In the category of “Tiny SaaS-enabled services businesses which exist to do one thing well” I give you verifyinvestor.com, which is *brilliant* in so many ways (contingent on the law being what it is).
The new accredited investor standard requires that a startup take reasonable steps to verify an accredited investors paper trail, versus the historical norm of accepting it pretty much on faith.
This is an imposition for lawyers and expensive if they charge you for it.
This is an imposition for lawyers and expensive if they charge you for it.
You could theoretically productize it yourself as a player in the ecosystem. AngelList did, and their implementation is pretty fantastic. But the thousand+ funds raising this year won’t all spend engineering effort on a workflow app.
Thus this business. It collects docs.
Thus this business. It collects docs.
The thing a lawyer needs to do, given the docs, is the simplest professional labor that can be called labor without breaking out laughing. The software makes their utilization on the task reasonable enough to involve the lawyer while still having software-like margins.
(That the person looking at a document with a number on it and saying “Yep that number is indeed higher than X; wow I did pass fifth grade” benefits from being a lawyer is a fun compliance implementation detail, because it lets startup certify “A lawyer or CPA vouched for X.”)
Customer acquisition is great too since usage is inherently viral and the customers you really want to recruit are repeat players who will bring you into many future transactions with new people who will eventually need (or be in a position to recommend) this service.
