Tali
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Tali was a voice-driven time-tracking product for lawyers built by Portland startup ThreeMatts, founded by Matthew Volm with Matt Anthes-Washburn and Matt Hoiland. Lawyers could log billable time with voice commands through Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, saying things like 'tell Tali I spent 12 minutes on a client call,' with integrations into the Clio, Rocket Matter and PracticePanther practice-management platforms.
02 / Tali FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Although Tali raised outside funding and won a $100,000 Clio integration prize, it never built a sufficient user base. The voice technology was not quite ready: capturing complete time entries required back-and-forth dialogue, which added friction for lawyers who are typically not early adopters. The company ran out of cash before finding product-market fit and could not raise more.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Founded and launched
Matthew Volm and two friends start Tali after Volm sees his lawyer-wife struggle with time entry; the product formally launches in September 2017 at the Clio Cloud Conference with a Clio integration.
- Award
Tali wins the $100,000 prize in the inaugural Clio Launch//Code competition as the best new Clio integration.
- Shutdown
Tali notifies customers it is shutting down effective 30 June 2019, after running out of money before finding product-market fit; annual subscribers are refunded.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The company raised outside venture funding but ran out of cash before reaching product-market fit.
- 02
Tali shut down effective 30 June 2019; annual subscribers were issued refunds.