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# Why I Ask About Customers Before I Start Drafting

Published August 30, 2026

A fairly common conversation for me starts with an early-stage operator who has a great idea for a business and is getting ready to build or launch it. They come to me with a list of things they believe they need—terms of service, a privacy policy, a customer agreement, maybe some other commercial documents—and they want to know what it will cost and how quickly we can get everything done. It is an understandable request because the legal work feels like a concrete step toward turning the idea into a real company.

Before I answer, though, I usually spend some time asking about the business itself. Who is the customer? What problem does the product solve for that customer? Have they spoken with the people they expect to buy it, and has anyone shown a serious willingness to pay? Sometimes they have already done a significant amount of that work and have clear answers. Other times, they are much further along in building the product than they are in figuring out whether there is actually a market for it.

I am not asking those questions because I want to discourage someone from pursuing the idea, and I am not suggesting that every company needs paying customers before it can speak with a lawyer. I ask because the answers determine what legal work is actually useful. It is difficult to prepare meaningful terms for a product when the way the product will work is still changing, and it is difficult to write a useful customer agreement when the company does not yet know who the customer is, what that customer is buying, or how the relationship will operate.

I think this has become a bigger issue because of how easy AI has made it to build things. An operator can now take an idea and create a credible product, website, or working prototype in a remarkably short period of time. That is exciting, and I use these tools myself, but it also means that someone can spend a lot of time adding features and refining the product without having the conversations that will tell them whether the product should exist in the first place. There is always something else to improve, and building can feel more productive than asking a potential customer to pay for what you have built.

The difficult part of starting a business is often not making the product. It is identifying the right customer, understanding what that customer actually cares about, and figuring out how to reach them. AI has made the first part faster, but it has not eliminated the second part. If anything, the ability to build almost anything makes customer judgment more important because there are now fewer technical or financial constraints forcing an operator to determine whether an idea is worth pursuing before they pursue it.

That sometimes leads me to have a different conversation than the person expected. Instead of immediately giving them a price for a set of documents, I may recommend that they first speak with more potential customers, test the offer, or get a clearer understanding of how someone would buy the product. There are situations where that means I am not retained, at least not at that point. I could prepare the documents anyway, and the person may find another law firm that will, but I do not think producing work simply because someone is willing to pay for it is always the most useful advice I can give.

None of this means that the legal work should simply be ignored until a business is generating revenue. A company that is collecting personal information, accepting payments, onboarding beta users, hiring contractors, entering a pilot, or operating in a regulated area may have legal issues that need to be addressed before launch. In some cases, the process of validating the business will itself create a need for an agreement or other legal support. The distinction is not really between “before customers” and “after customers.” It is between legal work tied to something the business is actually doing and legal work built around assumptions that may change as soon as the operator begins speaking with the market.

The documents are also better once there is more clarity. Terms of service can reflect how the product actually works and what users can reasonably expect. A privacy policy can describe the information the company is really collecting and how it is being used. A customer agreement can address an actual transaction instead of an imagined one. The first few serious customer conversations may change the pricing, the product, the implementation process, or even the identity of the customer, and each of those changes can affect the legal work.

So when someone comes to me with an idea and asks for a package of launch documents, I usually do not begin with the package. I begin by trying to understand the customer and what the operator has learned so far. If the business has enough clarity and there is real activity that needs to be structured or protected, then we can figure out what legal work makes sense. If it does not, I may tell them that the more valuable next step is to go speak with customers and come back when we have a better understanding of the business we are putting on paper. That may not result in an immediate engagement for me, but I think it is the more useful answer.

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