In this episode of Give It A Nudge, Steve sits down with Tom, co-founder and CMO of Lawpath. They talk about the reality of scaling a legal tech platform to over 600,000 small businesses. Tom shares a staggering statistic: up to 120,000 new companies are registered in Australia every single month. He explains exactly how Lawpath built a system to capture that massive audience.

Starting a business is hard. The standard three-year survival rate sits at a grim 51%. Most founders get completely crushed by the administrative burden of running a company. Tom explains why taking the legal and compliance work off their plates frees them up to actually build their products. This shift has pushed the survival rate of Lawpath users up to 65%. He also walks through their massive $10 million investment from Westpac, and why they doubled down on advertising during the COVID-19 lockdowns while their competitors froze.

We get into Tom's personal story, too. He traces his early career from Spritz—a startup that went through a wild $40 million acquisition by Yahoo7—to learning strict brand discipline at Tom Waterhouse. He opens up about the painful jump from being an individual contributor to a scale-up executive. He even admits that the sudden birth of his first child right before Black Friday finally forced him to stop micromanaging his team. Steve and Tom also trade stories about maintaining an 11-year co-founder relationship, and why loyalty always beats cheap pricing in the Australian market.

Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro: Surviving Spritz’s $40M Yahoo7 acquisition

05:47 – Learning strict brand discipline at Tom Waterhouse

08:31 – The origin of Lawpath: Fixing the headache of business setups

11:48 – Reaching 600,000 customers and the roadmap to 1 million

13:51 – How to secure a $10M strategic investment from Westpac

16:24 – Why 120,000 Aussies register new businesses every month

18:56 – Market quirks: Why Australian clients value loyalty over a cheap price

20:39 – The COVID pivot: Doubling ad spend while everyone else panicked

26:19 – Leadership realities: How a Black Friday baby cured his micromanaging

30:00 – Co-founder survival: 11 years together without imploding

37:01 – The 65% survival rate: Why automating the back-office keeps startups alive

Links:

Connect with Tom → https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomwillisweb/

Lawpath → https://lawpath.com.au/

Connect with Steve → https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevegrace/

The Nudge Group → https://thenudgegroup.com/

Give It A Nudge Podcast → https://www.youtube.com/@giveitanudge/

The Trouble With People → https://thetroublewithpeople.substack.com/