Every week another founder friend sells their tech business.
This week it was Dan Jaffe, founder and CEO of LawLytics, who sold his company to one of the largest legal software companies in the world.
LawLytics is the leading website platform for small law firms that helps them grow their practices without expensive paid marketing.
Dan is a lawyer himself. He created and sold a web directory of law firms 10 years ago. He wanted to do something bigger.
He saw that small law firms were trying to market on the web to get new clients, but either they wasted time building their own WordPress websites or wasted $5K-$20K a month on overpriced website marketing services.
So he started LawLytics in Tucson in 2011 and started growing. Slowly. Small customers add up slowly. His team grew slowly.
He had used some his own money to start LawLytics, but then started selling content-creation services for cash flow to fund development of their software platform. Two sides of the business for several years, then he stopped the services to focus only on software.
He raised a little money from a few angels, then a little more from the Arizona software seed fund Arizona Founders Fund. Then he stopped raising.
So self-funding + services funding + efficient angel/seed funding.
Dan did it his way.
He resisted “common knowledge” to raise his prices, oversell like his competition, go upmarket, stop selling services, raise more investment, move to Phoenix, sell harder!
It was always hard, but LawLytics still grew every year.
And now he leads a global legal software practice at a very big company, which is another way to fund the growth of your big vision. It’s just inside a bigger company now.
Congrats Dan. I’m so excited for you and your team. What a crazy journey.
And I’m a grateful investor in the AZFF, so your exit paid dividends to me. 🙂
