Joshua Browder, the founder of DoNotPay, grew up in London, England. He was an inquisitive and tech-savvy individual from a young age, influenced by his father, Bill Browder, a well-known financier and human rights activist.
Joshua moved to the United States to attend Stanford University, where he pursued a degree in Computer Science. During his time at Stanford, he became increasingly aware of the many minor legal issues people faced, particularly parking tickets, which sparked his interest in using technology to solve these problems.
His knack for coding and a desire to democratize access to legal assistance laid the groundwork for what would become DoNotPay.
Browder noticed a significant gap in the accessibility and affordability of legal services for everyday issues like parking tickets, refunds, and small claims.
Many people were either unable to afford legal representation or found the process too complicated to navigate on their own. This realization came from his own experience of accumulating numerous parking tickets and seeing how challenging it was for people to contest them.
To address this, Joshua envisioned an automated legal service that could help individuals tackle these minor but burdensome legal problems without the need for expensive lawyers.
This led to the creation of DoNotPay, the world's first robot lawyer, designed to provide accessible and affordable legal assistance for a wide range of common legal issues.
DoNotPay concentrated all their efforts on two main channels: media exposure and Reddit. Joshua created a pitch designed to attract reporters, using attention-grabbing terms like "Robot Lawyer" and "Daylight Robbery."
Each time he secured a feature in a publication, he leveraged that exposure to persuade other reporters to cover his company as well.
During their first week, DoNotPay was featured in various prominent publications, including This is Money, Telegraph UK, Mirror UK, Mashable, Huffington Post, and more.
These articles quickly began appearing on major subreddits like r/technology. This strategy resulted in 35,000 users in the first week and 50,000 within the first couple of weeks.