Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Startup Onion. This is the second episode that I olly have presented and I'm here with my guest, Linda.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Do you want to say hello very quickly? Hi, everyone, I'm Linda. I'm the CMO of Valor.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Nice to be here. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for joining me. And we're going to be talking a bit about Valor today, about their recent crowdfunding campaign and a recent trip to San Francisco that Linda and I were both on.
So, Linda, can you start by just telling me a little bit or telling our audience, our listeners, hello, everyone. A bit about yourself.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Yeah, so I joined Vala about 18 months ago as their marketing consultant, and then in the last six months I joined as their chief marketing officer. So I've actually been in tech and working in some startups since 2011. My first role in tech was with Freeagent, which was really great timing, actually. I joined them when they were just a small team of 30 people in total. I was the marketing director's first full time hire. We grew the marketing team there to 20, and when I left six years later, thinking team was about 120. It also gone through a startup to scale up, had an ipo, and then they were acquired by RBS for around 56 million. So I think quite a lot happens in the space of time. Six years. I think I was really lucky to get in there just at the right time and everything. Had that really great experience there, which is brilliant. And then from there went off to be the head of marketing and do it for myself on leadership team with a company called Vero. They were a marketing automation system based in Sydney, Australia. So that was very cool to have a work with a globally distributed team and some nice jobs.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Were you still used to still based here?
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: So working in the middle of the night?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Yeah, there was quite a lot of that. Not too much, but yeah, there are quite a lot of late night calls and some really great trips over to Sydney with the team, which is fantastic. So got a really great experience there, two years experience. And then did find that it was quite tricky working over here, working over in those different time zones. So I was keen to get back into the Edinburgh tech scene and work on some, just be around where people think COVID hit work those plans.
But yeah, luckily did a couple of interim roles and worked for Res Diary for a bit as well. And timing worked out.
Danae Schell started her own company as CEO with valor. I'd worked with her at Freeagent for a number of years, so joined her as a consultant and the business just kind of took off. Actually, the startup has gone from strength to strength and really excited that she asked me to join them at CMO and here I am.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: That's awesome. I love hearing stories of people who have worked in the Edinburgh or scottish tech successes like free Agent or Skyscanner or Fanduel, the big names out there, and they've worked there, they've worked there for a while and then they're like going to go and do my own thing and then they buddy up with someone that they worked with there. And I think that's brilliant because that's where you've got so much experience from your time there and you can just reapply it, go through that growth period all over again, put yourself through that experience.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: It's brilliant. And to go through it and to work on lots of different challenges and campaigns and see in different stages of that company and scaling it, and to then be able to kind of go off into other leadership and take those kind of leadership roles at a higher level and having done, made some mistakes, seen different ways of doing it, wishing we'd done it different ways, and taking that somewhere else and feeling like you can do that a lot more smoother and probably make some new mistakes too, and learnings. But yeah, it's been really incredible.
You have a lot of great network from that as well that you can tap into and to really help. So I think if you get into one of those companies at those early stages and they do go through quite a high growth period, then it's really, really valuable. And I do feel very lucky for being in the right place at the right time. So, yeah, it was great. That's awesome. Cool.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: And tell us a bit about valor itself and what valor does.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Vala's an AI powered legal tech platform, is for consumers. In the UK, we're at more focused on employment laws, so anyone who's having an issue at work where they're being treated unfairly by their employer and is a legal issue.
Around 7.5 million people in the UK face a legal problem of some sort every year.
A study came out from a survey, this is before the cost living crisis, and in that survey, 63% of people at that point had said that they couldn't afford legal services, they were too expensive.
So that's a huge market there that just can't access justice and they're in a situation where they have very little options because they can't afford to have those legal services. So in creating this platform, anyone that's going through an issue at work can go onto the platform and if something's happened, they can put that into a timeline, they can upload information, documents or like an email or something. So for many people that are looking to their legal services to help them with their employment issue, they're costing up to almost like nearly 5000 pounds in legal fees to go to tribunal, which is just really not affordable. And typically products cost about using Vala will cost maybe 90% cheaper to do that.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: So it's a real big, like, access to justice thing that, you know, enables everyone to get access to the legal support that they need.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: I feel like I hang out on Reddit a lot because, I don't know, I get bored easily and for some reason I'm on the legal advice UK subreddit. I never subscribe to it, but it's in my feed and it's just every day dozens of people who are saying, like, here is how my employer is treating me, oh, God, I need help. I don't even know where to begin. And it just feels like there is such a huge requirement for this that people are just being treated appallingly every day, like you said, and we need a better way for them to work on that and to improve things.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah, it's massive. So we know that everybody knows that they've either experienced or they know someone who's experienced a problem at work and it has a massive effect on their life and in every aspect of their life. And I think having something where they can go and they can put the information in there, it's like almost even by putting in something's happened at work, even if you don't need to do anything with it, but knowing that you can put it almost like a way of journaling, you put this happen on this event, this timeline, and there's, and you can come back to that and knowing that if this problem continues to go, you can have. Collecting evidence, actually turns out that collecting that evidence, I didn't know until I started with bowel, is actually called contemporaneous notes. And if it did go to tribunal, because you've taken that note that happened at that time, the courts will look at that as evidence as well. So for your own notes. So it's so important to do that. It also helps to ensure that if you ever feel you've been gaslit or having a problem that just doesn't feel right, at least you know you've noted it, you can go back to it and then you can also kind of just kind of get on with your day because you're doing something that's quite empowering.
And then I think that you never maybe need to do anything with that. And that part of the platform is free, those features are free.
And then if it is that you need to take this forward or raise a grievance, we have the letter templates there, we have all the support that you need for that. And then if you also think you have a case and you want to find out a bit more about that, and without actually going to pay huge legal costs and fees with the solicitor, we've got a homeer assessment, which is 149 pounds. They will go through all your documentation. You'll get an hour call with one of our legal professionals, such a fixed price, 1 hour call, the review documents, look at your case, the merits of that and whether to take it forward and what your options are. So you don't need to spend a huge amount upfront to then decide whether to take this forward. And that will give you kind of really good options there.
Our merit assessment is one of the first products that we actually used for Genaii because it's obviously so expensive. We needed a way to be able to reduce the cost. Sorry, reduce the time that solicitors are spending on reviewing documentation and a lot of that kind of work to make sure that we can make it cost efficient and affordable for our customers. So a lot of our customers could maybe put in their employee handbooks, they'll put in their evidence documents and it could be hundreds of pages. So our generic AI that we've developed will go through those documents, summarize what the claims are in there. So it'll also look at what the customer thinks the claims are. It'll also predict if there's other things that it's pulled out, that it thinks there are claims that they could go forward with that pose into quick summary, so that when they do want to engage one of our solicitors at a fixed price cost, the solicitor has a quick paragraph they can review and know where to dig into and spend that time making that a really good conversation and affordable for the customer as well.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah, that's super clever. And so is this a relatively new addition to the products, like the genai side of things? Is that.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think there's a few months ago now we put that in, but actually our CTO was kind of looking into it and he really brought it to us and I think most of the team were pretty skeptical about how we use this and going forward, but it's been huge and actually, and hugely accurate. We're now ready with the merit assessment. And lawyers are two times more efficient than they would be without this now. And quite often the majority of our products, both are actually three times more efficient, which is a huge savings.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. That skepticism is really interesting. I think that's quite common across most startups I speak to here in Scotland. The value of this, and if it actually is just hype, or if it's actually able to create value for people, and it sounds like you have, lawyers are able to do their job far more efficiently based off getting a summary of 100 page employment document. That just seems like a win win.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: It's kind of quite similar to that accountancy model that we saw with, with free age. And, you know, previously everyone was using accountants and passing everything off to an accountant to do that for them and their books.
And similarly, like, if we could, and everyone could afford to go to a solicitor or a lawyer and pay, you know, that 300 pound fee for an hour of their time, and then we would. But we've just seen in the market and the studies that most people find this too expensive.
So in a similar way to the accountancy, we can put a lot of those tools in front of the consumer. They can actually do a lot of that initial work, and then when they need to connect with a lawyer, we can make. They can give that the more value in terms of understanding. Like, okay, what are your options? And actually really giving them advice and coach them as to how to take this forward from a legal profession. The same ways that accountant would look at the taxes and actually tell you where to save on your tax. So it's kind of just changing that model a bit.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: It is kind of amazing, actually. Now you've kind of phrased it this way, how similar it is to free agent in terms of. Obviously, free agent is full of accountancy and valor is for the law, but it's empowering the individual to do a chunk of the work in order to get the best value for themselves. You know, I don't know, maybe that's exactly that.
[00:12:45] Speaker B: And the real value that people get from their solicitor and their lawyer is actually that legal advice and the options and coaching as to how to take that forward.
We know that as well now that since I think there's been a 260% rise in people self representing at tribunal since 2016, and even in family law cases, there's now about 40% don't have a lawyer on either side. So if they. That's an untapped market that people can't afford solicitors. So if we can give them the tools to help them in that situation, but then use a solicitor to coach them for what they can afford, there's a whole other market there. So, I mean, I think the UK consumer legal industry is worth about 17 billion a year and there's probably another over 4 billion of this market where the people can't afford these services that we can offer and provide to them.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And give them something that they really need.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. It's putting them in power, in empowering them and they know their case better than anybody else and just giving them the guidance on how to move this forward. It has. We hear from our customers all the time that it's been life changing. They wouldn't have been able to move. A lot of people say they wouldn't have been able to move forward with their case. They wouldn't be able to get justice if they weren't using ballot because they just couldn't afford it. It has massive effects for emotionally, financially and whether they go back into work as well in some cases. So it's been huge.
We're also excellent rating on Trustpilot, 4.5 stars there and we're constantly getting feedback. I think I have a spreadsheet at the moment. It's about 300 lines of just customer testimonials and great feedback they've got that we want to use and go back to your pool. We also did an NP's survey net promoter score and our score was 57. The UK legal industry average for the UK is minus.
-54 so we're over 100 points above the UK, the UK industry average, which is fantastic, which just shows us a massive need. And I think that's what's really, I think, really exciting about working at Val and why I really want to join the team is that it's really already seeing. There's all these signals in terms of it's like we just can't build it faster. There's such a massive need and demand for it and what we have done already, we're already getting really brilliant feedback and we can see that in our testimony, reviews, we're constantly talking to customers in our NP's survey.
So everything's. There's so many opportunities right now for us in different ways we can go. And I think also in that we've got.
We started on the employment law market at the moment and. And we've already seen that it's obviously really working, but it's a very similar way to. We could move this and go into other areas of law, such as family law, Dodger builders.
It's all kind of legal day to day problems that consumers experience and I think we can definitely think the product translates to that and we can move into those. So there's some really great opportunities there.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: I guess once you've got the sort of rough framework for it, then adapting it for a specific bit of law is like, yeah, that's the challenge there. But, yeah, that's huge. Absolutely. Yeah, brilliant.
And let's talk about. Because you're in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign right now. As we're talking about how that's going, can you tell us a bit about.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: How that can be? Brilliant. So, yeah, obviously we've been kind of looking at investment, and we've had some investment over the last a couple of years since we started investing capital. It's been tough to get investors, obviously, such a difficult market at the moment. We then had a look at crowdfunding and it just made so much sense for us.
And Bolton and I had actually done crowdfunding at free agent back in, I think it was around 2014.
So it's something we're aware of, but it makes so much sense for us in terms of we were having so many birthdays, customers coming to us and asking, how do they get involved with Vala? This has been so helpful. Or they know someone that needs this and just want to make sure it's available to everybody. So we're getting this kind of feedback. So, yeah, we decided to go talk to Cedars, the equity crowdfunding platform, and they were fantastic and helping us pull that together. So in terms of actually engaging them and getting our crowdfunding campaign launched, it's probably less than eight weeks, actually.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yes, it was really good. I think we were lucky because we'd had that kind of experience of going through it before, so we kind of knew what to expect and how it would run. It also helps that both myself and today the CEO is from marketing background, so we've got that advantage, thankfully.
So, yeah, we set the target to raise 350,000 on Cedars and really, we smashed that target within 40 hours, which is incredible. Yeah, super exciting. And again, just a massive validation that people really understand the need for this product and want to get behind it.
[00:18:22] Speaker A: Do you have a feel for the kinds of people that were investing?
Is that data that you have access to yet? Or maybe is it too soon?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Just in terms of the feedback we're getting of people understanding that need for it, I think there's.
Because we've already been able to kind of get Jenny I in there and prove that value and we have the data to show that we can make it two to three times more efficient, so. And that we can actually really change that delivery model for the legal services, which I think is super exciting and interesting to people.
I think just that emotional level of actually every knows how expensive solicitors are. And quite often so many people have, they're going through employment law issue or these issues, they just have to suck it up or they have to leave or it has detrimental impacts in their life. So I think that really they want to see this product come to market, come to mass market and for people to be able to use it. So, yeah, I think we've also had really great revenue growth as well.
We have ten x our sales in 22, 23.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So we only started generating revenue in April. 2022 is when we first started launch our products and, yeah, continued month on month revenue growth. So obviously everything's going in the right direction.
So, yeah, I think everyone's pretty excited.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. What would the crowdfunding help with? What's that money going to go towards?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so again, as I mentioned with the Genai, one key things is just to keep developing that and making our services and products more efficient, building the platform, making that even a better user experience for our customers, and being able to roll out Genai to lots of different products and fix price services and costs. So fixed price services and there were other areas we really want to obviously invest in. It's just a lot of our growth model and acquisition channels. So we've had already had a really great growth through organic, social and so Danae's really been lead on that and we've already got over 100,000 followers on TikTok and over a million likes. But we also want. SEO has been a real brilliant channel for us, so we want to invest more heavily in that and also in PR so we can just really get this in front of people.
[00:21:09] Speaker A: Awesome. Yeah. And so the crowdfunding campaign finishes in a couple of weeks.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: 12 March today looking, I think in.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: About two weeks time. So we are currently sitting at 515,000 and we are now looking to see if we can reach that 600,000 mark, which would actually just. We were looking for crowdfunding to be part of a smaller round. So we had set that minimum target fairly low. But having looked at it now, we now see that this can really extend our Runway and we may not square it for that larger investment quite so soon, which is really exciting.
And it's just brilliant to have everybody, all our supporters and people that really understand and really believe in this product and to come on this journey with us.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: It must be huge for you as a team to have that just support from all of these different people, rather than one investor writing a check and saying, I believe in you. You've got an army of people, an army of evangelists who are like, I believe in this and I want this to be a thing.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
It's incredible validation and it actually has just given us even more motivation and energy to move forward with this. And we just know that it's something that's really, really needed. It's a massive problem right now and we just want to build it and get it out there as quick as we can so everybody has access to that and hopefully does change those lives quite a bit.
And I think one of those key things in that is that the platform and those free services, we really want to start promoting and making sure everyone knows that if they experience a problem at work, go and just log it in Vala with a timestamp on it and just go. That didn't feel right. I'm not sure if it's legal, I don't know where this is going to go, but I want to put this down.
I've logged it somewhere safe and secure and I can get on with my day. If you have to come back to it, you can keep adding to those, that event timeline and things that happen and you always know that those services and the support that you need is there in valid should you need it. Hopefully you won't ever need it. But it is. There's help, there's access available and you can gain access to justice. It's huge.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: It's been a peace of mind for you.
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: I mean, obviously the law is so varied around the world, but you're UK focused.
[00:23:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so we are UK focused for now. We did explore previously other markets and Danetta had spoken to investors in the US and different places, but we were really keen to make sure that we could get this right in the UK first, especially for employment law. It's obviously a lot more complex in the US. So we wanted to make sure that we could get this right, make sure that the AI worked and that we could really develop this product. And now that we've done that and proven this model, it was really great to now start thinking about other markets that could go into. And it was so fantastic that we had this opportunity with techscale that came up and being invited out to San Francisco, which meant it gave us a perfect opportunity to start right at this stage, to be able to go back out there and have those conversations again and reopen conversations. And it was super valuable to find out what our opportunities are and create some really good contacts there. So that's been quite exciting that we are now record feedback to the team, both the CTO, Jeff and Danae, and actually now going through planning for Q two and the year ahead as well, and with our funding in place, where our next opportunities are going to be, which has been really insightful.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: That's very exciting. Just for some context, Linda and I are both freshly back from San Francisco, where we spent. You were there for a couple of weeks? Two weeks, yeah, I was there for a week. And us and some scottish founders were basically building our network, pitching investors, getting new customers, doing a whole bunch of stuff over there as part of the tech scalar Silicon Valley pop up and. Yeah.
What was your biggest takeaway?
[00:25:27] Speaker B: Yeah, so it was brilliant to go out there with a group of founders from Scotland with similar challenges and looking for similar things from that. I think by going out together you had these really great discussions, and when you go out to meet contacts and networking, there's so many opportunities to start to arise and there's a huge amount of support between those finders. So whatever those challenges were going through at the time, you could give ideas, options, make contacts, and quite often, if you're going to events or networking contacts, you had the opportunity, if it wasn't right, for you to introduce somebody else or suggest or fight or ways that this worked better for them, which is, and actually be able to kind of circle back as well and have those one to one chats that really helped and how and moving forward with that. So, yeah, that was really supportive. And then just being able to go out and actually go to spending having a bit of time there. So you could actually go out to different events and see a lot of their startups pitching and see some of those questions and what people were looking for, kind of benchmarks where we're at, but then having that real time afterwards to be able to speak to a lot of other investors and startups about their journey and finding out really what investors are looking for and being able to have that time to kind of explain your product and our opportunities and what we're looking for, engage, whether or not there is an opportunity there for us.
And one of the contacts I spoke to within about a 30 minutes conversation. Had got really excited about our product and had given some really great ideas about partnerships and people kind of speak to. He even gave me those contacts there and then, and I add LinkedIn, he gave me his details, and he is happy to do introductions, which is just something you wouldn't get by doing a quick dm on LinkedIn or, you know, just going to the online event. I think you have. These are much more conversations that you just don't know where they're going to lead. And it's been, yeah, hugely valuable, for sure.
[00:27:37] Speaker A: No, I think in person stuff is just kind of back. I think there was this moment when COVID happened, when we all moved meetups online and courses went online, and we were like, is this how it's going to be forever? Because now I don't have to travel and now I don't have to do logistics and things like that. I have to by catering or whatever. But it certainly felt in Silicon Valley or in San Francisco, it was just coming back to life, that it was all about being there in person and meeting people in person at things. I think we experimented with Zoom stuff, and that's good for certain purposes, but for actually expanding your network and meeting new people, there's nothing that can really beat being there in person, I think.
[00:28:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just a different experience, I think. And I think it gives the opportunity for you to have a much more organic conversation around that, and it leads to the conversation flows in a different way. There's much more different energy around it. You pick up on something and you can let that conversation go and you have the opportunity to follow up on it as well.
Yeah, I think it was a really good. I think everyone's just. It's such a great energy. Everybody in the room was excited to hear about different startups and what they're doing, and I think that it just. Yeah, it absolutely does lead to some really good conversations.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And I love codebase. Used to be a tiny little thing. It used to be like 15 companies on, like, one floor in this building that we're in. And back then it felt like you kind of knew everyone. And as it's grown, it's obviously, there's thousands of members now, and you just don't know everyone anymore. But I've just been in this WhatsApp group with you and the rest of the founders for the past couple of weeks, and I love that. I love that level of community where it's like, even this morning, people you were connecting someone to. Danae going to talk about something. And it was like, there's just still activity in it. And every day when we're in San Francisco, it's like first thing in the morning, it's like, oh, here's what I'm doing today. Here's what I'm doing. Here's where I'm going to be. Oh, cool. I'll see you later. I'll meet you up at this thing. I love that stuff when it's just a group of very focused individuals who are trying to build stuff, different sectors, different verticals, but all SaaS pretty much through and through and sharing their problems and learning from each other. I love that.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's exactly it. You could develop really good, strong relationships with people on that trip because you'd be talking to them over that week. Almost every other day, something would come up, and even when you come back, you'll recall something they said in conversation and be like, oh, actually, I speak to them about that because they had just gone through that part of that stage, or they'd just gone through this. And you know that it's easy to reach out to that and to connect people as well. So, so much comes from that, definitely, for sure.
[00:30:31] Speaker A: We just need to do it again now, get a whole new group of people and go back as regularly as we can. Scott Gubb, if you're listening to this.
So let me ask you one more question just to finish up. So we're coming up to the end of Q 124 by the end of this year. What would be a really great success for you? With valor, you've got nine months left of the year. What would success look like by the time we start 2025?
[00:30:59] Speaker B: So there are a few key things that we want to achieve this year. Obviously, continue our, our growth and develop those kind of acquisition channels to really create this kind of repeatable, scalable channels and experiment with a few other channels there, too.
We definitely want to explore our partnerships and there's opportunities there. We've actually got a really exciting release, press release coming out hopefully tomorrow or later this week.
So that's really exciting. So our partnerships and our b two B two c channel, we really want to kind of make sure we can push that this year and see some real growth there.
Also, looking at those other markets for us. So we're already, the employment lawmark employment lobby can really scale up there. And then just looking at that next area of law that we can move into and do the same. And again, looking at the opportunities, kind of explore potential investment in the US or going into those markets too, and maybe a few other markets where we've kind of got our eye on. So some really exciting times. It's going to be a really busy, exciting year for us.
So lots to and we're still close our crowdfunding round, which will be really exciting too. And bring those investment border journey with us.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Do you think you'll be hiring a few more people to help you on this journey with some of that money?
[00:32:32] Speaker B: I definitely think so. I definitely hope so. Yeah. We're only at the moment a team of seven for their core team and then we've got our lawyers that work on the platform with us as well. So, yeah, we're a pretty strong little team, but we could definitely, I think we've ambitious kind of targets and we're want to grow the business. We'll definitely be looking to add a few people to the team. Nice. Cool.
[00:32:59] Speaker A: Well, here's your every success in the coming months. Yeah, thank you so much for taking some time to chat today and I guess we'll finish that.
[00:33:07] Speaker B: Thanks, Ollie. It's been really great.
