What happened in 2022?
Took us almost all of January to digest our takeaways from the crazy year that 2022 was. Enjoy the quick recap from Brett, Thomas Alvarez , Rachel Janzen and Katie (Alvarez) Knopp .
Big wins and big challenges for the Goodlawyer team. Countless conversations and connections that have enabled our growth. New friends and partnerships across Canada. Facing new challenges, every month, week, day, hour… Working together to learn, solve problems, and grow (both the business and ourselves).
As we look back on our year, there are some key themes that we want to highlight.
Building community.
First and foremost, all of the incredible programming that we participated in and attended. From pitch competitions, to accelerator programs and even a yacht party (if you know, you know), we can say one thing about 2022 with absolute certainty: we had a damn good time.
We also learned… a lot. Every program has challenged our assumptions, pushed us to try new things and think even further outside the box.
We started the year in the first cohort of the 500 Global Alberta Accelerator program and shortly after that participated in the GrowthX program. We finished our year of accelerators by getting accepted into Creative Destruction Lab . Let’s go!
We dabbled in a couple pitch competitions, with Joshua Weinberger and Brett smashing pitches at Inventure$ and securing a side-deal at the Startup TNT Pitch Summit in the fall.
We would be remiss to leave out all of the energetic and inspiring conferences we attended: Uniting The Prairies (April), Inventure$ (June), Collision Conf erence (June), Startupfest (July), Traction Conference (August), SAAS NORTH Conference (November), the Canadian Blockchain Consortium Blockchain Summit (November), and closed the year with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce Awards where we won ATB’s Small Business of the Year. We’re grateful to have met so many amazing entrepreneurs, investors, and community builders!
Last but certainly not least, The Calgary @ Collision Yacht Party. They called us crazy, they had their doubts, but thanks to the sheer will and determination of the amazing Goodlawyer team (and our beloved sponsors), we pulled off the Toronto startup party of the summer. We’re STILL seeing it on LinkedIn and in our DMs (stay tuned for version 2.0 in 2023).
For real this is the last one, and it’s more like the absence of an event. The “Annual” Goodlawyer Summit wasn’t so annual this year. We made the tough decision to shelve an event that we put a lot of time into in pursuit of more pressing opportunities and business needs. It will come back. Someday.
That’s a nice segue into our next theme. The challenges of 2022. Read on for the nitty gritty.
Failing fast.
It wouldn’t be an honest look at 2022 if we didn’t include some of the challenges we faced and acknowledge the learnings that came from them. From growing pains, to shifting investor sentiment in the market and chasing product-market fit, what knocked us down a peg in 2022 also made us stronger.
We had to adjust and stay lean in tough economic times. Our headcount didn’t really grow throughout the year, and we've learned how to prioritize and do more with our existing resources. In the same vein, we got scrappy and found ways to maximize our use of grant programs for wage subsidies that paid for some very legendary interns (shoutout Olive Rachel Bensler , Jenaea Reimann , and Olivia Pietras ).
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We also learned to be ruthlessly selective of our priorities. Even if that means killing projects that we’ve already invested time and money into. We just retired 2 such products: in-house Annual Corporate Returns and Incorporations. We overbuilt on something that people didn’t care about as much as we hypothesized, and then it became a distraction to maintain. This was a lesson in smaller experiments and prioritization.
Investors also tightened up their belts, moved the goal posts and forced us to take a different look at our business. It made investor conversations more challenging, the investment process more drawn out, and ultimately took up more time than we budgeted for. But in the end, we managed to close our seed round in December because the market conditions forced us to improve our unit economics and discover new, more lucrative products.
Enter our next theme: Goodlawyer Product in 2022 (and what’s coming in 2023).
Discovering better.
I’ll start with the big one from 2022 and I’ll end on the key one for 2023: Goodlawyer Pro and Fractional Counsel. We started 2022 focussing on startups with a new and improved Pro plan that added more value at a higher price. Some loved it, but others didn’t see the value.
With our focus on our startup compadres, we rolled out new fixed-fee products for early stage financing and grew our lawyer network with some seriously talented startup vets. And we succeeded! The caliber of services that users are trusting us with has skyrocketed. In 2022, we helped customers with multi-million dollar financing rounds, international IP portfolios, and newsworthy mergers & acquisitions.
But as our customers grew and kept hitting new business (and legal) milestones, we had to grow with them, lest we lose them to the big firms (to both our peril). So, in the second half of 2022 we piloted a Fractional General Counsel (GC) program that embedded legal talent directly into a business part-time. Clients loved it, lawyers loved it, and it unlocked a new segment for Goodlawyer to target.
With the pilot program completed, we know that Fractional GC fills the legal gaps these scaling businesses face in a flexible, fast and affordable way. We’re learning more and iterating on Fractional GC everyday, and integrating it into our business is going to be a big part of 2023.
And throughout all of this, our product and development team worked tirelessly to improve our platform stability and security, minimize technology debt, and build or improve features that make dealing with your legal needs easier.
Feeling #blessed for such a team of stallions.
So, what does it mean?
We served over 2000 new founders and business owners this year, contributing to 2.5x growth in our revenue. We’ve expanded and upgraded our roster of legal talent to include over 100 of Canada’s top legal professionals in business law. We continue to learn and improve our services and products to best serve Canada’s entrepreneurs and good lawyers so they can work better, together.
We continue to strive for a world where every founder, every business, every organization of any kind has simple and secure access to the legal professionals that are essential for safe and secure growth.
Simply put, our mission remains the same: to put a good lawyer in every founder’s pocket.
Now let’s see where 2023 takes us. 🚀
Media Highlight Reel 🎞️
Entrepreneur
1yGreat share, Brett.
Partner, M&A and Capital Markets at Bennett Jones LLP
1yAmazing year and great takeaways! Can’t wait to see what’s next
Onward! 🚀 2022 was packed for you all. Here's to even more creative collisions this year!
You did good and keep getting better!
Amazing, can't wait to see what this year brings!