Company Overview
Stephen León Kane is Founder & CEO at FairClaims, an easy alternative to court. With nearly a decade of experience as a leading online dispute resolution provider, we’ve resolved thousands of disputes online. Learn more at https://fairclaims.com/.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
I’m a half-Mexican eastside LA native raised by a single mother. I still see the world through those eyes, even after years of elite education and experiences. Even after going to Stanford for college and law school. Even after raising millions of dollars for FairClaims. Even after starting one of LA’s premier startup accelerators (Grid110).
Before starting FairClaims, I was an entrepreneur who happened to have a law degree. I tried my hand at a couple startups in college and just out of college and worked in various business development and sales roles, including at one of the early successful legal tech startups (sold to LexisNexis). I also spent some time in corporate law and had my own legal practice representing small businesses and startups.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
As a small business lawyer, I kept getting calls from people with small claims disputes they couldn’t resolve. It got me thinking about ways I could help them. I read about ODR (online dispute resolution) in law school but it seemd impractial. Still, I started obsessing about whether I could find a way to use ODR to help people resolve their disputes more efficiently and effectively.
I spent about 6 months ideating on it. I built the ugliest wireframes you’ve ever seen, just to get feedback and start putting my vision out into the world. I decided I would adapt arbitration AKA “private courts” – typically reserved for large company disputes – to help help consumers get justice. I knew people were more than capable of understanding and using arbitration if it was properly designed with them in mind.
I spent another 12 months looking for anyone who would pay to use my service, eventually landing on sharing economy marketplaces (my cold email hit rate with them was about 30%). Boom, I was in business. My approach was simple – imagine dozens of potential paying user archetypes and cold email 30-50 of them with my theorized value props.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
Two things set us apart – (1) understanding how to talk to consumers and (2) highly configurable complex workflows.
You can’t teach that first prong. It comes from real world perspective and experience. The law ain’t rocket science but lawyers do speak a distinct language that’s not easily deciphered. We had a team that had enough perspective to break down legal concepts and dispute resolution processes into plain english. And we knew how to build and keep trust.
It took painstaking effort and a whole lot of trial and error to build our workflows. Our technology was configured for thousands of permutations, all behind the scenes of a very simple seeming product. That’s thanks to an amazing team, and immense attention to detail.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
Getting referrals from sharing economy marketplaces for “free” rather than having to broadly market to anyone who might have a dispute. This worked even when marketplace users wanted to make claims against them or other users on the platform. Indeed, it turns out that a referral from a known brand can be effective (most of the time in our case) even when trust is strained. I think most people recognize that a large enterprise has some gatekeeping skills and ability to discern a competent vendor, even if they feel wronged by them.
The most effective strategy for getting sharing economy marketplaces to adopt FairClaims was event marketing and thought leadership. In the early days we hosted panels and connected trust and safety leaders together to compare notes. This was based on feedback from them that the industry (at the time) was new and they wanted to learn from each other. I’m a big proponent of event marketing!
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
I very recently made the difficult but correct decision to shut FairClaims down, after 12 years in business. We could have kept going forever. But it went from being an exciting adventure to a draining barrier to creation. More on that story another time but #iykyk…
Looking ahead, I’m working on an open sourced think tank for the people slash venture studio (or some way to instigate an ecosystem that supports and builds towards the goals of the think tank). I started FairClaims because I wanted to change the world by changing the legal system. But I’ve come to believe that the legal system won’t change until the world changes. And the best way to change the world is to change the culture. Hit me up on LinkedIn if that resonates and you want to be part of the new journey – it’ll be a big lift… good people wanted!
