Fifty people before fifty thousand
I am not an entrepreneur | Post 3
I did not start BeforeYouSign with a marketing funnel. I started it with a list of fifty names. This is who they were, why I chose them, and what I have learned in the months since I invited them in.
The night I registered the company, at 1am on the living room sofa, I did not open a spreadsheet to plan a launch.
I opened a document and started writing down names.
Fifty of them. I stopped at fifty because fifty is the number of people I could read a survey response from properly. Ten more felt like scale. Forty felt like a focus group.
Some names arrived immediately. Some I had to reach for. A few came from scrolling through old WhatsApp conversations, looking for the messages that had ended with “send me the contract, I will have a look.” I had been having those conversations for two decades. There were more of them than I had realised.
By the end of the third evening, I had my Founder50.
Who they were
Freelancers. Founders. Consultants. Small business owners. The people who had, at some point in the last ten years, sent me a contract at 11pm on a Sunday and asked what to fight for.
Some of them were friends. Some were friends of friends. Some were people I had worked with briefly, years ago, whose contracts I had read once and never forgotten because of the specific unfairness of what they had been asked to sign.
They had four things in common.
One. They had all, at some point, been at the receiving end of a contract they did not understand. Every single one.
Two. They had all, at some point, signed something they later wished they had pushed back on. Every single one.
Three. They were all people I trusted to tell me the truth about a half-built product. Not to be nice. To be honest.
Four. They were all people who, in some way, had been the person in the room who most needed a lawyer and did not have one.
That last one is the one I want to sit with, because it is the reason the list looks the way it does.
Why not the loudest fifty
I could have picked fifty people with big audiences. Founders with newsletters. Consultants with LinkedIn followings. The people whose amplification of BeforeYouSign would have been visible to the maximum number of eyeballs the fastest.
I did not.
Not because those people are wrong. They are not. Some of them will be in Cohort 2 when they arrive. But they were not the right people to build with in the first eight weeks.
The people I needed in that room were the people who had lived the problem hardest. The freelance writer who lost three months of income to a kill fee clause she had not understood. The consultant who signed a non-compete that quietly rewrote the next two years of his career. The small business owner who guaranteed a supplier debt personally and did not realise she had. The designer who signed away the IP on a logo she had spent six months making, and then watched it become the face of a brand she was no longer allowed to name.
Those people know what BeforeYouSign is for in a way no growth strategist can teach. They know because they lived the version of the story where nobody helped them. They know because they still remember, years later, exactly which line in the contract they wished someone had flagged.
Those are the people you build a contract tool for.
Not the ones with the biggest platforms. The ones with the specific and lived expertise of having signed the wrong thing.
What I am asking of them
I want to be honest about the exchange.
Founder50 members do not pay for BeforeYouSign. They get complimentary Founder access for twelve months. 50 contract reviews each. Direct access to me as I build.
In return, I ask for something most people in this space would not ask for out loud.
I ask them to give me the truth.
Honest survey answers on the way in. Not the polite version. Not the version they would give a stranger. The version they would give a friend at 11pm on a Sunday when the wine is open. What worked. What did not. What confused them. What they closed the browser and gave up on. What they wished the tool had said and did not.
Genuine use on real contracts. Not test documents. Not toy examples. The real thing they were about to sign.
Continued reachability as the product evolves. When I ship a new feature, I want to hear whether it worked for them. When I rewrite a prompt library, I want to know whether the new report is better than the old one. When I make a decision about pricing, or terms, or who BeforeYouSign is for, I want their voice in the room before it gets locked in.
This is a working relationship. Not a beta test. Not a survey panel. A room of fifty people who agreed to be in the building of the thing.
Why the exchange has to be real
There is a version of a founder cohort that is essentially a marketing list with an upgrade badge. Get early access. Get a discount. Get a mention. That version is not what Founder50 is, and here is why.
If the exchange is not real on both sides, the feedback is not real either.
If someone gets a free product and gives nothing in return, they will be polite. They will find the nicest way to phrase what they think, and the nice way is the useless way.
If someone gives you genuine feedback because they know the exchange is fair, free access is worth something, and their honesty is worth something back, you get the actual data. You get the sentences that start
“The report was great except for the bit where I completely stopped understanding what it was telling me”
“I would have paid for this except…”
“If you changed this one thing I would send it to every freelancer I know.”
Those sentences are worth more than any launch.
What I am building with them, not for them
Most companies who claim to build with their community mean they listened to some user interviews once and mention them in their About page. What I mean is different.
Founder50 sees the report before it goes to anyone else.
Founder50 tells me when the language of the report is wrong. When a phrase confuses. When a clause I flagged as high-risk is actually low-risk for the way their industry works.
Founder50 shapes the product I will one day charge for. They shape the price. They shape the tier structure. They shape the list of clause types the tool covers next. They shape the tone of every email BeforeYouSign will ever send.
I am not building BeforeYouSign for them. I am building it with them. And what they get, in return for that work, is a product that when it ships will actually be the product they wanted.
Why this is the whole point
Contracts are the place where power gets written down.
Most people who sign contracts do so from a position of less power than the person who wrote them. The client has the lawyer. The freelancer has a Google search. The employer has a template. The employee has forty-eight hours to sign.
The reason BeforeYouSign exists is to close that gap. Not to replace the lawyer for the person who can afford one. To give the person who cannot afford one the same information the person who can is being given.
That mission is only real if the people it is being built for are in the room while it is being built.
Founder50 is the room. Cohort 2 is the next chairs I am pulling up to that table. Every cohort will be built the same way: real exchange, real feedback, real influence on what BeforeYouSign becomes.
If you are reading this and you have ever signed something you did not fully understand, and you would like to be one of the voices that shapes what BeforeYouSign turns into next, Cohort 2 is open at beforeyousign.uk.
If you are building something of your own, start there. Not with the audience. Not with the funnel. With the fifty people who have lived the problem hardest and will tell you the truth about whether you have solved it.
The fifty come first. The fifty thousand can wait.
Louise