Navigating the legal system on your own is challenging. Legally contesting a simple parking ticket takes an unnecessary amount of time and energy that the average person doesn’t have. Most people will forego the hassle and pay the fine. The law, in all of its majestic equality, frustrates both the rich and poor, which is why the former can pay lawyers to navigate the arcane legal system on their behalf. The latter, however, is free to suffer indignity and inconvenience equally under the law.
Joshua Browder refused to accept the Western legal system’s biased status quo, leading him to create DoNotPay. DoNotPay is the first consumer Robotic Process Automation (RPA) startup for protecting consumer rights. The San Francisco-based startup has raised a total of $25M in venture capital funding from Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis Ventures, Day One Ventures, and Global Founders Capital.
Alex Rampell, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says, “Large companies are using cutting edge software to automate their own processes, but tools for consumers are still stuck in a pre-Internet era. Navigating bureaucracy – in government, the medical system, and corporations – is a highly regressive tax in that rich people can pay to solve problems, but the poor must use their time, miss work, and lose wages. DoNotPay turns the table, by creating the same cutting-edge software, only this time, in the hands of the average person.”
SVB Vice President Jake Mendel (left), Joshua Browder (center) and Lisa Fetterman right.
Joshua Browder
Citizens in Western society have to interact with antiquated digital forms from archaic, slow-moving bureaucracies and massive, unfriendly corporations to resolve issues that impede their daily routine. For example, getting a parking ticket in America can be a hassle. Deciding to fight against paying the fine is a greater ordeal. Average citizens generally do not have the time to spend hours waiting or hiring a lawyer to dispute a parking ticket in a court of law, especially when the odds of overturning the fine are low. According to the L.A. Times, during the 2016-17 fiscal year in Los Angeles, “L.A. parking enforcement officers issued 2.3 million citations…more than 46,000 parking tickets were overturned.” Only a small percentage of these parking tickets will be disputed, as most don’t have the resources on hand to mount a defense. The successful dispute rate on average across the U.S. is 40%. Those who are fined understand that trying to talk your way out of a fine is more or less a gamble. The house always wins, and they win by a large amount; thus, most people decide to pay if they aren’t in the wrong.
One could conclude that Americans commonly run afoul of the law, and while that might be true, there are other important factors at play. Studies show that the top sixteen U.S. cities generate over $1.4 billion in revenues from parking tickets alone. New York City has the largest share of the parking fines accumulated with $545 million, followed by Chicago with $264 million collected. Given the low probability of those ticketed even trying to dispute their ticket, local police forces in these cities may be encouraged to issue parking tickets without abandon, knowing that the fines will most likely be uncontested and paid. Another consideration is that cities depend on revenue from fines to help fund their fiscal budgets for the year. The combination of these poor incentives results in money being siphoned from average Americans in a virtually incontestable fashion. Local and state governments are not the only ones harvesting citizens for revenue – corporations are in on it too.
Similar to dealing with government bureaucracy, resolving monetary disputes with financial corporations is no walk in the park either. These massive faceless entities that loom over consumers with their opaque presence. They leverage their market power to beat the latter into financial submission. Take, for instance, Comcast, one of the largest cable and internet service providers in the U.S., and coincidentally, one of the most unpopular corporations existing today. Comcast is known for its deceptive practices charging illegal fees to its consumers. These fees generate millions in ill-gotten revenues for Comcast (the cable and internet service provider generated $103.56 billion in revenues in 2020 for reference). Unless customers are diligent and persistent enough to identify these unfair fees and mount a defense against them, most of them will end up paying the price without putting up a fight. Usually, the only thing that can get a corporation the size of Comcast to curtail its unfriendly consumer practices is a state’s attorney general launching a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the latter’s customers. But these efforts come too little too late, and even in the best-case scenario where the state wins, the amount settled by corporations is routinely less than the amount they took in with the illicit fees. Consumers and citizens need an effective way to fight back against having to fork over their hard-earned cash from unaccountable governments and corporations.
Browder built DoNotPay as a tool to arm the average person with software to beat back larger foes trying to take advantage of them. DoNotPay bills itself as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” With a press of a button, the startup allows its users to “fight corporations, beat bureaucracy and sue anyone.” How can traditionally complex, time-consuming, manual processes be completed with one tap of the finger?
DoNotPay.
DoNotPay
The answer is RPA. RPA is commonly used in enterprise software companies to automate manual tasks. The tasks that can be automated are ones that have defined, structured data and input forms with detailed step-by-step processes of what operations are executed on the data throughout its lifecycle. Over the past decade, RPA has proliferated within the enterprise software business, leading to multi-billion dollar public companies such as UiPath (whose CEO, Daniel Dines, has angel invested in the standout company). However, consumer applications of RPA have been limited to specific use cases. Yet, Browder and his DoNotPay team have brilliantly leveraged RPA to build customized bots that enact over fifty different features or use cases for users to use DoNotPay. These use cases range from submitting warranty claims to cancelling any service or subscription. The team’s ability to break down complex legal forms and processes into a series of discrete steps that a bot can process is central to the startup’s success.
Each discretized step has to be automatable if the whole process is to be automated. DoNotPay has built a proprietary, customizable RPA toolkit that contains a specific automation for any potential step in an overall process to be automated. Simple tasks such as data entry or extraction, drafting customizable letters and more basic work all have unique DoNotPay automations. With any potential step now being discretized and automated, any ostensible consumer RPA process can be ‘stitched’ together by combining such smaller task automation. Herein lies the core secret of DoNotPay: the startup’s RPA tools are use case agnostic. They can virtually assemble any potential automatable process that their users demand by embroidering the tools together.
This critical insight reveals why DoNotPay is a horizontal consumer RPA company compared to its vertical competitors Cushion.ai and Truebill. These companies can satisfy a narrow selection of use cases instead of a variety. DoNotPay’s horizontal approach to their underlying RPA technology directly impacts their business model. With their suite of features, DoNotPay can retain a user for far longer than competitors because of two factors: the frequency and range of problems they have. Parking tickets or illegal fees from corporations are not everyday occurrences. A consumer may need DoNotPay or its competitor’s help every so often. However, when these issues do pop up, DoNotPay’s offering goes beyond solving that particular problem. The startup provides a wider variety of features if the user needs the startup’s services in the future for resolving different problems with bureaucracies or corporations. That sort of insurance through DoNotPay’s versatility helps immensely to retain a user versus a vertical solution that can only address one particular problem. In the latter case, a consumer would have to search for another software-driven or human-facilitated service to solve their problem. DoNotPay’s suite of use cases creates high switching considerations for consumers, which lowers the startup’s customer acquisition costs and assures an increase in the average lifetime value as they are likely to stay subscribed.
The results speak for themselves: Browder claims that the win rate for DoNotPay users is roughly 65-70%, and the average amount won is around $400. Putting aside the amount won, assume that the DoNotPay’s average win rate is representative per each feature’s individual win rate. Comparing the estimated 40% win rate from manually disputing parking tickets across the country, DoNotPay provides a significant improvement in the odds of appealing such fines successfully, which keeps its users happy and subscribed to the platform. It’s no surprise then that the startup’s churn rate is roughly 3.6%, which is significantly better than the ‘ideal’ churn rates of 6-8% for mature, public SaaS businesses. The massive improvement from arming the average consumer and citizen with powerful software is a testament to a stellar team.
Browder is a founder’s founder. The young, talented Stanford computer science graduate was a software engineer at Freedom House and an economics research fellow at Columbia University before starting DoNotPay. Browder’s mission is to create legal software that becomes society’s ‘operating system.’ He’s been able to recruit a talented team of ten (including him) to “help consumers solve their problems for free.” It’s safe to say he’s well on his way to doing so with DoNotPay.
“What’s truly exciting is that DoNotPay is being used to interface with customer service robots, heralding the dawn of a new era where robots only talk to robots to mediate our consumer needs and rights. We at DoNotPay are excited to usher in this new world and explore its implications,” states Browder.
Browder is more than a technology founder. DoNotPay is more than a startup.
Joshua is a browderer who ‘stitches’ consumer rights into the fabric of society with DoNotPay. What are the implications of the era Browder envisions hastened by DoNotPay?
Earl Browder, Joshua’s great-grandfather, has something to say about that. In his New York Times obituary, the former General Secretary of the Community Party of the United States of America is quoted as saying, “…the new industrial revolution [in America] must find its realization through expanding, not contracting, the area of freedom and democratic self‐government.” By “new industrial revolution,” he meant, “the completely automatic factory…in which the role of labor is confined to supervision and repair” of the machinery” (emphasis added).
How ironic (or is it?) that the (venture) capitalist great-grandson inherits his communist great-grandfather’s vision of automation and realizes it through his startup. The Browders form two sides of the same coin. The elder Browder focused on production, while the younger concentrates on consumption. DoNotPay is both the catalyst of the consumer-driven 4th Industrial Revolution and the vanguard for consumer rights in the current nascent, digitized age of production.
DoNotPay sublates the divisive relationship between industry and consumers to produce their synthesis: a society where the two are united in harmony.
Thus Browder weaves the tapestry of consumer rights protection into our commerce, one automated dispute at a time.
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