101: Matt Spiegel of MyCase discusses his journey to the creation of MyCase.

Matt worked as a criminal defense attorney at San Diego’s largest consumer law firm for four years before starting his own practice in 2009. He was also the recipient of the 2007 San Diego Daily Transcript’s “Top Young Attorney” award and selected as one of the Fastcase 50. After gaining experience managing a successful and growing private practice, Matt (along with co-founders Alex Dikowski and Chris Schulte) founded MyCase in 2010. He then spent several years building an extremely happy customer base before MyCase was acquired by AppFolio in 2012. In addition to being competitive in the courtroom, Matt enjoys rock climbing, golf and intense games of tennis.

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Fail fast to succeed faster

• Matt relates to “failing faster,” as the most important part of modern business eco-system.  In the tech world they focus on “agile development” which is the idea of doing the least amount of work on a particular item to deliver some sort of value then giving it to your customers and getting their feedback on that iteration.
• Matt tells us how in the beginning they launched a product geared just toward communication and collaboration, but their customers wanted more.  My Case failed quickly there, and was able to pivot and go the practice management route instead.
• The My Case team fails every day!

Tell us something good

• Matt knew that he needed to run his criminal defense firm like a business.
• While working at a firm early on he saw many business related things that he knew he would not want to repeat.
• His number one piece of advice to new lawyers is “Treat it like a business!”
• He created My Case to solve the problem of how to best communicate with clients; then enhanced My Case to build a full practice managment suite around it.
• My Case was bought by AppFolio in 2012.

What’s on your desk?

• Working on a documentation system for MyCase.com.  There are new document management features coming soon.

Favorite Resource

• TechCrunch
• LifeHacker

Favorite Books

• The E-Myth : Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It .  In this expanded edition of The E-Myth, business guru Michael Gerber adds new information from both small and Fortune 500 companies to guide people through a business’ developmental growing pains, showing them how to turn around a business that doesn’t work into one that works in a predictable and profitable way.
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Favorite Quote of the Show in a One Minute Clip

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Miranda McCroskey – host of Lawpreneur Radio