Last November, I set out to have 50 coffee chats with business owners. The idea was to do market research as I built my law firm. What I found was what ended up rebuilding my whole business.
I’m a lawyer. I’ve spent years studying to have all the answers. So you’d think sitting across from someone, listening, and asking open questions would come naturally.
It didn’t.
By the first interview, I caught myself listening for about 11 seconds before my brain jumped in with the solution.
Somebody would mention their contractor situation, and I’d feel the answer rising up in me like a sneeze, and I’d have to pinch my arm outside the camera’s view to stop trying to fix their problems and let them finish the sentence.
I’m still catching myself “mid-sneeze” more often than I’d like to admit, 50 interviews and countless discovery calls later.
I asked the same 5 questions to everyone:
How did you handle the legal side when you started?
Had you worked with a lawyer before, and what was that like?
What stresses you out about the legal side of your business right now?
If you could wave a magic wand, what would your ideal legal support look like?
And the burning question underneath all of it: what would actually make you feel protected?
The answers were different every time, and somehow the same every time.
The clinic owner, 10 years in business, 3 staff on payroll, admitted that her client contracts are all just verbal agreements. She shared it like a confession, like she’d been waiting for someone to ask so she could finally say it out loud, that she thinks about it sometimes late at night, wondering what happens on day one when one of those handshake deals goes sideways.
She wasn’t alone.
A sleep consultant found a free contract template online, filled in the blanks, and moved on, because nobody had told her what she didn’t know.
A visual artist registered her business number with the CRA and then just stalled, because the online legal depot’s instructions stopped there.
And almost everyone who’d hired a lawyer before described the same shape of relationship.
One woman called it “the nickel and diming.” Every email felt like it was costing her money, so she stopped sending them.
Another told me she’d spent an entire meeting doing math in her head (was that sentence her lawyer was midway through costing her $750 an hour) while trying to nod as if she understood.
More than one person told me the relationship ended the second the invoice cleared, even when the work itself had gone fine. There was never a relationship to begin with. Just a transaction, then silence, then no idea who to call the next time something came up.
That last part hit me harder than I expected.
I didn’t expect to learn this in a world full of AI: nobody asked for more paperwork. Not one person wanted a thicker contract or a longer clause list. What they wanted, nearly every time, was a person.
A person.
Someone reachable, who already knew their business well enough to skip the re-explaining every time something came up. And someone who could field a 5-minute question without turning it into a billable event with its own invoice number.
And they wanted to know the cost before they picked up the phone, not after.
That came up so often I started hearing it as its own fear, separate from whatever the legal question actually was. One woman put it better than I could: she needed to be protected, not covered, and those aren’t the same thing if you don’t trust the person who wrote the document.
I built my whole business on the assumption that business owners needed better legal documents. After those 50 conversations, I realized the documents were never the real product.
Everything on that list was the same request wearing different clothes:
Be useful, not just correct.
Being reachable.
Knowing their business.
Not billing for a 5-minute question.
Telling people the price upfront.
I went into these chats trying to gather data and came out with something closer to a confession booth: strangers telling me, in their own words, exactly where they feel exposed. Every one of them, without meaning to, was answering the same underlying question: who is actually useful to me when something goes wrong.
I think that’s the skill nobody puts on the job description: the willingness to sit still long enough to actually hear what the person across from you is afraid of, before you decide what to build for them.
I’ve finally sneezed. (So to speak.)
All that pinching my arm outside the camera’s view, all that biting back the fix before someone finished their sentence, had to land somewhere. It landed in a VERY USEFUL product. 50 coffee chats’ worth of what business owners actually need, built out (instead of forever holding it in): someone reachable who already knows their business, who tells you the price before you’ve even asked.
Every piece of it traces back to something one of those 50 people told me.
If the way to build a successful company is to focus on being useful, I took my time, did the research, and finally built the useful product everyone I talked to was begging me for.
Check it out here (hint: do it before the end of the week).
Build smart,
Sonya
P.S. Ttl;dr: I ran 50 coffee chats for market research and ended up with a confession booth instead. Here’s what every business owner told me, one way or another: Nobody wanted a longer or better contract. They wanted someone reachable who already knew their business, and the price before they called. So I built a product around what I learned. It’s in the beta-testing stage; the beta-testing price is good for only this week, and every piece of it comes from one of those 50 conversations.