“Build Less, Learn Faster” Inside SeedLegals’ Founder Playbook

On Profit Meets Purpose, SeedLegals Co-founder and Chief Executive Anthony Rose lays out a practical guide to building companies in 2025 from chocolate-box user tests to why your website probably says the wrong thing.

Listen to the full episode here.

Formed in 2018, SeedLegals helps founders to focus on what matters most by streamlining much of the laborious paperwork. Founders don’t want legal documents, they want investment, hires and momentum. “The product of a law firm is documents,” Rose says. “Founders want to raise, they want to hire. The legal docs are the by-product.”

Seven years on, SeedLegals is a 160-person legal-tech platform and founder guidebook operating in the UK, US, France and Ireland. Rose is not a lawyer. Before founding the company he helped launch BBC iPlayer. Then he built and sold a series of startups, “got tired of paying lawyers”, met his co-founder Laurent Laffy (a former venture capital investor) and productised the parts of fundraising and hiring that most early-stage teams find slow, opaque and expensive.

Because SeedLegals sits in the flow of thousands of deals, it can follow the entire journey taken by founders, providing practical advice throughout. The SeedLegals documents, Rose says, should be like the car manual in your glovebox: when things go wrong or very right — a co-founder leaves, you have an acquisition offer — you “open the manual and it has the answer”. This standardised approach saves founders and investors weeks of friction. Angel investors love the impact on founders because “the cap table is correct, SEIS advance assurance is done, everything’s e-signed”, and VCs can scan the deal terms without ploughing through PDFs. 

A startup inside the BBC 

Rose’s operating philosophy is relentlessly customer-first. When he arrived to lead iPlayer, “the path to success was to operate a startup within the BBC”. He ignored six-week research cycles and accelerated development by encouraging colleagues with gifts of chocolate to test early versions. Each time they stumbled, his team fixed the top three issues within days and repeated the drill. By round four, people were streaming their programmes in seconds. “Everything’s about customer-driven development,” says Rose. 

That bias to rapid validation has hardened into a rule. “Building stuff is often the failure to not have to build stuff,” he says. If you can prove demand with a spreadsheet and a few phone calls, do that before you write code. If you must build, build the least you can — even if that means “faking it till you make it”.

Two common mistakes

Time and again, Rose sees founders making the same mistakes.

Not validating hard enough. Get out of your head and into customers’ hands, explains Rose. He suggests using scrappy prototypes to prove real demand before writing lots of code or raising the next funding round.

Secondly he encourages founders to lead with customer outcomes not their tech. Your website/pitch should start with the problem and the result (“what’s in it for me?”), not buzzwords. Frame it as “Something is broken → here’s how we fix it → here’s the benefit” (e.g., “save 30% in five minutes”), then let the tech be the supporting act.

For founders in the sustainability space Rose offers some more specific advice. What matters is the audience. Some investors optimise purely for returns; some want to save the planet; many will give “brownie points” for impact once the core business case is compelling. Lead with the customer value; let your sustainability credentials support, not obscure, the proposition.

The market has changed so must founders

The 2021 party is over. Higher interest rates make bank returns more appealing to angels than backing sketchy startups; AI has created both hype and hesitation. “Fundraising is particularly hard compared to a few years ago,” Rose says. Investors want to see revenue earlier, and the path that now works for most is to bootstrap longer, raise smaller angel cheques (ideally with SEIS/EIS in the UK), achieve meaningful traction, then approach VCs.

Too many first-time founders, he argues, start at the wrong end of the ladder. “They go to the top 10 VCs in London. The VCs say, ‘come back later’. That becomes the story of your life.” 

Rose is honest about his own falling into this trap. He’s the “expand to 27 countries” type; but his co-founder has “seen too many companies run out of money”. SeedLegals has raised a modest £6m so far t. When the 2022–23 downturn hit, the company’s discipline looked prescient. “Aim to get to cashflow break-even,” he advises. 

Optionality beats the treadmill of ever-larger rounds, and very few companies actually become unicorns, Rose observes. “Success is building a growing, sustainable business with lots of happy customers.”

Listen to the full episode here.