What it is
An early-stage company set out to make surrogacy repeatable for intended parents who go without a full-service agency. The client stays unnamed.
Surrogacy is a medical process wrapped in a legal one: a contract with independent counsel on each side, money held in escrow and paid on a schedule, and a court filing to establish parentage. The rules change at every state line, and much of what people pay for is coordination and legal hours spent assembling documents rather than exercising judgment.
Fowler came to the work as a customer first. He went through the surrogacy and IVF process himself, pro se, representing himself without an attorney, across Arizona, Oregon and California. He did the surrogacy contracts and the pre-birth order filings himself with AI, and obtained a pre-birth order in Oregon.
What Common Ground did
- Fowler listened first, then separated the hours that are paperwork from the hours that are judgment. The obvious play, undercutting agency fees on price, left the real waiting in place: contracts waiting on drafts, filings waiting on documents, clinics waiting on signatures.
- Named the first customer: intended parents already going without an agency, who carry the coordination themselves and know what an hour of an attorney's time costs. Agencies and clinics come later, as channels.
- Shaped the offer as a guided process one state at a time: a roadmap of every step, one shared record of every document and date, a coordinator who keeps the parties moving, and licensed attorneys in that state who represent each side and review and sign every contract and filing, priced in stages that follow the milestones.
- Mapped where AI removes cost: first drafts built from the state's requirements and the agreed terms, plain-language summaries of each change, state filing packets checked for completeness, and coordination across the medical, legal, escrow and court milestones.
- Drew the line where AI must stop. A person may represent himself; a company that drafts and explains legal documents for a customer is practicing law. Legal advice and representation stay with licensed attorneys, medical decisions with physicians, escrow with a licensed agent. Fowler also pointed the team at a real difference between states: some, Arizona among them, license document preparers and law firms with owners who are not lawyers, and most do not.
- Placed the IVF savings in preparation and comparison: reading the customer's own fertility benefit and the clinic outcome data already published, so the customer arrives at a consultation with the right questions. The physician still decides.
- Set a narrow rollout: each state is a new product and opens only when its filing packets are complete and its attorney network is signed.
Results
- A go-to-market plan built around the first customer, a staged offer and a one-state-at-a-time rollout, with plain channels: communities where intended parents already talk to each other, patient coordinators at IVF clinics, and attorneys who would rather review a clean draft than write one.
- An AI cost map showing what software can carry and what stays with a licensed attorney, physician, clinician or escrow agent, with the surrogate's compensation marked as a cost not to cut.
- A licensed-line test the company applies to every product step before it ships: preparing, organizing and explaining are the product; advising, representing and deciding belong to a licensed professional.
External links
- Public data room: A surrogacy consulting startup data room
Stories from this work
At a glance
| Project type | Go-to-market and applied AI strategy |
|---|---|
| Industry | Fertility and family-building services |
| Seat | Advisor |
| Ran through | Common Ground |
| Dates | Recent |
| Public data room | A surrogacy consulting startup data room |
| Related pages | Common Ground |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |