The business case.

The problem

A 1–10 person trade shop signs a subcontractor agreement, a lien waiver, or a change order every job. The forms they're using are a Word doc someone emailed them in 2019 — generic, wrong-state, and unreviewed. When the GC's lawyer catches it, payment stalls. When the statute changes, nobody notices. Hiring a local construction attorney costs $350/hr and $1,400 per doc — not a fit for a 4-job week. Generic template sites give a Word doc and a prayer, with no state-by-state lien-law clauses. Levelset is built for $50M+ GCs at ~$1,200/yr. The SMB + trade-vertical quadrant has no incumbent.

Target customer

Launch wedge: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and general-contracting shops with 1–10 employees in California, Texas, Florida, New York, or Illinois. Owner is buyer, user, and gatekeeper — typically the licensed master tradesperson running the shop. Not a fit yet: 20-truck fleets (try Levelset), national GCs (try in-house counsel), shops outside the 5 launch states. We're going after the operator who'd rather lose a tooth than spend an afternoon redlining a Word doc.

Solution

Three flows, one attorney-reviewed clause library:

1. 01 · Pick the doc + state

   Subcontractor agreement, lien waiver, change order. CA, TX, FL, NY, IL. Right statute snaps in by state.

2. 02 · Fill 4 fields

   GC name, job address, payment amount, date paid through. Scrivener-mode fill-in-the-blank — no LLM-generated legal text.

3. 03 · Export PDF + DOCX

   Attorney-reviewed boilerplate, your logo on the header. Email it from your phone before you leave the lot.

Pricing is one tier: $39/mo or $390/year (17% off). No per-doc fee. No per-seat tax. Five launch states; 50-state rollout queued at $1.8K of attorney spend per state.

Why we win

Honest risks

1. 01

   Unauthorized practice of law (UPL) — the dominant Phase 2 risk; mitigated by attorney-signed UPL opinion letters in each launch state and scrivener-mode product framing throughout.

2. 02

   Levelset pivots downmarket within 12–18 months — mitigated by SMB-cohort lock-in and a price point ($39/mo) that risks brand cannibalization for a $1,200/yr enterprise incumbent.

3. 03

   OLDA $25K surety bond requirements in some states — surfaced and budgeted; not passed through to customers.

4. 04

   LLM hallucination on conditional lien notices — eliminated by scrivener-mode design (no LLM-generated legal text).

5. 05

   CAC sensitivity (PE red-team flagged a back-calculated CAC) — surfaced honestly on /inside as a 3×3 churn-by-CAC sensitivity table; central case is $180 CAC and 5% monthly churn, recovering in 9.2 months.

6. 06

   SAM ambiguity — intake claim says 1.2M shops; BLS cross-check says 550–750K; both surfaced rather than picking the bigger number.

7. 07

   PE returned 7.1 (originally PASS, patched to FUND) — disclosed honestly on /process; Phase 2 attorney work is the dominant risk-retirement step before any external pitch deck.

Financials at a glance

All figures are projections from the PE diligence cycle, not achieved revenue.

Investment needed

$132K

Total runway

18 months

Phase-4 paying subs

100

Phase-4 ARR

$46K

Full month-by-month detail and the CAC × churn sensitivity table live on the For Investors page.