How one lawyer built a $1.3 million firm on social media

This essay is about lexian AI-powered law firm for startups. Edited for length and clarity.

I had no intention of starting a law firm. I was a corporate startup attorney for almost 10 years. When I left my previous job at Cooley, a large law firm, I decided I wanted to join a VC fund as an investor.

To help attract potential portfolio companies, I started sharing legal tips for startups on social media. It worked, but all the founders who contacted me were looking for legal support, not investors. Some have even started offering stock in addition to cash for my services.

Several leaders have told me that this is clearly a real problem in the market. They told me to stop chasing what seems like success and respond to what the world is asking of you. So I started a startup law firm called Lawlace, which grew to over $1.3 million in revenue in two years. Now I’m growing it into something even bigger by turning my expertise into a product.

Grew your audience against conventional advice

The law firm’s secret to growth was social media. At Big Law, there was a stigma surrounding social media. The idea of ​​top lawyers dancing on TikTok was disgusting.

But I continued to act on two basic principles. It’s about meeting people where they are and providing value. I started telling real legal horror stories in short videos, sometimes with dance, sometimes with comedy. Because the interesting format allows founders to stop scrolling long enough to realize the problem they’re facing. They’ll look at a 20-second story and realize, “Wait, we never signed an IP assignment,” or “We don’t have vesting rights,” or “Did we file our 83(b) on time?”

Those stories spread quickly. This video has over 5 million views per month and Mark Cuban reposted my content. Legal knowledge does not exist only in meetings with partners, but reaches already interested founders. People watched my videos, avoided costly legal mistakes, and ultimately became customers before paying me.

Law is about trust, and content is how you build trust at scale. That content is a forever investment that brings me new customers even when I’m not trying to acquire them.

We grew our business by building software instead of services

Like many service-based founders, I found it difficult to scale my business. In the past, legal work existed only in the minds of lawyers, was manual, time-consuming, and impossible to scale.

I didn’t want to start a traditional law firm, so I immediately started automating my workflow. By late 2025, it has become clear that AI agents can perform truly complex tasks, essentially the jobs of junior employees. So I started building a new iteration of my business. That’s Lexsy, an AI-powered legal operating system for businesses.

Our clients buy a subscription and run their entire legal life on the platform. It runs on autopilot with human lawyers involved, which means less friction for founders. All activities conducted on the Platform are protected by attorney-client privilege.

We are an AI-native company. That means we have an army of AI agents working first on everything while senior team members set and review strategies. This allows you to grow quickly without increasing your number of employees. Our human team consists of five people (myself as head of product and operations and three software engineers), plus a few part-time support people for podcasting, AI architecture, and social media.

Raised funds with a specific goal

Last year, I closed a small funding round of $650,000, which is minuscule by Silicon Valley standards. We had an income and were making a profit, so I was intentional about fundraising and asked for money for very specific reasons.

First of all, we needed enough money to stop selling for six months to build Lexsy. Before we started raising money, I had already bootstrapped and tested the platform. We needed enough funding to build our platform and agents and hire a team.

Also, if an investor could not support the business in other ways, such as media support or customer referrals, I would not take money from them.

This small raise allowed me to take the risk of building a production version of my business without having to worry about a paycheck for several months. There was also the possibility of failure. Instead, we came out of stealth in June 2026, going from quietly building behind the scenes to launching in the public eye, with $372,000 in annual recurring revenue from clients who transitioned from law firms, increased word of mouth, and my social following.

Advice for service business owners: Productize yourself. Automate execution while keeping the human touch on what matters. It doesn’t have to be technical and you don’t have to raise venture capital. You just need to provide value. That part never changes.