How Estate Engine’s Focus on Full Customization Grew From MVP Feedback

My brother and I tried bootstrapping a direct-to-consumer estate planning platform in 2019, but it didn't survive COVID. We'd always planned on pivoting that toward SaaS for estate planning attorneys, but after it failed, we got busy with our full-time gigs (and were a little exhausted from launching and losing the first iteration). When AI started to take hold, I read a couple of articles with titles like "You are the technical co-founder you need" and "Are we about to see the first one-person billion dollar company" that inspired me to try again. So I took an online course on prompt engineering and just enough of an online course on Python to have a sense of what I was looking at, then started vibe coding. I built the whole front end that way. When it was time to dive into the back end, I started asking my brother-in-law (a vet software engineer) a lot of questions. Because I'd built so much already, he could see what it was rather than just hearing a pitch on the idea of it and offered to jump in as a third co-founder. Turns out I did need a technical co-founder to get it right; I just didn't need one to get started.

What worked, organic marketing. My marketing career was focused on organic, so I always planned on that being a big part of it, and I started early. I was publishing blog articles before we even launched the product. We've had the most success going after AI answer engines instead of traditional SEO. I started manually tracking every month whether we showed up when I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Mode the exact questions our buyers ask, like "best estate planning software for solo attorneys." We were invisible at first. So instead of writing generic content, I wrote pieces aimed directly at those specific questions because almost no legal-tech competitor is doing this yet. Within weeks, we started appearing in answers that used to cite only competitors, far faster than traditional SEO ever moved the needle, and it's now a core part of our distribution plan. What flopped, cold outreach. Early on, I tried just about everything. Cold emails, cold calls, etc. I got the most traction on LinkedIn. Maybe it wasn't a complete flop because we did get our group of beta testers by reaching out to estate planning attorneys on LinkedIn. But none of our paid customers have come this way. We still post there because some good conversations have come from it (including potential partnerships that are in the works), but it has become clear that isn't going to be a reliable growth channel.

We're still pretty early in our journey. We just pushed V2, so all our feedback so far was on our MVP, and most of it was what you'd expect from feedback on an MVP (more features, fewer bugs). We handled that all gladly; it's exactly why you launch an MVP instead of toiling away to make it "perfect" before launch. Most of the feedback was about stuff already on our roadmap, so we just bumped it up the priority list. But some was unexpected and has helped us build toward the product our target audience really needs. One surprise was how big a demand for full customization there was. We expected that when it came to document templates (attorneys are notoriously finicky about their legal documents), but they really wanted full control over the intake questionnaire - how questions were worded, what questions were asked, in what order, etc. That feedback reshaped the product but also our positioning, we now lead with full customization for solo and small firms that can't afford the enterprise legal-tech budget required to get that kind of flexibility anywhere else.

Their views on AI. I think most people assume solo/small-firm attorneys are either desperate to use AI to get an edge or they're 100% opposed to it (because they fear it is coming for their jobs). Our market isn't that black and white on AI. They are really careful about using it in some areas (for document generation, for example). AI drafting is a non-starter because lawyers are rightfully risk-averse and compliance-anxious about every word in their legal documents. But solos, in particular, are also, by necessity, entrepreneurial. Half their job is running a business, not practicing law. So they are more open than most attorneys to adopting technology that will trim down admin and non-billable hours. They are hungry for efficiency, and it's pretty obvious that AI can deliver that in some areas, so I haven't seen a blanket opposition to AI like some might assume. There is also more caution than I saw when working in marketing, where it felt like everyone was pushing to use AI everywhere, even before knowing whether that was a good idea.

We still have a list of little enhancements that might not seem like game-changers but will, I think, reduce friction and add efficiency to our attorneys' workflows in a way that makes a big difference. I don't expect those to bring in a lot of new customers, but I think it will help us keep our customers really happy. Existing users will love the enhancements. Beyond that, our biggest evolution will be improving the self-serve UX for customization. As it is, an attorney can create fully custom intake and link them to literally any legal document template they want. Sky's the limit, and there's no code required. But we need to improve the UI/UX in a way that attorneys aren't intimidated by doing it. We're still offering free setup for those that don't want to do the customization themselves, and a lot are taking us up on that. We'd love to get to a point where no one even considers needing our help getting their flow dialed in perfectly because it really is that easy and intuitive.

We're at around $2,000-$3,000 MRR. So, we're really just getting started.

I had no background in law or legal tech. My experience was almost entirely on the product/marketing side. I sort of stumbled into audience-building and growth backwards, first by promoting bands when I worked in music, then later learning all the stuff I did to grow a band's audience had names and frameworks once I landed a corporate marketing job. What I brought was a knack for reading an audience, a good distribution instinct, and an annoyingly persistent tendency to question "best practices" that didn't actually make sense. My two co-founders fill in my gaps perfectly. One is still a practicing estate planning attorney who actually uses our product every day; the other is a software engineer who has worked with household names on products millions use. None of us have built a SaaS company before, so there is plenty to learn, but our combined backgrounds make a really good mix.

Assuming our audience would love our default templates. We always planned to offer full customization alongside our default intake and document templates, but right out of the gate, we found the demand was overwhelmingly for customization, not our defaults. It forced us to pivot not just the product but our entire positioning. We probably should have tested that assumption before building around it, but I really do believe some things can only be learned on the run. Or at least some things are learned much more quickly on the run. Either way, we've discovered a real gap our competitors aren't filling, genuine full customization for solo and small firms that don't have the budget for the enterprise legal-tech platforms that already offer it.