alt Hacker NewsHi Drew, I remember your "Show HN" from a while back and have been secretly rooting for you ever since! (I'm not a lawyer but for some reason I have many friends that are, and now I happen to do work for a firm in the legal publishing sector, so I often hear about how terrible "word processing" can be and think there've got to be better tools!)
May I ask, how are things going? Also, will your IDE always be focusing on transactional law or have you considered expanding to other legal areas and/or markets?
Hi! It's a super interesting time to be in legal tech. Thank you for asking.
When this project got started, "VS code for transactional lawyers" was the target. We pretty well have that on offer at this point, but it sits in a weird spot making it harder to sell than it would be in, say, 2024. Right now, "AI forward" lawyers are spinning out of law firms in droves to start "AI native" firms backed for example by YC. They're so comfortable with Claude that they for the large part bypass a need for Tritium (or at least they think they do ;). OTOH, large law firms are inundated with legal tech products right now and have a hard time even understanding how an IDE benefits their lawyers. We're also trying to stay away from VC funding (other than from a certain awesome one ;), so we're missing a key signal for enterprise buyers. As I mentioned above, it's super hard to even set up a hands on demo because we have to get the desktop app installed on their infrastructure. But I'm shocked to learn that Googlers are happy to work in a browser, and distributing Tritium via browser is trivial, so we're going to 180 on that right here and now.
That all said, we eliminated the "free tier" as advised back in the Show HN thread, and we've managed to find a very small market in individual users. We're also finding some opportunities with the AI natives using an "unreal engine for legal tech" model that makes Tritium source available and handles the boring editor-related parts of their innovation.
I should probably do a post on this, but there's actually a topic we're working on that perhaps the HN audience will find even more interesting... coming soon!
[edit: I realized that I haven't responded to your question re: other markets, but accidentally did with the hint. We have some ideas.]