How long have you been selling your software? If it's new-ish this honest question from the prospect can be life changing for your product positioning and marketing strategy.
But we actually run into the same buyer/not user problem on the licensing side of our business. Textbook publishers don't really care about the student's user experience, for example. This is because the textbooks are assigned by the professor, so students don't have a choice about which textbook to purchase.
Fortunately, we're finally going to launch an integration with a digital textbook platform. Not surprisingly it's a reseller platform, not a publisher. Unlike publishers, their product differentiation is more about the UI, so they're looking to provide additional value by adding our reading enhancement tech. [1]
What kind of speed improvement can I typically expect?
Edit: I found the "research summary" link in the education page, but it doesn't appear to work in Chrome with uBlock for me. The actual "conventional" link in the FAQ does work. It might be because the former is not an <a href> but something else.
For a typical skilled reader, up to about 25-30%. For people with reading challenges (dyslexia, ADHD, vision impairments), it could be much greater. One fellow with ADHD (and two PhDs) said that he could read about 3x the speed with BeeLine versus regular text.
To get a sense of what the speed difference could be for you, check out our "Reading Challenge". [1] It's not super scientific (you might have more knowledge of one of the topics already, which would bias your results), but it can give you a ballpark figure.
Thanks for pointing out the issue with the research summary link. I'll get that fixed ASAP! There's actually newer research that shows even larger gains for students with reading challenges, as well as data from companies (including a YC company) who saw dramatically lower churn rates and/or higher engagement for users reading with BeeLine in their apps.
"Read 30 to 300% faster with Beeline."
Cool stuff!
Hope it succeeds enough with commercial partners (especially ereaders!) that you can offer the browser extension for free on Chrome someday.
This is 100% our plan. As our B2B revenue goes up, we will reduce our B2C pricing, hopefully to $0. We've already released one tool for free, our iOS extension for Safari. [1]
1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-extension/id1571623734
There was also a study done in an optometric office with patients, who saw improvements in visual tracking, not surprisingly.
Various of our partners have also tracked to see how user behavior differs between people reading with BeeLine and people reading traditional black text. These have shown increases in article completion rates, average scroll depth, pages per session, and app usage.
All of these studies were done independently and were not compensated. I don't know about bionic — they're pretty new, so I imagine they don't have a ton of research at this time.
It is not like the law firm has a choice to keep using pen and paper to bill 100x the number of hours as others. They have to compete with other law firms.
"Document review" is something law firms can dump thousands of manhours into with no real appreciable change in outcome. It ends up being more a question of what a company/individual is willing to pay.
The reason big lawfirms stay in business isn't because they generally get much better results, but rather it's because they have the time and manpower to chase down every single rabbit hole to fully understand the law around the cases they are working. So, instead of a firm giving you a "We are 95% sure the law is this way" with a bigger firm you get "We are 99% sure the law is this way."
The other messed up part of the US legal system is the bigger the law firm, the more time they have to chase down discovery rabbit holes looking for wins and (potentially) legally bankrupting their opponents. "Document A references document B written by Foo? Well, lets have a deposition of Foo and a request for Document B". It ends up looking a lot like refactoring spaghetti code in a dynamically typed language.
That is impossible because the quality of work for a lawyer is very, very difficult to gauge, and it may take years (or decades) for bad work to be visible in many cases (say missing some bad edge cases in contract language, or they can't handle in litigation in certain types of cases, or the like).
And other lawyers have little incentive to price shop either, as they usually get to add on a little on top when they farm out the work. Cost-plus, essentially.
And if 'very expensive and opaque' is the norm, it's not like 'very expensive and opaque' is unreasonable.
Yes, but I feel like this only works up to a certain point. There is absolutely a sense that high caliber attorneys charge more and getting a "cheap lawyer" instinctively sounds like you're setting yourself up to fail - despite the fact that the lower price firm is probably just as apt as the firm with the brand recognition.
Clients pressed for fixed billing arrangements to save money, and law firms obliged because their books of business were shrinking. But then things came roaring back, and the purse strings loosened again. We may be in for another contraction, and if fixed-fee arrangements come back that would be a good thing for legal efficiency.
(Besides the fact that there's no shortage of software work, so it would be really hard to run out of things to do no matter how efficient you are.)
How does a client know whether a provider that charges double is also twice as efficient? I suppose it might work if you have a long relationship with said client, but if you are talking to a new client, it seems they'd just go with the lowest price per hour that seems reasonable.
The same way that a client (or potential client) would know whether the existing rate is proper -- I (or my network references, word of mouth, etc.) must be able to sell them on the notion. If I can't sell it, then I might need to question whether that efficiency was really providing value to clients after all. I don't think people hire me because they're looking for the lowest bidder, so I'm not too concerned about that.
Lawyers get paid less the more efficent things are. Thats not a thing they desire, nore incentivize. Eventually they will come, kicking and screaming, but dont hold your breath.
Or are there other limiting factors of how much work they can take on like court schedules or such?
Yeah, that's a huge concern. If they get paid for literal hours, then they're directly incentivized to maximize hours.
Software is highly effective when you get paid for productivity: hourly rate scales with efficiency. I want to reduce the hours I spend working so I can go back to enjoying my life as soon as possible.
I wrote my own software to track my process and compute statistics so I could identify bottlenecks and opportunities. Essentially a profile-guided optimization run on my job which doubled my hourly rate and got me home faster.
This is normal and encouraged in law and the consulting world.
Presumably this law firm may not like lower billable hours, but some upstart law firm might use it to bid lower and take their business.
I never heard back after that conversation...lawyers aren't big on efficiency-enhancing technology. That tendency was probably one of the reasons I left biglaw!
- Henry David Thoreau, from Life Without Principle, 1863
Maybe I’m wrong but I would rather eat dirt than spend time/money on lawyers and other secretary tier professionals who ultimately still make mistakes.
It’s kind of like medicine. There can be high stakes and you want someone who has “done it” before. Someone who knows the statutory law, the case law, the precedents, who keeps up on that area of expertise.
It was tempting to buy a piece of software that could draw up the papers I needed to create my family trust, but if I really need that in 10 years and something is outdated or the laws have changed, then I’m just passing down a problem of unknown potential to my next of kin.
I had recent need of an estate attorney when my mom passed unexpectedly, and the time, hassle, and general insanity the attorney saved my family and I was well worth the expense of a few grand coming out of the estate. He was very conservative in his billings and gave us four trips, in person, to government agencies on the house.
In short, efficiency is discouraged when dollars are on the line.