Truman Sachs launches Cubby, an AI teaching assistant for law students targeting a $1B market

mirror how they test. It's like having your professor tutor you every night. Learn the law, master your professor, and outperform the curve with Cubby. Good set design, too. I love it. Well, welcome to the stream, Sherman. How you doing? Welcome from the reream waiting room Ultra Dome. No, you're you're good.

You're good. We can hear you now. We can hear you. I think we're just being noisy. What's up? Good. Congrats on the launch. Haven't seen you since uh workout. Phil, was it six months ago? It's true. Yeah, it was about 6 months ago. I know. I like every morning I'm like, damn, I wish I could steam with the boys today.

Yeah. Yeah. Next time you're in LA, come hang. It'll be fun. Every day. Every day. So, and you were telling us about you were telling us about this play. Yeah. So, it's glad great to see you at launch. Thank you, man. I'm excited for it to go public. Yeah, break it down for us. What are you launching?

Uh what's the pitch and what what kind of led you to this particular subm market? Yeah, great question. Um you know, it kind of dates back to like a conversation you and I were having with Senra a few years ago now. That runion hike. Yeah.

Um you're telling me how like beautiful Renion hike where where great stories begin. Runion Canyon, folks. Canyon. Running Canyon to In and Outber. Um, couple influencers doing Renion. Dude, we got stopped like every second. It was crazy.

Um, anyways, but no, I mean, John was talking about this idea that just like there are power law people, they're also power law books. Um, it's a Kanan idea right there. And, uh, 0ero to one is the we both agreed is the business power law book.

And there's a quote which I I think like kind of defines my personal operating philosophy which is like the perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrating together and served by few or no competitors. Mhm. So I think that like sums up the law school industry in a shell.

Um law school is three years. It's curve based. So everyone's stack brain against each other with public rankings. Um and it's like directly correlated to the job you get after law school is how you perform with your grades. Yeah.

So like big law firms, everyone's vying for the same big law jobs after law school which pay like 220k out of pock and there's only a limited amount of them and they're a day. Yeah. The AI research market is if you don't make that start chasing ambulances, bro, that's what happens.

Seriously, it is a knockout dragout fight in law school. Got to get to the top of the ranking. But no. Yeah, it's crazy.

So like everyone's competing each other because there's like a everyone knows there's public rankings like you're either the top of your class or you're not and the firms see that and that's what they're recruiting off of.

So um the mindset of the consumer is that of like I will invest in my future like anything that will help me do better in school is an investment and I will spend money on it. So I it's a really like powerful lever to tap in as a as a business you tap into that market.

Um so what we built was like the first AI teaching assistant for law students. Um, we've like trained a model on thousands of practice exams and case reefs written by like a top Georgetown law uh law student who just graduated.

And we built like an entire experience that's almost like a dual lingo style course that calibrates all the material that's specific to your course and your professor all the way through the final exam. So you could take like unlimited final exams and practice throughout the semester.

Um, get instant grades, feedback, and it's all kind of built to mirror exactly how your specific professor would like teach a grade. Um, because that's who decides your grade. Yeah. What what's the business model then? Do you do you want to sell to the law school? Sell to the law students.

Just take like 30% of their lifetime earnings. Don't don't worry about the business. We have like a really aggressive terms and conditions. Uh that uh lambda school is doing ISAs, income that was but but income share agreements. But I think those are I think those aren't kosher anymore. Yeah, it's always tricky.

Anyway, yeah. Who are you going to who's actually putting down the credit card? So, good question. right now. Like it's funny enough, there's already an existing tool in this market from 2007 called Quimby. Everybody, everybody in law school, like ask 8 out of 10 law students, they buy Quimby for 30 bucks a month.

So there's around 120,000 law students in the US um per year and like they're all spending 30 bucks a month on this software from 2007 that hasn't changed. It's like a static company for like cliffnotes for case law effectively.

So we we we plan to come in as like a 10x better replacement for that and think that like our tool versus their like just straight up like the decision will be obvious. Sure.

So that's kind of coming in what we're trying to surf up initially and then over time like we've already had some interest about like partnering with schools themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. How how do you see the top of funnel?

Like how do you reach a there's so many there's so many fun things that you can do on campuses to make sure that you cannot go to law school without knowing about drone show. Well, as we speak right now, we have hundreds of law students at from Cordo Law at a Cubby Cafe truck outside. Yeah, there was going to say truck.

Yeah, exactly. Free coffee. Yeah. Yeah. Free coffee. Papa bagels, ice cream. So that's like an on campus approach for um this week. I'd like you guys should do branded aderall. Dude, low key. Do not do that. Illegal. Uh I'm sure there's I'm sure there's a tele medicine company that that could uh controlled substance.

It's specifically you cannot do that. But it's just so funny because this industry is run by like like legacy like these like massive bar prep companies. Like the our biggest got acquired a few months ago and like the second we launched like a small Tik Tok like of just like what we're doing.

We got seasons in desisted by them. Um just like like hey like we we think you might be training on our materials like and if you are like we're going to come after you but like we're not sure.

So we were just like [ __ ] off and and they're like oh yeah yeah we're sorry like we're going to counter you for these anti-competitive practices.

So, it's an interesting like sleeper market that I like I think it's an interesting wedge as well to go deeper into the actual law like legal tech space as well because once you have that relationship with the customer, you know, they're they're the future lawyers of America.

You should prove how how how well the product works by personally counter suing the Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I passed the bar. I learned it all with Cubby. It it is uh it is particularly difficult to pass the bar without going to law school.

you have like there's one loophole where I believe you can you can like mentor under a lawyer and they can say that you're that you're allowed to but in general you cannot take the bar and pass it just because you did the studying like you have to be in a law school accredited uh yeah it's all to control the number of lawyers to drive up uh comp well maybe we'll open our own law school at this point for kids who just are fed up with the traditional system yeah there's like one online law school or there's only a few like that that actually let you do it in this particular way like it's very like hacky.

It It's a very tightly controlled uh like market in general. Sounds like you tried to hack it at some point.

I I actually if there's a system I did, John will try to hack and I emailed a guy who who did it and he was just like basically credential maxing and he and he was like a lawyer, a doctor, and had figured out how to do all of these things because he was really smart and he could take tests really well.

And so he just went around and got like law degrees, but figured out like the the the minimum time, maximum amount of money. So, you pay a ton of money to to do this, get all the test prep, and then take the test. And I was like, "Well, did you wind up using the law degree ever? " He's like, "No, but it's a flex.

" Yeah, it's a flex. It's a flex. And I was like, "I like this guy. I should email him, get him on the show. " Uh, yeah. Anyway, how big is the actual market?

like are are you going to go like venture mega round like Harvey style or or or is this more something that you want to grind at for for a long time and you think you can just like find a great wedge great business and then maybe if there's like a secondary market that opens up then that's the venture territory.

Yeah, great question. Um so the legal education market's five years. It's from Alsat Bar like you mentioned. Um we have 120,000 plus people going through that every every year. And I think the average like C customer spends over over three over five years uh $5,000 on on like supplemental spend.

So take that times the time you're looking at like a billion dollar just education. Sure. Sure. Sure. Um but at the same time like so I I do think bar and elsat's kind of where we take it next. Um that we could see some like meaningful um AR growth from there.

But I I I just I'm really excited about this concept of like we we know in the age of AI everything is like distribution and like what kind of like moat and competitive edge do you have on on the customer acquisition side and like it's so difficult to break into legal tech like I don't think that's why we see so many rappers in the legal tech space because it's just like such an old guard and you need to know connections you need to have like specialized models the bar for quality is so much higher and I think if we can really entrench ourselves and establish ourselves as a meaningful player in law school like I said like every single one of these players are going to legal and to to the big law firms next.

And I think if we're able to kind of create that relationship with them, help them start building like practicing legal research in their like breaching classes while they're in law school, they're going to get used to that flow just like they got used to Google Docs and brought that to them to work with them.

So I do think there is a really interesting play to kind of like continue with the the customer to the workforce that I think we'll try to angle for. Makes sense. Are you playing to somebody Taylor in the chat is not a not a PC uh but That's going wild right now.

They said cubby branded one one and a quarter by one and a quarter ziplock baggies for for maybe the associates after they moved to New York. Cubby event at Marquee on Saturday nights. Yeah. Uh John actually threw the horse emoji in the chat. Is there plan to do horse branded merch?

You know the team that's like huge into horsepower. Play horse noise on there. Of course. See like I don't know if you guys see that on my wall. Oh yeah. There you go. Anyway, great catching up with you. Thanks so much for hopping on. Congrat to see you. Congrats on launch. We will talk to you soon.

Good luck with the rest roll out. Talk to you soon. Bye. Let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Find your happy