SoloSuit

George Simons started SoloSuit while still in law school because he had a pressing personal problem: he needed an attorney but couldn't find one. As he dug into the problem, he uncovered a systemic issue that would become his company's mission. Every year, 10 million people in the U.S. are sued for debt. Of those, 9 million automatically lose their cases—not because they don't have a valid defense, but simply because they don't know how to respond to the lawsuit. This wasn't a niche problem; it was a massive market failure of access to justice.

In 2018, George officially launched SoloSuit as a completely free service for people facing debt collection lawsuits. The initial product was straightforward: walk users through a process to generate their legal response document themselves. The core insight was that most people didn't need fancy legal advice—they just needed help understanding the mechanics of responding to a lawsuit within their deadline.

But George quickly discovered a critical gap in his product. Even after users generated their response document on SoloSuit, many of them never actually filed it. The problem wasn't the document generation; it was the filing itself. Court filing systems vary wildly by jurisdiction, and the friction was too high. In 2019, still while in school, George pivoted. He introduced a paid filing service: $197 flat fee, no matter the debt amount. An attorney would review the document and handle the actual court filing. George went full-time on the project immediately after graduating in April 2020, right as COVID shutdowns began.

From day one, SoloSuit's customer acquisition strategy relied almost entirely on organic search. When someone gets sued for debt, their instinct is to Google "how to respond to debt collection lawsuit." SoloSuit was there, ranking first. George didn't stumble into SEO expertise by accident. Before law school, he took random Craigslist jobs to explore different fields. He noticed content writers were in high demand, took some writing gigs, and then worked with a Y Combinator company (SimpleCitizen) that had built an exceptional SEO machine. He learned their playbook and applied it to SoloSuit. Keywords like "debt collection lawsuit response," "how to answer a summons for debt collection," and the long-tail variations of these phrases became his acquisition funnel. Nearly 100% of customers came through search.

The $197 flat-fee model worked beautifully. It created predictability in a business that wasn't technically recurring revenue, but felt like it. George's argument to Nathan Latka was compelling: people get sued at the same rate every month (they have been for decades), so while the specific 400 customers might change month to month, the volume stays consistent. This allowed him to forecast revenue and plan hiring.

What also worked was the power of solving a real problem with a moral dimension. Debt collectors often add inflated attorney's fees ($300 to $9,000), charge post-judgment interest at 5-10%, and exploit the massive power imbalance between corporations and individual consumers. About 50% of people sued for debt say they don't even owe it—they're being sued for the wrong amount or the debt is fabricated. SoloSuit's value wasn't just legal—it was ethical.

The growth was impressive: from $15,000 in monthly revenue a year prior (November 2020, when George appeared on TechCrunch Disrupt), the company had grown to $80,000 per month by the time of this interview. That's roughly 5x growth in a year, driven entirely by SEO and organic word-of-mouth.

With a team of six (two engineers, operations staff, and George), SoloSuit had just completed a seed round of "less than a million" dollars through Y Combinator. George was deliberate about raising capital not as a growth accelerant that would force rapid scaling, but as a form of de-risking: it gave the team a runway cushion and the ability to make preemptive hires. The next phase was clear: automate the filing process across America's estimated 10,000 to 30,000 courts. According to George, SoloSuit was the first and only company building a software stack capable of calculating and filing documents across different court systems. That automation would be the next frontier for the business.