BetterLegal: a Zapier automation built to help one lawyer friend became a $2.5M-a-year business
Chad Sakonchick wasn't trying to start a company. A lawyer friend was losing clients to LegalZoom, so Chad wired up Typeform, Zapier and a document tool to cut his paperwork from 3 hours to 10 minutes. They split a $299 fee 50/50. A few years later it was BetterLegal, doing about $2.5 million a year.
Overview
BetterLegal forms LLCs and corporations for founders and keeps them compliant afterwards. One upfront price, no rush fees, no surprise add-ons. It can set up a New York business in under an hour and a Texas one in two days.
At the time of the interview it made about $2.5 million a year, with more than $70,000 a month in recurring revenue, and was heading to break even after losing $400,000 the year before.
Before BetterLegal
Chad started as a salesman at Dell and quit within a year, in 2005, to build a website-building tool, hiring help on rentacoder.com (now Upwork) while working for his dad's friend who installed septic systems.
He then spent six years at an integration company, connecting business software like Salesforce and QuickBooks. "Integration is what we called automation before Zapier popularized the term." On the side he kept trying startups. He sold his house and used 10 years of equity to fund one of them: Spacesift, an Airbnb for event spaces.
The automation
A friend of Chad's quit his law firm to go solo. He was struggling to find clients and kept losing them to LegalZoom and Incfile, because his price for forming a company was $1,200.
Chad looked closer and saw the problem. His friend was charging $300 an hour to fill in the blanks of a template. That was work a machine could do.
Using Typeform (the client fills in their details), WebMerge (turns the answers into legal documents), Zapier (connects everything) and Asana (tracks each order), Chad cut the job from 3 hours to 10 minutes. The lawyer now made more per minute while charging far less.
They priced it at $299 and split every fee 50/50: half to the lawyer, half to their joint venture. In the first year they formed 50 LLCs.
The $1,200 test
With a little money from those 50 orders, they bought betterlegal.com, Chad built a simple website, and they spent about $1,200 on Google Ads to see if strangers would buy.
The ads brought back only $600. Chad counted it as a win anyway: "it was enough to validate the idea. People who had never heard of us were willing to trust us with their credit card information and social security numbers."
Building it, mostly without code
The first version was a patchwork: a basic static landing page, the Typeform, WebMerge, Zapier, and Salesforce in place of Asana for managing orders. That original Typeform stayed in use for five years.
As volume grew they automated more. They built bots that log into state websites and the IRS to file automatically, which handled about half of all filings. Then they built a Chrome extension so their operations staff could create new bots themselves, without engineers.
In January 2022 Chad found Bubble, a no-code app builder. They had been paying developers six figures a year to maintain custom code. Within ten months they rebuilt the entire system on Bubble and dropped the developer bill. "This single service saved my company."
They also moved from Zapier to Make (formerly Integromat) after Zapier reached about $600 a month for high-volume tasks.
Growth
- The launch was a Facebook post. No big budget, no press.
- Google Ads carried the first five years. They wrote an internal tool that adjusted their bids for every state each morning at 6 am, which let a tiny team compete with billion-dollar companies.
- YouTube: Chad answered questions from the website chat with simple blackboard-style videos, then sent those videos to every customer who asked the same thing.
- Programmatic SEO in 2023: researched pages for every state on starting and maintaining an LLC, and for every follow-up filing.
- TikTok: from zero to more than 50,000 followers in about six weeks.
- Product Hunt: a recent launch took second place.
Close calls
In 2020 an investor promised money on one condition: hire two experienced former LegalZoom employees. Chad hired them at a combined $375,000 a year before the money arrived. A few months later, with about $100,000 on his personal credit cards, the investor pulled out three days before Christmas. "I remember sitting with my head in my hands." The investor came back two weeks later.
In summer 2022 a director of operations was refunding customers instead of fixing their problems. At one point refunds ate 15% of monthly revenue, and Chad had to lay off his first-ever hire.
His rule since then: "I've always wanted to grow from customer revenue and not be beholden to investors... I'd rather grow slower."
The model
The $299 upfront fee mostly pays to acquire the customer through ads. The profit comes afterwards: subscriptions for registered agent and state compliance services, plus referral fees from banks, insurers and accountants the customer needs next. "If we didn't have to pay for customers, we could theoretically charge $0 for an LLC."
His view of the industry's "dirty little secret": most "best business formation service" review lists rank companies by how much they pay per referral.
Funding: bootstrapped at first, then about $100,000 from friends and family and a few hundred thousand from angel investors.
The numbers
| Figure | Number |
|---|---|
| Lawyer's old price | $1,200 ($300 an hour) |
| Time per filing | 3 hours to 10 minutes |
| Starting price | $299, split 50/50 |
| First year | 50 LLCs |
| Validation ad spend | $1,200 spent, $600 back |
| Filings automated by bots | About 50% |
| Recurring revenue | $70,000+ a month |
| Annual revenue | About $2.5 million (trailing 12 months, 2023) |
| Previous year | $400,000 loss, now near break even |
| Hires found on Upwork | About 90% |
Do what he did: step by step
1. Find a professional charging by the hour for template work.
Do this: lawyers, accountants, insurance brokers, immigration consultants. Ask what they do over and over. Anything that is "fill in the blanks" can be automated.
2. Build it with tools you can learn in a weekend.
Do this: a form (Typeform or Google Forms), a document generator (Documint, PandaDoc, or a Google Docs template), and Zapier or Make to connect them. Today an AI step can draft the text too.
3. Partner instead of competing.
Do this: offer the professional a revenue split. They bring the license and the trust, you bring the automation. Chad's deal was 50/50 on a $299 fee.
The pitch, word for word (email or say it over coffee):
"You charge about $1,200 to form a company, and most of that time goes into filling in the same documents. I can build a system where the client fills in a form and the documents come out ready for you to review in about 10 minutes. We sell it for $299, you review and sign, and we split every fee 50/50. You'd make more per hour than now, and win the clients you're currently losing to LegalZoom. Can I build a version for you to try on your next client?"
Where this works best: any professional who repeats the same paperwork: company formation (lawyers), immigration forms (consultants), basic tax filings and bookkeeping setups (accountants), insurance quotes and certificates (brokers), leases and tenancy notices (property managers).
4. Test with strangers and small money.
Do this: spend a few hundred dollars on Google Ads. Losing half of it is fine. The question is whether strangers trust you enough to pay.
5. Charge upfront, earn on what comes next.
Do this: let the first sale pay for the ad, and plan the follow-on services (renewals, compliance, referrals) where the profit lives.
6. Stay on no-code until it breaks, and grow from customers.
Do this: Bubble ran his whole company. Avoid investor conditions you can't afford if the money never comes.
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Sources
- Hampton, "How A Single Zapier Automation Morphed Into A $2m+ Business," interview with Chad Sakonchick by Ethan Brooks (June 13, 2023)
