Rajah Lehal
Founder and CEO of
Rajah Lehal is the Founder and CEO of Claushound Inc., a media company that uses smart design to break down complicated legal documents to help make them more understandable. We got the opportunity to ask Rajah about his Entrepreneurial journey. Here are his answers:
What made you want to become an entrepreneur?
Becoming an entrepreneur wasn’t part of the original plan. I spent a lot of years working my way up organizations across a couple careers. My first career, technology management, became more of a routine that left me bored and with too much spare time. This led me to my second career, law. I started working for a big law firm that gave me the opposite problem from my last career — I had no spare time and no room for creativity. I didn’t like that lifestyle and I began exploring my creativity and the people-based aspects of my work. This eventually led me to the startup industry — an industry I didn’t know much about. This drastic career change was unnerving and it certainly took a lot for me to stick it through.
Why did you start Clausehound Inc?
I started Clausehound to help solo and small-firm lawyers draft and review contracts. I wanted to level the playing field for big and small legal practices, helping people save time and money on the necessary expense of creating agreements and contracts. I also wanted to create a service that people could trust; a service that provides quality, peer-reviewed content.
How did you get involved with the GBC Digital Media and Gaming Incubator?
Clausehound is a media company that uses design to uncomplicate a complicated topic. Legal documents are often deep and tangled and our service breaks them down using smart design. With this in mind, the Digital Media and Gaming Incubator made perfect sense to us. Our team thrives on our surroundings and the fact that this is such a focused environment really drew us in. We also appreciate how diverse the talent is around us. Being around talented designers, programmers, etc. helps our creativity flourish and gives us better perspective on our work. We also like how the comfortable yet professional the space is. We’re very grateful to GBC for having us here.
How successful is Clausehound Inc?
We’ve had a very successful year. We had a strong finish in 2017 and we’re very proud of everything that we’ve accomplished. In 2017, we started the year with a single site license customer. By the end of the year, we had sold site licenses to 26 organizations, including many Canadian colleges and universities (Queen’s U, Western U, Windsor U, all of Ryerson University’s Zone Learning Incubators and Accelerators, Seneca College, and George Brown College to name a few). Our site license customers include 24 organizations in total in Ontario, as well as two in the western Canadian provinces
What is one piece of advice you would give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
Get impatient! Sometimes it’s best to forget the small things and just get started. The idea for Clausehound was already set about a year before launch and the only thing holding us back was software development delays. I got impatient with the delays and ended up scrapping what we had and building the first version to launch. Within six months, we had a 400% increase in web traffic from launch.
To learn more about the great Clausehound product offering, please visit www.clausehound.com