Comment by piker
16 hours ago
Hi! It's a super interesting time to be in legal tech. Thank you for asking.
When this project got started, "VS code for transactional lawyers" was the target. We pretty well have that on offer at this point, but it sits in a weird spot making it harder to sell than it would be in, say, 2024. Right now, "AI forward" lawyers are spinning out of law firms in droves to start "AI native" firms backed for example by YC. They're so comfortable with Claude that they for the large part bypass a need for Tritium (or at least they think they do ;). OTOH, large law firms are inundated with legal tech products right now and have a hard time even understanding how an IDE benefits their lawyers. We're also trying to stay away from VC funding (other than from a certain awesome one ;), so we're missing a key signal for enterprise buyers. As I mentioned above, it's super hard to even set up a hands on demo because we have to get the desktop app installed on their infrastructure. But I'm shocked to learn that Googlers are happy to work in a browser, and distributing Tritium via browser is trivial, so we're going to 180 on that right here and now.
That all said, we eliminated the "free tier" as advised back in the Show HN thread, and we've managed to find a very small market in individual users. We're also finding some opportunities with the AI natives using an "unreal engine for legal tech" model that makes Tritium source available and handles the boring editor-related parts of their innovation.
I should probably do a post on this, but there's actually a topic we're working on that perhaps the HN audience will find even more interesting... coming soon!
[edit: I realized that I haven't responded to your question re: other markets, but accidentally did with the hint. We have some ideas.]
Wow, thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions in detail!
> As I mentioned above, it's super hard to even set up a hands on demo because we have to get the desktop app installed on their infrastructure. But I'm shocked to learn that Googlers are happy to work in a browser, and distributing Tritium via browser is trivial, so we're going to 180 on that right here and now.
"Trivial" in the sense you can just compile everything to WASM? I'd be curious to know what such an IDE would feel like in the browser. I think the only WASM-based GUI apps I've tried in the browser were Flutter apps and those were… weird.
> I should probably do a post on this, but there's actually a topic we're working on that perhaps the HN audience will find even more interesting... coming soon!
I'll keep an eye out for the next Show HN! :-)
> "Trivial" in the sense you can just compile everything to WASM? I'd be curious to know what such an IDE would feel like in the browser. I think the only WASM-based GUI apps I've tried in the browser were Flutter apps and those were… weird.
Yes, that's about it. We rely on threads a lot in the desktop version which doesn't map as easily to WASM so there is still some work to do. But if you remember back to the original Show HN post, it was running in the browser there. So we have experience with it.
There is a bit of uncanny valley that comes with using WASM with <canvas> in the browser like we do rather than the DOM. There aren't reflow events in the same way, and frankly it's just a lot snappier than you expect. But it comes with a lot of trade-offs and you're forced to reinvent the wheel if you totally abandon web primitives.