Work record / Operating / Surrogacy Consulting Startup
A surrogacy startup: first customer, one state at a time
I came to this as a customer before I was an advisor. The startup wanted surrogacy to be repeatable, and my job was to say who to serve first and where AI has to stop.
The seat
I served as an advisor, through Common Ground. The engagement is recent, and the client stays unnamed.
| Sector | Fertility and family-building services |
|---|---|
| Type of work | Go-to-market and applied AI strategy |
| Years | Recent |
| Through | Common Ground |
| Credits | Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Advisor |
What I was brought in to decide
A young company wanted to make surrogacy repeatable for intended parents who do not use a full-service agency. The client is not named here.
Think of surrogacy as a medical process folded into a legal one. Each side has its own independent counsel and a contract. Money sits in escrow and is released on a schedule. A court filing establishes parentage. The rules change every time you cross a state line, and a lot of the cost is coordination and attorney hours spent putting documents together, with little judgment involved.
My own path in was as a customer. I went through surrogacy and IVF myself across Arizona, Oregon and California, pro se, meaning I represented myself and used no attorney. AI helped me prepare the surrogacy contracts and the pre-birth order filings, and I obtained a pre-birth order in Oregon.
What we did
- I started by listening. Then I sorted the hours that are paperwork from the hours that take judgment. Undercutting agency fees on price was the obvious move, and it left the real delay alone: contracts waiting on drafts, filings waiting on documents, and clinics waiting on signatures.
- I named the first customer: intended parents who already skip the agency. They handle the coordination themselves and know what an attorney's hour costs. Agencies and clinics can follow later as channels.
- I shaped the offer as a guided process, opening one state at a time. Customers get a roadmap of each step, a single shared record of documents and dates, and a coordinator who keeps everyone moving. In each state, licensed attorneys represent the two sides and review and sign every contract and filing. Pricing is staged to follow the milestones.
- I mapped where AI takes out cost. It builds first drafts from a state's requirements and the agreed terms. It writes plain-language summaries of every change. It checks state filing packets for completeness. And it coordinates across the medical, legal, escrow and court milestones.
- I drew the boundary for AI. An individual may represent himself. A company that writes legal documents for a customer and explains them is practicing law. Licensed attorneys keep legal advice and representation, physicians keep medical decisions, and a licensed agent keeps escrow. I also flagged a real difference between states for the team. Some, Arizona among them, license document preparers and law firms owned by non-lawyers. Most states do not.
- I put the IVF savings in preparation and comparison. Customers read their own fertility benefit and the clinic outcome data that is already published, so they come to a consultation with sharper questions. The physician still makes the call.
- I kept the rollout narrow. Each state counts as its own product, and it opens only once the filing packets are complete and the attorney network has signed on.
Results
- A go-to-market plan built on the first customer, with a staged offer and a one-state-at-a-time rollout. The channels are simple: communities where intended parents already talk with each other, patient coordinators at IVF clinics, and attorneys who prefer reviewing a clean draft to writing one.
- An AI cost map separating what software can carry from what remains with a licensed attorney, physician, clinician or escrow agent. It marks the surrogate's compensation as a cost to leave alone.
- A test of the licensed line, which the company applies to each product step before release. Preparing, organizing and explaining make up the product. Advising, representing and deciding are for a licensed professional.
The lesson
Start with the people already doing the hard version themselves, and open one state at a time, behind the professionals the law requires to stay involved.
Stories from this work
Firm record
Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Surrogacy Consulting Startup on the Common Ground wiki.