Using Google Docs as a shared workspace to settle draft emails

Early on in Sideline’s life, I approached a number of newer, tech-forward law firms to see if they’d be interested in using my software. I’d read that when you’re getting your product out for the first time, you need to look for the ‘innovators’ who are willing to try out new things and take some risks. These sorts of law firms seemed to fit that bill.

The result?

They weren’t interested. So that was bad. But I learnt some great lessons.

An innovative customer is not always the right customer

I was correct in identifying these firms as innovators. The problem is that I was too correct. These firms were so forward-thinking compared to traditional law firms that they had completely re-imagined their entire technology stack and workflows, such that the problem I was trying to solve (the lack of track changes in Outlook) did not exist for them.

One firm had basically done away with emails. They used Slack for internal communications, and communicated with their clients through a firm-branded portal.

Another firm still used emails, and still had supervisors needing to review and show changes made to draft emails prepared by their teams. But to solve the issue Sideline solves, their staff would draft and settle emails using track changes within a shared Google Doc, and then once finalised, copy and paste that into an email. Yet another firm used a similar process, but within a co-authored Word document.

It’s not hard to see then why these firms didn’t need Sideline.

Lessons learnt

So, what did I learn?

• Looking for ‘innovators’ is far less important than looking for people with an acute need for the product.
• It’s a journey to discover who are the people that really want your product. What you discover is usually obvious in hindsight, but you won’t learn unless you try. Everything works on a whiteboard.
• Starting with a blank slate allows people to circumvent a lot of the change management challenges they’d otherwise face. People are welcome to try, but I cannot imagine telling a BigLaw partner they are now required to log into a Google Doc to review their team’s work.