?
Sergii Shcherbak: I’m an IT lawyer with 7+ years of professional experience. I love technology, and I want to improve legal industry with it. Last year, the idea of Manydox – the “Spotify for legal templates”, making legal content a universal affordable commodity – was born, but I couldn’t find investors to hire a development team. That’s why I decided to do it by myself: I really wanted to do it! In summer 2016 I learnt web-development (Python/JS) from Amazon books, and in September 2016 I started developing the platform. Now Manydox is in public beta for around 3 and a half months, fully tested already.
Legal Tech Blog: What is your startup doing? What problem does your startup solve?
Sergii Shcherbak: Manydox is the “Spotify for legal documents”: lawyers all over the world upload legal templates and self-brand and earn royalties this way, while businesses pay a small subscription fee (24.99 EUR/month) for access to legal templates and other document management tools (e-signature, document automation, etc.). So basically, a global database of legal documents + internal document management solution. Manydox solves the following problems: (a) no global platform for legal templates, where one can find legal templates for different countries and in different languages; and (b) legal templates are expensive.
Legal Tech Blog: Please pesent your startup team shortly.
Sergii Shcherbak: My startup team has been myself so far. I’ve built the platform, and now I’m looking for a sales- and development-skilled professionals who know what they are doing and ready to work for equity.
Legal Tech Blog: What is your business modell?
Sergii Shcherbak: Business model is subscription-based. Business users pay a small subscription fee (24.99 EUR/month) for access to legal templates (5 per month) and other document management tools (e-signature, document automation, etc.). Additional quota can be purchased as well.
Legal Tech Blog: What is your success strategy to win new customers?
Sergii Shcherbak: Success strategy can be summarised as follows: (a) if one needs affordable legal templates and/or internal legal document management solution that makes their life easier, choose Manydox; (b) it’s very important to have constant dialogue with customers, know what can be improved or added: this way, some minor new features have been implemented and some got improved to address the customers’ needs; customers see that the platform cares about their needs.
Legal Tech Blog: Where does your startup need help? What support do you need?
Sergii Shcherbak: Startup needs marketing help mostly. The key challenge is getting the word out there and spreading it to as vast an amount of businesses and lawyers as possible. We don’t have investors so far, which makes expensive marketing campaigns not feasible at the moment. I use my LinkedIn network as a channel to spread updates about Manydox. And through LinkedIn I found all lawyers, business users, and partners.
Legal Tech Blog: Did you raise money from investors?
Sergii Shcherbak: No money raised from investors yet. Now we are not actively looking for investors (unlike last year, before I learnt how to code :), so it’s really casual and we roll with the flow.
Legal Tech Blog: What is your advise for other legal tech founders?
Sergii Shcherbak: My advice to other legal tech founders: just do it, no matter how hard it is. If you follow your passion and love what you are doing. you can do it.
