Responsiv’s Playbook: Building a Legal Tech Product Without Traditional Marketing
Most B2B startups rush to build their marketing engine. Responsiv took the opposite approach – keeping their product behind a waitlist and letting satisfied customers drive growth. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, founder Jordan Domash revealed their unconventional go-to-market strategy.
“Since we publicly launched, we have a bunch of paying customers happily using the product, but we haven’t really turned on our go to market motion yet,” Jordan explains. “If you go to our website, its behind a waitlist.” This controlled approach wasn’t about manufacturing scarcity – it was about building trust in a risk-averse market.
The strategy started with carefully selected design partners from Jordan’s legal tech network. These early adopters “believed in the vision and identified the pain point that were articulating.” Their success created a powerful referral engine.
“Most of the new customers that we’ve signed in the past month or two have come from referrals from existing customers,” Jordan notes. “We haven’t done any marketing. We just had our first salesperson start this week.” This organic growth validated their product-market fit.
The waitlist served multiple purposes. Beyond controlling growth, it helped Responsiv refine their positioning. As Jordan explains, “When you tell an attorney, oh, you’re building a legal research tool, they think Westlaw, they think about one of the platforms that’s been around for a long time that’s really targeting those big law firms and not something far silk lawyer that we’re building today.”
Their focus on in-house counsel rather than law firms proved crucial. “Most of our peers that are building legal research tools are actually get the bulk of their spend from law firms… For us, basically we’re the anti traditional legal research tool and that we’re hyper focused on the corporate use case.”
This specialization helped them identify specific customer segments: regulated organizations with complex legal needs and high-growth tech companies facing new challenges daily. These customers had clear pain points – they were spending thousands on outside counsel for basic legal information because “there isn’t really an alternative.”
The approach required patience. As Jordan notes, “We’re still trying to figure out what’s the pithy one sentence line that really articulates the category that we are playing in.” But this deliberate pace allowed them to build trust through successful implementations rather than marketing promises.
Their experience at Relativity, which grew from 350 to 1,800 employees during Jordan’s tenure, informed this strategy. “I’ve been building AI enabled tools for attorneys for ten years,” he explains. This background helped them understand the importance of proving value before scaling.
The lesson for founders? Sometimes the best marketing strategy is no marketing at all. By focusing on specific customer segments, delivering clear value, and letting satisfied customers drive growth, Responsiv built credibility in a notoriously skeptical market. Their story shows that in B2B, especially with risk-averse buyers, product success can be more powerful than any marketing campaign.