What One Week of Real Users Taught Me About Building in Legal Tech
Notes from a bootstrapped founder on Reddit rabbit holes, attorney conversations, and why the real product work starts after you ship.
A week ago, we launched Meritocrat — a platform that helps EB-1A and NIW applicants understand their profile, organize evidence, and prepare for attorney conversations.
I expected launch week to feel like a finish line. It felt more like a starting gun.
Instead of celebrating, I spent the week listening. I read hundreds of Reddit discussions. I talked to applicants at different stages of their journey. I reached out to immigration attorneys. I watched user session recordings, sometimes wincing, to see exactly where people got stuck.
Here’s what I learned.
The question behind the question
On the surface, every applicant asks the same thing: “Can I qualify for EB-1A or NIW?”
But sit with the conversations a little longer, and the real questions surface:
• Which evidence actually matters — and which is just padding?
• Why was my case denied even though I hired a well-known law firm?
• Which attorney is the right fit for my specific background?
• What gaps exist in my profile before I spend thousands of dollars?
• How do I organize years of scattered achievements into a compelling case?
These aren’t eligibility questions. They’re clarity questions. And almost nothing in the current process is designed to answer them before an applicant writes a large check.
Reddit as a research lab
I went down a deep Reddit rabbit hole this week, and I’d recommend it to any founder in a niche market. Not to promote — to listen.
The same themes came up in thread after thread: evidence organization, attorney selection, RFEs and denials, confusion about USCIS criteria, and people reverse-engineering successful cases to understand what worked.
What struck me most: the problem clearly extends beyond document storage. People aren’t looking for a folder for their PDFs. They’re looking for structured guidance — a way to understand where they stand before they commit to a path.
Every thread I read strengthened our conviction about what we’re building.
Launching is not the milestone. Learning is.
The most humbling part of the week was watching real users interact with the product.
You can obsess over your onboarding flow for months, and a stranger will still get confused at step two in a way you never anticipated. We found friction points we didn’t know existed, questions that needed clearer explanations, and small UX details that made an outsized difference once fixed.
We’ve been shipping improvements daily — driven by what users actually do, not what we assumed they would.
Where attorneys fit in
One thing I want to be direct about: Meritocrat is not designed to replace attorneys.
If anything, the attorney conversations I had this week confirmed the opposite. Attorneys do their best work with prepared clients — people who understand their own profile, have organized their evidence, and know where their gaps are.
Our goal is to help applicants arrive at that first attorney conversation with clarity instead of chaos. Better inputs, better outcomes, for everyone involved.
The founder lesson
If week one taught me anything, it’s this: validation doesn’t come from likes, upvotes, or launch announcements.
It comes from a user telling you exactly where your product confused them. From a Reddit thread describing your problem space better than your own landing page does. From an attorney explaining what they wish every client walked in with.
We’re still at the very beginning. There’s a long road ahead. But every conversation, every piece of criticism, and every user session is shaping Meritocrat into something more valuable than what we launched a week ago.
That’s the whole point of building in public.
If you’re building a startup: what’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from real users that completely changed your product? Reply or leave a comment — I read everything.
If you’re an EB-1A or NIW applicant (or an immigration attorney) and want to share your experience, my inbox is open.