How SoloSuit CEO George Simons grew to $799.6K revenue and 400 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is george simons he started solo suit in his first year of law school when he needed an attorney but couldn't find one he graduated with his jd and mba from byu in his spare time and he loves to cook because he loves to eat now helping people fight debt collectors again at solosute.com george area takes the top yeah happy to be here so what does this look like like who is the main sort of consumer you're you're supporting to help fight debt collectors yeah the main person that we we help are people that are that are being sued for a debt lawsuit right so when somebody gets sued for debt uh they get on google or youtube and they search how do i respond to debt collection lawsuit and then they find a solo suit in those search results then we walk them through the process and give them the help they need but is this a particular kind of debt like a home mortgage they're laid on or credit card debt or something else or what uh yeah 10 million people are sued for debt every year in the u.s 9 million of them automatically lose their case because they can't figure out how to respond uh so we're targeting those nine million people and make it easier to respond um that said usually most people that are coming to us uh they're in credit card credit card debt so i guess how do you help them yeah um let's say somebody's being sued for like thirty seven hundred dollars in debt that's the our average is actually forty seven hundred dollars um they'll come to our site they walk through our process they can generate their response document to respond to the lawsuit for free on our website then they pay us to have an attorney review the document and then to file the document for them so without before solo studios being sued they're going to lose their lawsuit automatically because they can't figure out how to respond and when they find solo suit they're able to respond properly uh in their within their deadline and block the lawsuit and then usually um around like 60 even more of the time customers cases get dismissed and they they actually win their case just by filing an answer and so what does that what would i have to pay you to file that and review it uh 197 bucks okay no matter what if it's a hundred grand in debt versus a hundred bucks in debt it's still we just have a flat flat rate business model um price subject change but right now it's they pay 197 fair disclosure i like that that's creative okay when did you when you start cranking on this thing when you write the first line of code uh we officially launched in 2018 uh when i was a law student and then solo suit was just a free service uh for what year in 2018 until 2019 it was totally free and then in 2019 uh still when i was in school we found that filing a legal document is insanely difficult uh people even once they generated their document on our site a lot of people didn't file because it was just too hard to file a document in court uh so we offered a filing service paid filing service in 2019 and then i went full time on the project once i graduated in april uh 2020 right after the covet shutdowns and then so i mean give me a sense of scale right how many i guess lawsuits did you process in 2020 lawsuits processed in 2020. um you know good question i'm not super sure right now we uh let me see at the moment we've done over we've helped over 22 000 people and we've helped protect over a hundred million dollars from predatory debt losses so what does that mean you've helped twenty two twenty two thousand or twenty two hundred yeah it's uh twenty two thousand people have made uh accounts with some suit god i imagine everyone who makes an account though doesn't actually file paperwork how many have you actually like filed and saved 100 million for um i don't have that number top of mind why don't you i mean isn't that like the number one thing you're tracking in terms of success rate how do you not have that number um i have the accounts that we've that people have made accounts that people have made with our with our service and then uh how much money we're saving them on each uh that lawsuit but you don't save them money unless they actually file like you have your review pay you the fee and you help them file correct yeah that's right um yeah like currently we help uh like 400 paying customers a month that's what we're doing oh wow that's a lot okay so you have like so i mean can i take 400 times 12 last year i mean you helped what 4 000 or so during covid you know fight back against debt lawsuits if i don't have the uh aggregate aggregate number top of mind okay but right now your run rate is like 400 400 in october that's right interesting now is there a model here where you can go from i mean obviously getting one you know 197 bucks 400 times a month is what 80 000 bucks in revenue but it's really hard for you to like hire people and build a real company unless you have revenue you can sort of like plan on so is there a model here where it can turn into recurring or no not really um you know this might sound absolutely bonkers these days uh we think recurring revenue is a little bit overrated um and our revenue i think is very predictable people are getting sued at the same rate every month they have been for decades uh so we consider our revenue to be very predictable even though it isn't technically like monthly recurring revenue okay got it so you feel like i mean look by the way the only reason sas is a popular business model is because it's predictable revenue so you can make investments i don't care if it's called sas or not but point being is you can't build solo suit and build all the products you want to build without knowing where your money's coming from next month your argument is it might be a different 400 people but you're always going to have 400 500 600 people coming to you every month that's exactly right interesting how are you getting those 402 is it all in seo play yeah pretty much nearly 100 of our customers come to us from uh seo focus on ranking first on google search and youtube search and what are some of the like your top keyword that brings you the most new customers um you know pretty predictably it's like how to respond to that collection lesson so like if i go well that's a long cert what do people actually type into google uh oftentimes they type in like just that yeah like they respond to debt collection lawsuit or like that collection lawsuit or how to respond uh we focus on like the long tail keywords as a lot of people do um because it's people that are further along in their decision making process that will search like the longer tail keywords yeah that's right now i just i just typed in debt collection lawsuit response and under all the ads you guys come up number first how to answer a summons for debt collection not paid anything for it underneath all the yes that's where we want to be yeah exactly how did you get so good at seo i mean you were like a lawyer um yeah i actually [Music] um how did i get good at seo you know do you hire someone um we we do it uh yeah it's kind of a crazy story during one summer before law school i figured you know i'm just gonna take crazy craigslist jobs and see what kind of crazy job i can get off of craigslist and i sifted through a lot of scams a lot of just like bizarre jobs there's this one lady who wanted help like moving your trampoline and i found a lot of people were were searching for content writers on craigslist um pretty bottom of the barrel content writing gigs i took some of those and got interested in like writing content and then from there i worked with another y combinator company doing content uh for them and i think that's probably where i got most of my um training they had a great uh seo marketing channel and really learned how they were doing it and then from there applied that which channel is that so my listeners can go learn too um the uh the company i was working for was simple citizen they they just have a they used seo very well to drive revenue okay got it but i thought you said there was a channel you watched where you learned um i mean no i mean simple citizens one of their channels for acquiring customers was seo oh i see that one of the marketing tools yeah they don't provide like tutorials or anything so what how many folks are on your team today uh we're just a team of six oh i love that that's very cool okay and so what's a split like what's how many engineers uh we have two engineers and then we have a few people on operations so people that are doing uh like actually like helping file the orders that come in uh and then i'm doing it's not all automated there there's some manual work cool yeah interesting okay and in terms of growth rate i mean if you're doing like 400 new customers a month today do you remember where you were a year ago what was a year ago november uh 2020 um yeah i think we were publicly doing we were on startup we were on techcrunch startup battlefield last year around that time and we were doing 15 000 [Music] no i mean how many do you remember how many customers that you were i mean i guess it's gonna take 15 000 divided by 179 so what is that you were doing like 80 90 responses per month yeah i don't remember exactly how many customers we were doing but that sounds like yeah yeah well it sounds like more than 4x which is great so so um it's not that you've mentioned yc you mentioned disrupt so have you raised capital yeah we raised money we went through y combinator um beginning of this year and we've done what we call crown and how much did you raise uh we've raised less than a million so far okay why do you need the capital i mean why do you need to raise for something like this why not just keep it print money for yourself get rich uh yeah yeah i certainly could have done that i think uh raising money in my mind as a form of de-risking a venture uh i think some people think that it like increases the risk but for us i see it as like a form of de-risking and it's not not as um [Music] because it allows for more of like a uh a cushion for the team and it increases our runway it also allows us to grow faster as well something is both but doesn't it doesn't mean you actually you have to grow faster i mean doesn't it make you just go faster either up or faster down it actually decreases your ability to do something long term i don't think so no i don't i i don't believe that is what happens necessarily um i think a lot of people raise money and then they feel like they have to spend that money uh quickly um i think that's oftentimes the pressure that people put on themselves unless unless it's like a later stage raise where they're giving up uh control of the company with a board seat or something like that i think in early in early stage fundraising i think that the founders maintaining control of the company if they want to spend that money really fast and they they can or otherwise they can spend it slower to do more control growth we certainly like controlled growth but the second you take a dollar you are like officially on the vc track and so if you're not raising every 12 to 18 months the market's going what the hell is wrong with these people what's going on there must be something wrong with them sure you know i think there's companies out there that have raised money and then gone silent for years name a couple or name one um i think uh as xavier comes to mind i'm not super familiar with their background but i believe zapier followed a path like where they raised the series a and then i think they were kind of quiet for a while and they have multi-billion dollar violation yeah yeah yeah yeah i'm not fact-checking myself but i think that's the situation that that is one good model it's just it's one in ten thousand um so like the likelihood like one thing i always wonder getting in the heads of founders like you is like the likelihood of building like a five to ten million dollar business uh that's a great lifestyle for you where you can like print money get rich do what you want it's way easier to do that than it is to go build the next zapier right or the flip side of zapier is to go build the next like a company that raises 200 million in ipos for you know 2 billion right it's just there's less likelihood you can execute that interest yeah it's fair point um i think on the other hand i think uh raising money has also been great for at the same time allowing us to grow faster than we would have home allowing us to make like preemptive hires yep yup no that's fair that's fair so okay six books on the team today uh a million bucks raised pre-seed round um what's who's the next hire gonna make uh next hire is more engineers and what kind of code will you be building uh i mean can you automate some of this filing stuff uh yeah yeah but most of the filing stuff's already automated um what we're doing is we are uh according to my knowledge like the first and only company that uh is compiling uh like a software stack that allows us to calculate uh the filing information uh for different courts and then to file on those courts there's thousands of courts and like nobody actually knows how many courts there are in the u.s uh our estimate is there's like 10 to 30 000 courts in u.s and we are um quickly becoming the company that can file all those courts how do you feel about this and this might be slightly controversial but i mean if someone went out and spent unrealistically and put five grand on their credit card that they cannot afford and they're getting sued i mean don't they owe that money why would you want to help them get out of that shouldn't they pay that back they spent the money uh yeah for for a few reasons so one we aren't necessarily we aren't the judge right sole suit is not the judge uh we are empowering consumers to get access to justice in courts and it's still up to the court to decide what like justice is but there is a huge power of asymmetry just mind-blowing power asymmetry in the debt collection lawsuits currently we are we are seeking to even the playing fields uh it's like in the news i think we oftentimes think of lawsuits that we hear about where an individual individuals going and suing like a multi-billion dollar corporation right like you have a customer that sues mcdonald's but what we don't oftentimes hear about as much is where these multi-billion dollar corporations are actually suing a loan consumer it's like we have customers that are being sued by discover bank right it's like nancy smith i get i get all that i get my point is if nancy smith spent money she knew she didn't have she's contractually signed a credit card agreement why don't these these people should the people should pay what they spent i mean that's like why shouldn't they be sued uh i'm totally fine with them being sued uh they have a right to fight back and i think regardless of whether or not she owes that money uh we are very happy to provide her the support that she needs to get access to justice in court and to like fight for her own rights in court i'm just trying to understand what what grounds would anyone have to stand on if they spent money they can't pay back to the bank to me that feels like what you're doing is effectively empowering there is a power and balance you're empowering consumers but if something just feels wrong to me if someone signed a base said yes i'll pay this money back they buy whatever they buy and then they don't bank should sue them all day long yeah um so i mean what happens here oftentimes that we see is because of the power asymmetry there's a lot of underhanded moves from the debt collectors there's a lot of ways that they throw in additional money that the customer doesn't actually owe oh i see for starters for starters the according to consumer financial protection bureau about 50 of people that are sued for debt say they're being sued for dead they don't vote so like they legit say i don't even know this debt at all zero percent of this debt do i owe they're suing the wrong person or the debts fabricated uh anything along those lines and then on top of that so that's that's for starters fifty percent of people are being stupid at all okay that makes sense that makes sense to me and then on top of that uh debt collectors will add on uh attorney's fees uh that oftentimes can be overly expensive um so these attorneys fees range from like 300 up to i've seen administrative slash attorneys fees in the range of nine thousand dollars just to file a uh just to file a complaint in court yeah that's charging too much in these attorneys fees um and then this isn't necessary this isn't necessarily in the bank then the bank is pacing like panning off this bad debt to a debt collector who's trying to get 10 cents on the dollar and they keep x and the bank gets like something lower it's really the person in between the bank and the consumer yeah yeah they might do that the bank can add on attorney's fees as well um the either the debt collector or the original creditor can add on these attorneys fees and bring the lawsuit okay um so that's added on and then also there's like huge amounts of post-judgment interest uh so if you lose the lawsuit then you have to pay post-judgment interest which is like super high often times like five to ten percent as far as that uh as far as i know well i love fighting back against all those things that that makes sense yeah so those fees those fees add up uh add up quickly yep yep very cool man all right well this is good stuff let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book [Music] favorite business book um well i probably go back to classics it would go to seven habits stephen covey number two is their ceo you're following or studying see how i'm following or studying um yes there definitely is um i mean i think about ryan smith and walter explained that he's here from utah as well um definitely like what he did with culture number three what's your favorite online tool for building solo suit uh probably ahrefs is what i come to the most uh big fan of ahrefs for like seo uh research number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i get lots of sleep um i definitely believe how many hours george i get eight to nine okay fair and situation married single kids uh married with one child just turned one this week oh that's super exciting congratulations man how old are you uh you know i'm old enough that i kind of forget how old i am i think i'm 32. 32. what do you mean that's not old come on 32 last question something you wishing you when you were 20. wow uh the entrepreneurship wasn't lame i was not into entrepreneurship muslim coming from a lawyer he's much cooler now that he's building his own thing guys there we have it solo suit.com helping consumers fight back uh you know really evening the power and balance between banks and credit card owners who are being sued for call it debt that they might actually owe they're processing on average 400 a 400 of these cases per month they charge 197 per case they've caught 80 000 bucks a month in revenue up from 15 000 a month just a year ago more importantly though again have a vision for sort of uh continue to empower these folks the number one growth channel seo and inbound we'll see where they go next after they've raised they just raised here one million dollar pre-seed round to hire more people team of six today george thanks for taking us to the top thanks david one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live 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