
We publicly launched Goodlegal on Nov 23. Yeeey!
First of all, I would like to thank everyone who joined our journey (or is thinking of doing it) in these early days when everything is happening lightning fast, and we are figuring out a lot of things based on your input.
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I also wanted to share a few of my thoughts after our first three weeks, and the initial feedback received from our first users, some of it positive, some of it with positive potential.
This is a testament to our belief that we are in a great position with a live product which took us a little under one year to bring to the market from the initial design to the live product launch and first users.
Of course, when you think about creating a new product, everything is crystal clear in your mind at that point in time, and the only thing to do is to make that idea a reality. You can easily see the problems you are solving, the shape of the innovative product, the future happy customers, an engaged community, excited partners, and a motivated team force. But this is only an image that can become a reality if the above-mentioned elements are constantly in sync through recurrent product roadmap validation with the existing and future customers, community, and partners.
When the actual product development starts, you are building pretty much based only on your own experience with a personal vision of the problems you want to solve, while greater market validation comes (hopefully) later in the process. The only guidance you have is from your own experience, your team, and the early adopters.
This is one of the reasons why building a community in the very early stages of product development can help to keep the focus on what matters rather than everything at once. That's why we first built a foundation of what Goodlegal will hopefully become as the product matures.
For this approach to be successful, our community and early adopters' engagement is very important, and I am very happy to see already a lot of great feedback coming in.
Now as we continue to build the product, we are finally seeing how well our vision is matched by our customers' vision and needs. This offers a great understanding of how to tackle the best practical issues ranging from what are the right technologies to be used (to address security concerns), prioritizing the roadmap features, or selecting the initial partners, to name a few here.
Goodlegal is such an awesome concept, like many other products, but translating that vision into actual benefits for the users is the real challenge and ultimate goal of all products. That's why it was and still is (and will always be) very important to communicate with customers and continue to ask for feedback which is a great indicator of how close the platform is to achieving the above goal.
Coming back to what I mentioned earlier, the user feedback is wonderful and aligns with our roadmap helping us to see where we need to be faster with certain features. Below is a sample of practical feedback we received and the actions we took to address it:
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User: there are too many steps for importing a template from the marketplace to personal space;
Goodlegal Action: we created a shortcut directly to the Template Library on the main dashboard.
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User: the review button is not visible enough;
Goodlegal Action: redesigning the actions bar to make them more visible at our next update;
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User: why are there Documents and Templates;
Goodlegal: Templates are what we call the company-approved standard that anyone in the company should use. Users can use an example from the Template Library or upload their own. When a template is used for a specific case, it is individualized, and it becomes a document that actually works for a specific situation covered by that template is done. We simplified the creation of a Document out of a Template (now you can just duplicate the template in the needed workspace).
This initial user feedback already generated an impact on future users, so I cannot stress enough how important it is to have you on board as early adopters helping us to deliver the best experience on the market.
As those of you already using the platform know, Goodlegal is designed to be that unique solution where any legal or non-legal team can do their work by using our full document lifecycle features, collaboration and automation capabilities, e-signature, prebuilt document packages and templates for various business scenarios while being able to always connect with the right legal support through the Goodlegal trusted law firm partner network.
All these features and benefits are one click away, prebuilt, and ready to use. Although we still have some work to do to explain this better "out of the box legal ops'' concept, we believe we are on the right track.
This is only the foundation of what we eventually see Goodlegal become - an end2end ecosystem for any legal and compliance-related matters where a solid infrastructure meets AI.
To achieve that ecosystem vision, we need to make sure that the foundation is solid and that the AI capabilities on our roadmap can truly bring structural change to a company. Not only a project-based type of success but a real structural change in how a company operates.
Stick with us, and you will be among the first ones to benefit from the AI-related features through the Goodlegal infrastructure, such as auto doc, automated contract negotiation, document understanding and analytics, automated playbooks, and many more.
As we are closing this year and the holiday season is upon us, I wanted to thank you all again for your support.
I hope that you will have an amazing 2023 and that it will also be the start of your Goodlegal life ;)
Start here: https://goodlegal.io/