She's Building TurboTax For Prenups

0:00Jasmine:This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to standout tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you. Discover new arrivals from brands you love like WAIFE, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas and Free People. Plus, free shipping and returns and free styling appointments make everything so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Hey, business besties. Welcome back to Female Founder World. I'm Jasmine. I'm the host of the show. And today I'm chatting with Libby Leffler.

0:36Jasmine:She's the founder and CEO of First. Libby, welcome to the show.

0:40Libby Leffler:Thank you. It's so great to be here. Okay. People that don't know First, what are you guys building? So we are an online prenuptial agreement platform with real lawyer review.

0:49Jasmine:I think one of your investors maybe told me to reach out to you when I was kind of messaging her saying, this is a conversation that we need to have on the show. I'm seeing this come up in my TikTok feed. Who do I talk to? And she was like, oh, we need to talk to Livy.

1:02Libby Leffler:Yeah, that's right. I mean, we love that, right? One of our investors who's investing in our company and helping us kind of get things going, making that connection to you and kind of your community is so special and really excited to be here and talk about this.

1:14Jasmine:We're going to talk about how ambitious entrepreneurial women protect themselves in partnership. I'm going to have that conversation with you and I'm very excited about it. And I also want to know about Building First and your background and what's working in this business because it is such a cool concept. I really, really love it. Let's do it. How did you get started?

1:30Libby Leffler:In first or in technology? Because I've worked in the tech industry now for almost 20 years. So that's right. I started my career at Google and that got started with a cold resume inbound at a time when there were a lot of people interested in working at Google. And like there was, it was just an amazing tech company. I went to college in the Bay Area. So I went to UC Berkeley and then was really interested in kind of what I know today to be these global scale companies with massive impact. And so really wanted to go work at Google and started my career there. I was at Facebook after that. And then at SoFi, which is a fintech company at Compass as well.

2:09Libby Leffler:Also a fintech company in the real estate business. So it's been a really cool journey. And then along the way, I always was interested in founding something. I think I always found myself in positions at all of those different companies where if there was a new team, I was like, yes, let's go do it or something new to build. And so after the journey with Compass and that company went public in 2021, as I was moving on from that opportunity, I thought, you know, there's probably no better time, right? You can never really, no one else can push you kind of over that ledge so to speak except yourself and so I finally did

2:47Jasmine:so here we are building first I love the idea of any kind of resource or tool that is taking something that is usually reserved or gatekept for a certain group of people and making it accessible to everyone else who has the ambition and has the want I mean prenups are not wealth

3:06Libby Leffler:exclusive. They're a mainstream financial tool that is so important, particularly if you're starting a business, which I know your besties are all about, right? Like if you're starting whatever is your new startup, your newest side hustle, you're creating a brand, a community, you're building something, whatever it might be, you have real value in that and ownership in that. And so this is bigger than a conversation just about, okay, well, what are my premarital assets, the things that I own and, you know, have before getting married. And how do I want to treat my post-marital property, right?

3:40Libby Leffler:Things I earn or inherit or acquire later. But it's more about how do you think about the things you're investing in and how do you invest in yourself? Everyone has a prenup. Everyone has a prenup. It's the one that you created or it's the one that, you know, basically goes with the rules of whatever state that you're in. And so as we think about the prenuptial agreement process, we want to make it faster than ever, easier than ever, and really legally sound and solid. So people have a great place to turn to take advantage of these types of tools, which are just very powerful for all of us to know about and to be able to have at our fingertips.

4:21Jasmine:That is such a good call out. Everyone has a prenup. You either just have a say in what is in there or you default to the state. That's right.

4:29Libby Leffler:Everyone has a prenup. This mic is like shaking in front of me. Everyone has one. It's, it is. And we tell people this all the time. Now I have customers reaching out to us that basically say this to us, I'm getting this agreement because everyone, we all are going to have a prenup and we want to craft our own. And that makes us really excited. It makes me as a founder. So, um, you know, so very excited to think about all of the customers that we work with and being able to help them. We are at first, we're totally pro marriage. And so that's the other thing. And I think the misconception that people have as well, a prenup means you're planning for divorce.

5:10Libby Leffler:We're actually a prenup to me is one of the most optimistic things that you can do. Like you're planning for your investment in yourself in the future. You're planning for what you're creating together. And there's no better time to hash that out and have that money talk than before the stakes are really, really high and things are not so great.

5:30Jasmine:There's also this misconception around who prenups are for. And I think when I look at my kind of like friendship circle, and even though there are so many ambitious, successful, self-made women in there, I think there's still this idea that prenups are something that are kind of like put on women by like wealthy men or something. But you're finding that actually a lot of the people that are coming to first are women instigating this.

5:57Libby Leffler:So more than 50 % now of our customers initiating prenuptial agreements are women. Yeah.

6:04Jasmine:Amazing.

6:04Libby Leffler:Yeah. And that's an opposite sex marriages, of course, but that's really different than the trends that you might see even five, 10 years ago. Um, when we have people reaching out to us, asking about our services or inquiring about what we do, it feels very collaborative, right? We want this to be collaborative, not competitive. We don't want people coming at this from a place of, you know, an argumentative place, right? We want it to feel very amicable, that it strengthens your relationship, that it gets you talking about things that you would have otherwise maybe not ever discussed, and really opening your eyes to a whole wide array of different topics and conversation that you'll be really happy that you hashed out with someone before you walk down the aisle.

6:53Jasmine:Okay. So what is the process? People come to first, they're planning on getting married.

6:57Libby Leffler:What happens? Yeah. So people come to first, you create an account, sign up, you purchase your prenup. We ask you a series of questions about your assets and liabilities, which are important as you create a prenuptial agreement. And then what we do is we ask you how you'd like to treat your premarital property. So stuff that you have before you've gotten married and what you'd like to do with your post-marital properties. So what your wishes are for things you earn or inherit or acquire later. And so our goal as a platform is really to collect all of that key information right up front. So the customer is providing all that information and context in advance of connecting with a lawyer that they choose on our platform.

7:39Libby Leffler:The way to think about us and the way we've been described in Fortune described us as this, as the turbo tax for prenups, you come in and you could be talking to a lawyer tonight finalizing a draft of your prenup

7:54Jasmine:this is such a smart business idea and i've got more things i want to ask you about prenups and how people protect themselves in partnership but i want to talk about your business for a little while because i'm listening to this concept and when you just said the turbo tax for prenups i'm just like oh this is so so smart so you're building essentially a marketplace of lawyers and people who need these lawyers, and then you've got the infrastructure in the middle. What are you doing right now to grow your customer side of the business?

8:22Libby Leffler:So we do a lot of things and we think about this like a flywheel that kind of all works together. So part of that flywheel is, for example, like being here and sitting with you and talking about our product and what we do. And we try to be out there as much as possible in front of our customer to talk to them about the new things we're offering, new states we might be available in. And so I spend a lot of time kind of taking those opportunities to educate and help people learn about what we do. Of course, we invest in paid marketing. I think today in a consumer business, really everyone's doing that, but we're always trying to learn, iterate, leverage data to make decisions about how we get increasingly better and just more efficient in paid marketing.

9:01Libby Leffler:So like meta Google. Yeah, I would say meta Google. I mean, I think I read a stat somewhere this year that like 99 % of most startups paid marketing budgets really are like meta and Google. There is really interesting prenup conversation and dialogue that happens in Reddit. And so we try to kind of meet our customers where they are there. That's interesting. But there is a paid marketing side to our business. And then there is, of course, like an organic side. And so that really comes from content, education. People are so craving information about this. And we get a lot of people coming to us through that content.

9:34Libby Leffler:So we produce all kinds of original content. Community building is very important. We invest in our social channels. We're active on Instagram, on TikTok. Actually, LinkedIn is a really interesting place for us. And I post there, you know, pretty frequently, at least a few times a week. But you would be, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised at the number of people who reach out to me on LinkedIn, founders, you know, executives and businesses that are like, hey, I need to get a prenup. Like, can I do this with first? And I never really thought LinkedIn would be a place for that. But if you think about who our customer is, it's actually like the perfect place for that.

10:11Jasmine:Totally. If they're active on LinkedIn, they're probably a certain kind of ambitious kind of person who a prenup makes sense for.

10:18Libby Leffler:And again, these are all very tactical tools as your community is thinking about building their businesses. Like we don't want people to gatekeep prenups and we don't want to gatekeep how we grow our businesses. I've been on LinkedIn for a very long time and every stage of my career have posted things there and connected with people there, networked there, learned there. And just in my organic like day-to-day posting about whatever was going on, I realized that actually we're starting to see such an interest building from that community. It was something I never expected. I think I knew and that's why I engage with that community.

10:55Libby Leffler:So we think about social and content and how all of those pieces fit together. And then of course we engage in email and all of those different parts of the ecosystem. Like it all really works together as we think about holistically marketing our product and taking it to customers, no matter where they are.

11:12Jasmine:Who's doing this work on your team? What does it look like your staff set up?

11:15Libby Leffler:We have a really scrappy nimble team. So we have a bunch of people with their hands kind of all in everything. We've got folks that work on operations and marketing and help our customers. We have a prenup concierge that kind of helps our customers navigate, you know, things that they're encountering and as part of the process. Of course, we have engineers, which are, you know, so important for us to have those technical team members that help us build out this end-to-end infrastructure. And then design, great design is such a cornerstone of what we do. When improving a process like this, you really have to take a step back and look at every little minute detail of how people would formerly get a prenuptial agreement, which leads us to design in certain ways and to say, where are the friction points?

12:02Libby Leffler:Like one of the reasons that we collect all the key information upfront about the prenup is because we want to hand that off in the process to be able to get to the final product faster. Because when you, like we're not a template product. It's a custom product that's tailored to your wishes. And so we want to have all that key information up front and your wishes to understand, okay, how should this take shape in the form of this agreement? So we took a step back and looked at and examined every part of the process. We studied family law attorneys and their practices and how they worked.

12:40Jasmine:Do you follow them or do you work side by side? Are you having calls and kind of being like, Like, talk me through your process. What does that look like?

12:49Libby Leffler:The first step that it looks like, like uber tactically, is thinking about how you connect with the subject that you're looking to kind of observe. Right. So if you take this into another industry, like maybe you're interested in reinventing health care. Right. Maybe you reach out to a physician or maybe you reach out to like a nurse practitioner and you're like, hey, can I shadow you? Hey, would you like to advise my company? Right. There are a million different flavors that you can do this. I still remember like where I was and the call, the cold call that I made to a very well-known family law attorney who's based in California.

13:31Libby Leffler:And I had not a pixel of my product, like nothing, like maybe the beginnings of a wire frame on what this would look like. Maybe, but an idea, right. of we want to build this platform. We think the lawyer is incredibly important to this. We're not a law firm. We're not trying to be a law firm, right? We don't refer people to lawyers. We help people simply connect and engage those lawyers and just asking this person like, hey, can I learn more about what you do? And you'd be surprised, like people want to teach you. She was super excited. She kind of came and sat with our team and we had multiple sessions, sight unseen.

14:17Libby Leffler:We spent multiple times together. She looked kind of at materials and different things. That to me was such an amazing turning point, I think, as we were building because it really takes it from, this is an idea in someone's head and maybe it's in a deck and maybe we're circulating it here and getting input. But once you start talking to someone to really understand, like, what is the breakdown in this process? And she would take us through, too. Then at the end of the month, I have to do all this billing and I've got to do the marketing and I've got to do the overhead and the drafting takes me this much time.

14:47And we're thinking to ourselves, OK, well, if we work with lawyers and help connect people to engage lawyers, how can we remove all of that heavy lifting for them so that they can come and do what they're meant to do?

15:00Jasmine:I'm so interested in this area. And like the reason why I wanted to ask this question is because I think a lot of people stop from, they see a problem because maybe they're on the other side of this, like they're a customer experiencing the problem, but because they're not a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, whatever, they don't want to go into that space. And they feel like it's a, you know, there's a big barrier between being able to make an impact. But I feel like what you just shared is like, no, actually like those, those professionals, people in the industry that you want to disrupt can help you and will actually like help guide you and be the people that can help shape the product?

15:33Libby Leffler:I mean, it depends on what you're working on, but I think absolutely. The other piece of it is we feel the pain of problems and that's how a million great businesses have been started, right? When we feel the pain of those issues. But sometimes you have to really dig in and go, why does that pain exist? Is there a reason for that? Is there something that's not quite getting solved in that journey that we can be uniquely good at, right? One of the things that we do, one of the modules in our system is called alignment. It's in our platform and it's where you share kind of your wishes for your premarital and postmarital property and your partner shares theirs.

16:13Libby Leffler:And then we show you instantly where you align or where you don't align most importantly. And we're like, Hey, there's three things you don't align on. Have the conversation. Here's how to think about this. Get aligned so we can move forward. We're here to help. So that part of our platform is patent pending. And we think about it as probably the most important cornerstone of what we do because the alignment between these two partners is really like that's the heart and soul of any kind of contract between two people. And so we've had lawyers that, you know, we learned only about that alignment and the challenges that come in the prenup process because we talk to people who do this.

17:00Libby Leffler:Now, maybe you go, I don't want to talk to people who do this because I'm trying to reinvent something completely different. And that's okay, too. It's important that your product, that you're opinionated about your business and your product. And we knew for what we do because of the industry we're in, we really have to get it right. Yeah. And then the other thing is just customer conversations.