A Conversation with Bryan Pham for the Asian Hustle Network podcast

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Bryan: At what point did you realize that you had product market fit and how did you

advertise this product?

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Raad: It started out with my co founder and I knocking door to door with a square

reader and going on Yelp. We started charging people $300 to join the platform and

promising them clients, even though we had no ideahow we would get any. Then, we

realized that actually getting lawyers to pay for your services is a harder problem

to solve for.

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So it started off as this SaaS subscription model and we allowed lawyers to upload

their real time availability. It was similar to a Zocdoc for lawyers where people with

clients can go in, click a slot, get a consultation, get the lead and they would pay us

in exchange for that. That wasn't really good at product market fit, It wasn't

sustainable. We were going after so many different practice areas from divorce

lawyers, to personal injury lawyers and we were spread too thin. Eventually we

focused around startups and small businesses.

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We thought that we had product market fit at that time, but it really wasn't. Yet, it was

enough for us to get the attention of 500 startups because we were growing. We were

doing a few thousand dollars in revenue a month and it was picking up.

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In terms of social network and how we marketed, I utilized Quora which is a Q&A

site to filter by all the legal questions that people were asking. I cracked open my

old law school textbooks and began answering hundreds and thousands of them for

free and I would link Lawtrades at the bottom for people to check it out. It resulted

in a lot of people visiting the website. I would answer questions like should I

incorporate as an LLC or a C Corp? I must have answered that in 50 different ways

on the site, but it eventually drove some traffic back to the main homepage.

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What's cool about Quora is it also picks up with SEO. So if its a really

popular question, people can type it on Google and then Quora will usually be the

first answer there. So not only do you get Quora's traffic, you get Google SEO traffic

as well. That jump started a lot of our early growth and a lot of our early users.

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Bryan: I know that you initially mentioned that you thought you had a product market

fit, but what was a real Pivot that caused the product market fit?

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Raad: It's tricky because you can grow your company, get paying customers and just

assume that you have product market fit. Fundamentally, if your underlying unit

economics is not sustainable and your customers aren't constantly coming back to the

platformusing it more and more, it becomes really hard and expensive to grow your

product. You can be sort of tricked into thinking that you have product market fit,

which is what happened to us.

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We were selling to startups and small businesses and eventually got into 500 startups,

which invested around 125K at the time. Then, we eventually raised a seed round

shortly after doing demo, which resulted in raising a little over 3 million dollars. It

was led by a big VC fund, Draper Associates. At that point, we switched away from

just posting on Quora because it wasn't scalable to continue running more ads on Google and Adwords.

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At a certain point, we were spending close to 100 grand a month on Google Ads.

We were acquiring lots of customers and focused on growing the top line revenue in

the business, even though we were actually losing a good amount of money.

The problem with the early stage startup small business segmen, is the vast majority of

them go out of business within the first year.

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If you think about when you're starting a company, the last thing you want to spend a

lot of money on frequently is a lawyer. You're trying to hire for engineering, you're

trying to market and spend money on a customer acquisition. When you're building a

marketplace start up, if your demand side usage isn't predictable and recurring, then

that doesn't provide a lot of incentive for your supply side to stay on board.

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So at this time we were losing lots of cash, but we're growing top line revenue. We

were doing anywhere from 100 to 250k in monthly top line gross revenue. We knew we

were going to raise a series A and we were going to figure out this losing of money

thing later on. What ended up happening is we failed to raise our series A. At the

time, we didn't know why, but then we realized that there was a competitor that came

out that took our idea and raised around 70 million dollars. It just so happened that he

was a famous founder named Justin Kan who launched his company called

Atrium. He raised from every single VC that we spoke with and we realized why

everybody stopped answering our calls. Justin had close to a billion dollar exit doing a

legal tech company, so why would you trust a bunch of nobodies from Queens to be

able to compete with him?

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This goes into the second phase of it, we were forced to get profitable. At that time, it

was a travesty me and my co founder stopped taking salaries. We laid off 80% of our

team, and we just had to get profitable.At this point we were all in on Lawtrades,

failure wasn't an option.

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It was a blessing in disguise because it forced us to make this pivot into selling to our

true product market fit, which is legal departments in bigger companies. We now

work with companies like DoorDash, Pinterest, Opendoor and Angelist. We sell to the

general counsels within those companies who have a daily legal need. It went from

startups that might have an annual or quarterly legal need, to companies that use this

every single hour because their legal teams are small, but their companies are growing

and scaling.

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It seemed we were doomed for failure, but it all made sense. We rebuilt the product

but we used pieces of it that worked for the small business side and tweaked it for

more longer term enterprise level engagement. Finally it all clicked and our LTVs

went from $1,000 to, basically close to a million dollars. We attracted an even better

supply and the revenue was predictable. Then we kept getting more customers

which attracted more supply and allowed us to become cash flow positive based off

that pivot.

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Atrium and another competitor then ended up going out of business and we survived.

A a couple of weeks ago, we raised our Series A.

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Kamrul: Raad, I'm just curious. Why did you get fired from CVS?

Raad: There was one night where someone asked me to vacuum the aisle, and I think I was the youngest worker there and I just didn't want to vacuum it. It was supposed to be an every other day thing. And they were like, you have to. I was like, no, I'd rather just do anything else.

They fired me the next day. They found some excuse. They were just like, oh, your cash register was short by 36 cents. I knew it was because I pushed back on doing something I genuinely didn't want to do. It was a common theme in my life where I just didn't like being told what to do.

I'm a little bit of a free thinker and maybe that seeded the plants of not ever being able to hold a steady job since then, which leads into a bigger story.

Kamrul: But you've never held a job?

Raad: I have, but they were very short-lived. I wasn't very good at showing up at one place at a specific time and doing the same thing over and over again. I'm just not a very big morning person. Whenever I had to forcefully wake up, that would just dampen in my mood right then.

I'm a curious person. So if I'm told to do something and I don't really understand the why behind it, I'm just not going to be naturally into it. I'm going to do it by force. I think I did that with a lot of my other jobs because I needed the money. But I knew it wasn't going to be long lasting because I'd rather be poor than do something that I'm not generally interested in.

Before CVS I worked at Jones beach concession stand, I worked at a country club as a food server. Then I worked at a couple of law firms and luckily those were pretty short because they were while I was in law school, they were two or three months long. It was just enough to realize this has to end at some point. I needed to look at the writing on the wall. I just got into making stuff on the internet.

Kamrul: Obviously you have this company and you manage people. How would you deal with someone like you? Someone that's a free thinker and maybe takes direction, but doesn't want to do exactly what they're told?

Raad: I try to actively find those people. I'm not the best manager. The people that we hire and bring on have to be self-starters, and just be generally curious. I'm good with setting the stage and setting the vision and letting them know why this work is important and the impact they could have on the greater society. After that, it's really just up to them on how they perform. Money is a decent motivator, but if you're building anything early stage, you really need people to go away beyond just money being the main motivator. It needs to be something that comes from the heart.

And that's the only way you're really going to succeed. When you're doing something really early stage, especially in the technology sector, and within law. There's been institutions around for hundreds of years, and you're this less than 10 year-old startup trying to disrupt it.

You need people to go to the extreme. Extreme actions lead to extreme results. I try to actively find those people. It's very hard for us to hire because there's not too many of them out there.

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EJ: Does this create any network effects, as you sell into lawyers? Obviously if they want to, they can go start their own practice and use Lawtrades. Do you see that happening?

Raad: That's an interesting question. We've actually had people in both ways. We have had people on the supply side get hired by a company and become the GC there who then use Lawtrades to hire another team of remote freelancers. There's definitely network effects from a traditional platform perspective.

The more talent and supply side you have, the faster matches the better experience and all of that. Even on the customer side it's a very referral driven industry. You're not going to be able to sell to general counsels via a LinkedIn ad or a cold email.

That helps for little bit of brand awareness, but it really is word of mouth driven. So for us, getting a couple of customers and making them really happy and exceeding all of their expectations in terms of price, in terms of quality, in terms of product experience, and really blowing them away led to a lot of our growth because they went around and told all their friends- and their friends told their friends.

That's why a lot of our focus is on community building through virtual events and in-person events. Not only is it fun to hang out with your customers and grab a drink with them, but it adds more fuel to the fire in terms of spreading via word of mouth.

The same thing happens on the talent side. If somebody gets on the platform and they get hired and land an amazing gig- they tell their friends about it. LinkedIn is our main platform.

So we see people posting about us from a talent perspective-

This was amazing. It was life changing. And so much better than the traditional staffing model or so much better than working at a Big Law firm.

People take note of that and then apply themselves. They'll often share different opportunities with their friends if it wasn't a fit for them. I think for these very vertical marketplaces, it really is important to provide an amazing experience for both sides because they're the ones that are going to drive most of your growth.

It's not a SEO play. It's not an ad-words play. It really is just brick after brick- building community, gaining trust, and then giving them the tools to go out there and spread the word.

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At the end of 2019, Lawtrades’s bank balance was down to $20k.

People were getting value from our platform, but we were struggling to convert that value into a healthy balance sheet. Investors were wary of our niche after Atrium shut down, so we had little choice but to go into survival mode—cutting 80% of our staff, and even, at one point, putting expenses on personal credit cards.

Most companies in our position would have gone knocking on VCs’ doors, looking for capital to bridge the gap to profitability.

But we felt we could preserve our equity, stay resourceful, and elbow-grease our way across the chasm.

First, we pivoted, shifting focus from small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) to hypergrowth tech startups. That brought its own slew of challenges, and a brush with bankruptcy that we narrowly avoided. But ultimately, we managed to hack our revenue, taking it from $70k/mo to $700k/mo. 

Here’s how we did it, step by step, and the lessons we learned along the way.

Step 1: Fired 94% of our customers

In the beginning, Lawtrades tried to serve every type of client. Mostly, this meant SMBs who couldn’t afford full-time legal teams. Unfortunately, it also meant:

* High churn. SMBs generally needed one-off legal help, meaning limited repeat business.

* High customer acquisition cost. The less repeat business we generated, the more prospects we had to nurture, hiking our customer acquisition cost.

* High competition. Without a clearly defined niche, we were competing on more fronts than we could afford. 

Taking a cue from Peter Thiel, we realized that competition was for losers, and that the only way forward was through our most profitable customer segment: hypergrowth tech companies, often pre-IPO, whose general counsels (GCs) needed ongoing support. We fired everyone who didn’t fit that niche, and quickly became a go-to tool for companies like Cruise and DoorDash.

Lesson #1: Riches are in niches. 

Step 2: Built a community

Having identified our niche, we naturally started learning a lot about it. What problems did GCs commonly face? How did they solve them? What trends were impacting the space, and how could legal teams stay ahead of them?

To collect our insights, we created a Substack newsletter, Forward GC. Over time, this led to:

* Loyal customers. Customers learned to think of us not just as a marketplace platform, but as thought leaders in the niche. 

* More referrals. By solving one problem very well on a repeatable basis, we earned endorsements from prominent brands like DoorDash.

* Lower customer acquisition cost. Word-of-mouth marketing is highly cost-effective—especially when it brings in repeat customers.

Lesson #2: As Paul Graham said, “It’s better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.”

Step 3: Realized we had a cashflow problem

The one great thing about serving SMBs was that they paid quickly. Our newer, larger customers often worked on 30-, 60-, even 90-day billing cycles. Given that we pay our lawyers every two weeks—Lawtrades is fundamentally about economic empowerment on the supply side—that meant our outflow outpaced our income.

The more hypergrowth customers we attracted, the more we grew—and the faster we lost cash. This is where we got down to $20k, where my co-founder and I paused our salaries, and we where had to go into survival mode.

Lesson #3: Don’t grow broke. It’s not always within your control, but avoid it if you possibly can.

Step 4: Tried everything to improve our cashflow

Desperate times called for desperate measures:

* Working with shady lenders, some of whom wanted customers to pay them directly—both inconvenient and suspicious.

* Quick business loans with outrageous interest rates, in some cases, as much as 10-20%—near-impossible to justify.

* Putting expenses on personal credit cards, specifically mine, which prompted some (very) angry words with Amex.

Each of these steps bought us some time, but never sustainably. We couldn’t keep borrowing badly, and Amex threatened to shut down my account

Again, this is where a lot of companies would turn to VC. But we simply believed we didn’t have to—we had legitimate receivables, it was just that they were taking a long time to come in on companies’ billing cycles. Shouldn’t there be a way to leverage those receivables to get capital that would let us pay our supply side, and make it to our next growth stage?

Just in the nick of time, we learned about a new debt option that let us do exactly that. 

Lesson #4: Before you default to VC, consider new debt options. As a founder, the most valuable optionality you have is the equity you haven’t sold, the dilution you haven’t taken.

Step 5: Finally fixed cashflow

By a stroke of luck, we learned about a company that provides upfront capital based on receivables. After a few conversations, Capchase agreed to take a chance on us, freeing us up to:

* Pay marketplace users without waiting 30+ days. Lawyers on our platform got paid quickly for the work they did, without having to wait out long billing cycles.

* 10x our revenue by using debt to acquire our next cohort of customers. With more cash on hand to spend on customer acquisition, receivables continued to grow. More receivables unlocked more debt, which allowed us to acquire more customers. And so on. 

* Revisit fundraising with a much higher valuation. Had we jumped at VC when times were tough, we probably could have raised at a $30-$40M valuation. But because we waited, we were able to revisit fundraising with an $80M valuation, ultimately raising $6M, diluting less than 10% equity.

By this point, VC was a way to diversify our revenue streams, thereby de-risking our CapChase credit line.

Lesson #5: Use VC for Research & Development—innovation—not as a Sales & Marketing or General & Administrative holdover.

The level of effort and maneuvering it’s taken to turn our growth from a liability into an asset has been incredibly illuminating. For startups, it’s not as simple as finding customers or even finding the right customers. There’s an enormous level of nuance even within those objectives.

We are often given the advice that “debt is bad.” We’re told to avoid it at all costs. But with the right partners and plan in place, debt is a powerful mechanism to grow without giving up equity. In our case, we had customers coming in and expenses under control—it was a cashflow problem. And debt solved it.

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EJ: I can think of how I might approach this. If I were in that position, I might try to go out and get large clients first then see if I could subcontract that work to some lawyers I knew. How did you approach validating this idea. Was was most important to validate: that lawyers would want to be entrepreneurial, or that clients would use a service like this?

Raad: Because it's a marketplace, you're validating both of those needs. When you look at it from the side of an independent lawyer joining the platform, you want to validate if they can actually leverage this for a source of income. Are there real dollars that can be passed from this platform?

There's been plenty of companies before that just did lead gen that would charge lawyers a subscription and sell them contact forms, then they would pay per contact and take it offline. I didn't want to build that kind of business. That's been done by the late ‘90s, early ‘00s directory websites.

We started off in a pretty manual way. We used Square readers as a way to pass money back and forth before we built out a more automated payment platform.

On the supply side, will they earn enough to stay on the platform? The demand side was the harder one. We pivoted through it a couple of times. We originally started selling to everyday people with all sorts of legal needs. Then we narrowed it down to small businesses and early-stage tech companies.

Now we've found product market fit with scaling pre-IPO tech companies with an in-house legal team. For that, it was validating if they would use something like Lawtrades instead of a traditional BigLaw firm that’s been around for a 100+ years where they have deep connections and relationships. Will they actually try out something new?

That's been a little bit of an uphill battle, but after Covid- most companies were forced to cut their legal budgets in half and hire remote workers. The pandemic actually helped accelerate our growth because it forced companies into considering us as a viable option. Since then, the growth has been snowballing.

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EJ: It sounds like you're creating a category. There are people who start their own law practices, but it seems like something people do later on after they have a few decades of experience. You're building awareness for lawyers that this is something they can do and then helping to create social proof and education about how to do that. Then a community to support?

Raad: That's pretty spot on. It is a different category. It's building into this internet economy around delivering services online. It's around building your online profile reputation versus your offline, in-person reputation.

I think we're doing a good job of signing up lawyers that never really considered this a real possibility. People look at us and question how big the market is for lawyers that are actually freelancers. We have no idea how many lawyers in full-time jobs right now are looking at us and considering that to be a real possibility.

If anything, after COVID, it taught a lot of professionals that just because you have a full-time salary doesn't mean you're guaranteed a job. You can get fired at any point in any time and everything can be gone. Post pandemic, it’s viewed as a more riskier bet trying than diversifying, or trying to build out a book of customers.

It’s less risky than someone saying-

I'm going to not just be with one company for 10 years. I'm going to work with five or six companies at once. I'm going to build up my reputation so that can speak for itself. And I'll get hired in the future instead of just working under one brand and one law firm.

By doing more than one practice area, you can diversify your skillset and be more marketable. We already know the future is going to be moving everything to digital, and to the internet.

We hear about all this stuff happening with web3 and the metaverse, and that's all great- but who's innovating around work? What does that look like in a web3 world? We're already changing that as it is. When you join Lawtrades and your profile is approved, you can get hired within the same day. We've seen people get hired within minutes.

That's a very different process than going on LinkedIn and browsing through jobs and submitting your resume and waiting around for days, and talking with a recruiter- or going through a couple of rounds of interviews. It's really old school. Vertical marketplaces bring hiring into the future. It creates opportunities for independent professionals, way faster, in a way more predictable way.

Now payments are seamless. Now there's a dashboard. Now there's spend predictability. They're not wasting time sifting through resumes and posting jobs and going through recruiters, it's a direct connection. It'll be interesting to see that grow and play out. It's a peek into the future of work.

I know everyone throws around the word, future of work, but we're actually doing it.

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I’m reading more on philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, spirituality- things within the realm of ego and consciousness. Such as how your emotions work, or how you can observe them.

I got into meditation over the last 2 or 3 years. Most of the reading material is based around the mind, and how it operates. Like why we do the things we do, why we think the way we think- with ultimately the goal of how to think for yourself when you are surrounded by the society we live in.

It’s easy to go with the flow, even after you start a startup. It’s a game, it’s just a different game. My ultimate goal is I never want to play someone else’s game. I want to create my own game, and my own rules.

The books I’m reading now reflect that. I’m moving away from practical business books to more out of body, and out of mind thinking. It naturally piques my interest. I’m not using it as a way to level up, it’s just interesting.

It’s a whole other world. I like the aspect of not knowing about something and being like- Holy crap, that type of thought exists, and I didn’t know that- I can employ that. That’s just what I’ve been curious about.

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In undergrad, I studied Philosophy of Law, and I really liked philosophy. I like reading, and writing. I wasn't very good at the hard sciences. I originally started as a chemistry major and I just wasn't into it. It was more forced than anything. I feel that anything in life, if it is something that you have to force yourself to do, and if it doesn't feel like play- you're always going to be worse than somebody else out there that views that as hanging out, playing, or writing. You're not going to be able to beat that person.

I switched into philosophy, and I think abstractly- I got law. It felt like a piece of code that society wrote. There's people following it, and operating within those confines. Sometimes you can change that law, and then there's a different thing that happens within society and it can get evolved. I like that analysis of it from a very zoomed out way—how society operates through rules and laws. Sometimes you break them to create new laws. Sometimes you bend them. Sometimes, to evolve as a species, you need to change them up. Abstractly, I was into it in that way.

The second part of it was I never really cared about pleasing my parents. That's true, but deep down, especially at that age, there was still a part of me that knew they'd proud if I had the title as a lawyer. Then they could introduce me to their family, friends and say that, Hey- my son is a lawyer. I got that. There was definitely a part of me that did it for them. I forced that.

I ended up graduating and got my JD. I didn't drop out or anything, but I really wanted to. I was working on different internet products that were doing way better than any job I would've gotten coming out of law school. I knew after my first or second year of law school, there's no way I could work as a lawyer. It didn't make any sense to me. It wasn't the job at CVS, but it was still a job. I got to wear a tie to work, which I hated.

I don't get the point of a tie. It didn't make any sense to me. You get to go to a fancy office. You get to work out of the city, but you're still working under somebody else. You're making somebody else richer in the process of you getting some menial salary. I knew I could build something better than this institution of a law firm, which hasn't been really fundamentally changed in the last century.

That's why law. I liked it from an abstract way. I liked how it made me think. I definitely feel going to law school made me a better writer. You have to be really succinct. You're always removing words. You have to be very concise, it's like surgical writing.

There's a lot of degrees out there that don't give you really practical skills, but getting a law degree really helps you become a better reader and a better writer.

I think that is the foundation of anything and everything you do, whether it's startups or you're opening up your own thing. There's nothing that beats being able to read something complex, level up your level of understanding, then translate that into your own words, and communicate anything that you're doing to anybody else in the world— in the easiest way.

So I don't regret it.

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Kamrul: Obviously you're Bangladeshi, but do you find yourself to be in touch with your "Bengali-ness" for lack of a better word. Are you close with your family in Bangladesh?

Raad: Yes and no. I was born here in the U.S. I went back when I was really young for a year when I was one or two years old.

I've only gone back like two or three times since then. One time when I was 16. Then another time recently after my mom passed away. I went back for that. It's interesting, all of my relatives are pretty much in Bangladesh. In the the U.S., it was just my dad, my mom, and some of their college friends.

I have cousins that are in Australia and some that are in Florida, but nowhere near me. I never had this big, Bengali family-type experience growing up. When I went back for the funeral I saw my uncles, my aunts, and my cousins, it was like, we didn't even skip a beat. I felt like I knew them my entire life. Family's family, and I think it's been different for me just because I haven't had a lot of that growing up.

When I did experience it, it's had a profound enough experience for me to want to go back more often and cultivate those relationships a little bit more.

Kamrul: Where in New York did you grow up?

Raad: I grew up in Queens.

Kamrul: What part of Queens?

Raad: I was born in Elmhurst hospital. We lived in Richmond Hill for quite some time.

Kamrul: Did you not have a Bengali enclave where, you made people that are not your family into to your family. Not you, but your parents?

Raad: They had friends that they went to college with or high school with that ended up immigrating around the same time as them.

I was lucky enough to have a couple of core friends around my age plus or minus one year that I grew up with at family parties. Actually, I'm going to see one of those friends—he's getting married in two weeks. We've been able to stay in touch.

They were basically family, right. Even to this day, I consider my friends like family members that I can pick. I think about this the same way as my college friends and some of the people that I grew up with. They were there and that was cool. I wasn't as lonely growing up. I still keep in touch with most of them actually.

Kamrul: That's what happens. I grew up in a building, all Bengali, pretty much 40 Bengali families.They just ended up becoming like family.

Raad: I ended up moving to Long Island when I was in the sixth grade. I stayed there for middle school, high school, and part of elementary school, and they visited. I feel at that time in Long Island, it was just not a lot of Bengali people, not a lot of brown people really. That was just kind of who I felt most comfortable with, plus we moved around a lot. It was just weird. I really didn't enjoy school that much.

I was a bit of a loner, I was into music, I was interested in creating things. I was into things that were very different than varsity sports. I actually wasn't even that great of a student, to be honest with you, I'd just work on other projects and other ideas.

Kamrul: I was asking about how connected you are to your Bengali side, because I really enjoy talking to people like you that are entrepreneurs. There's not a lot of Bengali entrepreneurs. I feel like there's a mindset that Bengalis that fall into, including me, we go for the safe career. Doing the nine to five, which is ironic because our parents came here and risked a lot for us to have a better life and would take more risks for them. A lot of people like me and my friends end up taking these safer roads. I'm trying to figure out what happened that was different with you.

Raad: It's an interesting topic because I've definitely talked about this before with some of my Bengali friends or older family members. The bottom line is that, at least for me, when my parents immigrated here, they had no choice but to start a business.

They came with nothing. They didn't have advanced degrees. A bunch of my friend’s parents went to college, they were pharmacists. They came here and opened up their own pharmacies. My dad didn't and it was almost like starting a business and entrepreneurship was a last resort.

The thing that they wish they had were degrees, were white collar jobs. Going in and having a boss, having a paycheck, making $100,000 a year. Whatever thing that they dreamt up as the American dream was what they wanted their kids to have.

I was never interested in money like that, even though we've had our ups and downs and we grew up pretty poor. At some point my dad made a decent amount of money and bought a house in Long Island, but then lost it all. It was always very fluctuating and up and down. It led to a lot of fights.

Bengali parents really value status and prestige in the realm of society and degrees like being a lawyer, or being a doctor- which is the obvious thing. You get people that either listened to them and people that don't. I didn't really listen to my parents that much.

It was mainly my dad. I listened to my mom more than my dad. You have to go through a lot of s**t, anytime you do something against what the norm is. You're going to get a lot of uncomfortable pushback. Most people don't want to deal with that pushback. There's a multitude of reasons to not do the thing that probably is the "better path”, which for me was freedom.

I wanted to build something where I didn't have to be at a certain place at a certain time. I didn't have anybody telling me what to do. Money was never something I had to think twice about. I had that vision for myself when I was 15 or 16 years old. All of the jobs that I had just further validated that this just isn't me. I'm not built this way. I like creating, I don't like doing something over and over again.

Within the Bengali community, it comes a little bit to that society around parents, and what your view of wealth and money is. I said that I don't care about money, but I meant like I don't really care about the salary. I care about creating wealth in the form of equity and enriching lots of people in that process. You need that leverage to make a difference in the world and in society. I would be just as happy if I made the bare minimum to eat, but I got to create and do my own thing.

I got to make websites, I got to touch millions of people's lives on the internet, and I got to improve it in some way. That is something money can't buy. That's an experience that has to be created and cultivated. I couldn't see any other way. My parents obviously came around and my dad was just like, this makes a lot of sense.

It took them a really long time to A, accept that, and B not be mad at me for not being a lawyer and not taking the bar. I signed up for the bar and then the day before I didn't take it and launched the startup instead.

I guess I never really grew up craving appreciation from others. In high school I was a super quiet kid. I was a little bit of a loner. I never looked for social approval. I guess that always stuck with me.

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Kamrul: I'd love to hear about how you got started. You don't have a tech background either. I know you got into one of these incubators, 500 startups. How did that come about?

Raad: I've read books, essentially. There were always all these forces in my life growing up where I needed to be my own person and be independent. I was living in a time where I was always really fascinated by the internet. I loved using AOL instant messenger growing up. I loved seeing different websites and how they were built it back in the early 2000’s era.

I came across this book when I was in law school. It was called millionaire fastlane, or something really cheesy. I was just like, why is it so hard to figure out how to get rich? Why isn't that just there? Why can't I just search for that, get a good result, and just follow that rule. I wanted to do that because I viewed that as tied into freedom.

I picked up this book and I read it and there wasn't a whole lot there around internet companies, but there was something in there about music that really resonated with me and how musical artists got really rich. It might seem very obvious, but at the time, the way that it broke it down for me was really eyeopening.

Musicians think of a song. They think of a creation. They record it once to sell it a million times. And for the million and one time it costs the same amount as the first time you produced it, because the cost of replication is negligible. You create something once, and if you have the right distribution, which at the time was the internet, you can infinitely scale at a zero cost margin. It's open 24 7, and there's millions of people on the internet. That idea of build one, sell twice stuck with me when I was in law school.

I experimented with this web app for Facebook, which allowed you to customize your cover photo on the top of your profile. At one of the Facebook conferences at F8, they announced they were going to roll out this thing called cover photos where anybody could to upload a big banner image on their profile.

I thought it would be a cool idea to have a website that had thousands of different cover photo images, perfectly cropped in size to that Facebook cover. With one click using the Facebook app integration, it would change it automatically on your Facebook profile and then post it on your timeline that, I just used this website to change my cover photo to this Justin Bieber thing, or this motivational quote thing, or whatever. I must've spent probably $300 to launching it.

I found some guy in China that wrote the code for me, and I got the website up. I knew basic HTML so I knew enough to get the website up. And I asked other people for help. I bought the domain name, 'myfbcoverphoto', and did a bunch of SEO.

I was going deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. I had this blank website with all of these keywords in it that said "cover photos", "Facebook covers", "Facebook cover photos". The things that I felt like people would search for once Facebook actually made this public and dropped it.

When they did drop it, the site went viral. At its peak, it was getting 30 million hits a month and I ran Google ads on it, Google ad sense. I turned it into a six figure business while I was in law school. I think at its peak, it was doing like 250 to 280 K a year, just from clicks. And I did a bunch of other sub websites after that, one for Twitter, one Facebook, one was an Indian version of that.

I just knew at that point, there was nothing else I would do other than build stuff on the internet. It was a no-brainer for me. I didn't really have too many friends that even did this. There was maybe one friend. At that time, we weren't close. His name was Fahim Saleh. He actually passed away this last year, as well as with my mom.

He was the only person that I knew that was doing stuff on the internet. I would bug him all the time after I built that site and try to meet up with him as much as possible. He was way further along than me, because he had actually built out his website. I think it was doing a million a year.

It was a lonely process, but I was able to see that path. I got more into tech and I was realized there's a bunch of other people doing this. I read just a few books and what I saw Fahim do from the sidelines.

That was enough for me to realize this is where I'm going to build my life's work. And I'm going all in on that.

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