Interview with Victor Mwago – CEO, CallPesa App [2023]

I would say Covid-19 pushed me to come up with the solution. My consultancy at a law firm ended right before lockdown and there was a swift move towards remote working. I would receive calls from people looking for a quick legal opinion and that would go unbilled. At the same time, clients were beginning to question whether traditional billing models would work in a remote work setup. So the initial idea of CallPesa was to be a PAYG model. You call your lawyer or doctor or accountant, but before you engage, a fee is paid to account for the time you would spend sharing your knowledge.

Good question. Being in the legal industry for about 10 years I always had a great interest in technology. I would read about new tech endlessly. I guess it’s the passion that drove me to figure out how I could merge it with the law and try to differentiate myself from my peers. YouTube and Udemy helped me a lot in getting started.

As for practical advice, Do your research, is what I would say. Many times we are tempted to create a business out of a personal experience without considering whether that problem exists broadly and therefore research is crucial.

When releasing a new product, don’t be so quick to perfection. All the apps we use today started as very buggy apps. Release an MVP and work at getting feedback. Also know the quality of feedback you are getting. Feedback from friends may be skewed because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Feedback from random people may have a higher degree of objectivity and therefore focus on those.

I honestly do not know the answer to the growing trend but I suppose the need to be financially independent and off the big banks and the government is a factor.

People trade P2P without traditional banks now more than ever. There’s also little to no transaction fees and trading platforms are designed in a way to minimize fraud as much as possible. Crypto returns have proven to be much better than traditional money market funds however it is still very volatile. There are months when you can do almost 10x. There are months you may hit -50%…as long as you can ride the wave, and have a high tolerance to pain, you will be fine.

I’m not an expert in crypto, I only buy and hold coins that (in my opinion) have solid fundamentals and just like a start-up, doing your own research is necessary.

I think outside Bitcoin and Ethereum which are must-haves, Solana, Hedera Hashgraph, and the Secret Network are worth looking into (Not Financial Advice!!!)

We’ve seen how technology has streamlined Legal Practice Management. My first company, SheriaSoft.com was designed out of a horrible experience with a paper-based law firm. My co-founder’s dad’s lawyer lost his documents. When we drilled down to the issue, we noticed that all legal operations were painfully manual and lost documents were a huge concern. I’m glad we were able to fix that. 

Legal spending is another area where technology has played a huge role. Companies are always expecting their in-house legal departments to do more with less, with legal spend management software, you can deliver the tools and data you need to maximize every dollar and improve collaboration across departments. And of course, Time Tracking and Billing. 

In the legal industry and I think any other Professional Service Industry, time is the stock in trade. E-billing and time tracking software such as CallPesa help lawyers and law firms automatically record their time which means little to no manual data entry, hours saved in punching in time, and ensuring no billables fall through the cracks.  

I would say, legal design thinking. Whilst we have succeeded in introducing tech in all areas of the industry, we have fallen short on User Experience. A lot of the tech today requires hours of onboarding and is expensive, which goes against the grain of having it in the first place. Legal tech developers have a task in ensuring that 

1. The cultural mindset is right 
2. The tech is easy to use, meaning little to no training is required and 
3. It should be affordable.

• Please don’t say your product is powered by AI if you can’t back it up solidly.
• Your team is everything. There’s a phrase about the 3 C’s – Competence, Character, and Chemistry. Many people have the first two but don’t get along, and for the first few years, chemistry is everything.
• Sales cure-all. A lot of teams are hyper-focused on products and forget to sell. There’s no rule book, you have to get out and sell. It is not a comfortable space and 99% of the time you will be rejected, but you have to keep it at it.
• For software, good SEO goes a long way. That is something you have to invest in.

Market research.

I am a morning person so I am up by 4.30 am and work out until 6.30 am. I do my most challenging tasks between 9 am and 1 PM. My family keeps me grounded and I found that Prayer deals with the disappointments of life and business.