What I Learned Building a Legal Tech Company as a Solo Founder

I didn't set out to build software. I set out to fix a problem I lived every single day: contracts managed through email threads and shared drives, where addendums get lost, versions conflict, and nobody actually knows what was agreed. So I built the thing I wished existed, Midly, while still practicing law full time.

Here's the honest version of what that taught me. Not the LinkedIn version.

1. Your expertise is the moat, and the blind spot

Being an attorney meant I understood the problem better than any outside founder could. That's real leverage. But domain expertise cuts both ways: I assumed everyone saw the problem as clearly as I did. They didn't. The hardest work wasn't building the solution, it was learning to explain, in plain language, why the problem was worth solving at all.

Lesson: your expertise builds the product. Your ability to translate it builds the company.

2. Solo doesn't mean alone, but it does mean deciding

As a solo founder you make every call, and there's no co-founder to talk you out of a bad one at 11pm. I learned to build a "board" out of people who weren't on any board, mentors, a few sharp friends, other founders one step ahead of me. Cheap, honest counsel is the highest-ROI thing a solo founder can find.

3. Practicing law made me a better founder (and vice versa)

Every negotiation I ran for a client made me sharper on my own vendor contracts, my terms of service, my equity conversations. And building a company made me a far more practical lawyer, I stopped giving clients theoretically-correct advice and started giving them advice that works when you're moving fast with limited resources.

If you're a professional thinking about building something, that cross-training is a gift. Use it.

4. Protect the company before it needs protecting

The irony of an attorney founder: it's tempting to skip your own legal foundation because you're "handling it." Don't. I set up the entity, the IP assignments, the contractor agreements, and the customer terms early, because the cheapest time to get it right is before anything's at stake. This is exactly the Founder Foundation I now hand to other founders so they don't learn it the hard way.

5. The problem you can't stop thinking about is the one to build

You'll hear "find a big market." True. But for a solo founder juggling a career, the real fuel is a problem you genuinely can't let go of. Mine was watching good deals fall apart over bad contract hygiene. If you have a problem like that, one you'd fix even if no one paid you, that's your signal.

If you're building something and want a strategist who has sat on both sides of the table, as counsel and as a founder, that's what a strategy call is for. And if you want to see what I built, take a look at Midly.