Your employee was not selected in the H-1B lottery - the employer's options
10 mins read | Sep 28, 2026
TUKKI’S CHOICE OF BUSINESS MODELS TO IMPROVE THE US IMMIGRATION EXPERIENCE.
Contributor
Ramiro Roballos
Reading time
3 mins read
Date published
Aug 9, 2024
I'm still convinced that execution is more important than strategy. However, some strategic decisions can make or break your business.
One key decision is choosing the industry you want to enter. Many years ago at Kellogg, I read a statistic that stuck with me: 50% of a business's success depends on the industry you choose.
The next crucial decision is your business plan and positioning. Even though our team at Tukki chose to work in immigration, we could have gone in different directions, like selling software to lawyers or automating the immigration process to replace lawyers. Each option would lead to very different business models, clients, company types, required skills, and economic implications.
I’m asked a lot why we chose to work with lawyers instead of running other business model options. I’ll answer that in this article.
To make a significant impact in the industry, we need to address the biggest pain points, which do not lie with the lawyers, but with the immigrants.
After interviewing dozens of lawyers and immigrants, it became clear that immigrants face the most challenges: inefficient processes, lack of visibility, slow responses, stress, and uncertainty. While lawyers could benefit from better technology, we believed we could make a bigger impact by working directly with immigrants.
Additionally, we think that the pain points that immigrants currently experienced can't be solved by software alone. It requires a combination of software and operations. Great lawyers are part of the operations piece, but bringing in business best practices from other industries makes a huge difference for the immigration experience and ease of process for lawyers.
Involving immigration lawyers from the start is essential to providing the best service to immigrants — we’ve learned this from personal experience. Immigration law is complex and rarely clear-cut. You need the expertise and judgment of an experienced lawyer. While many steps in the process can be automated, there are moments where a lawyer's input is crucial, such as:
Additionally, obtaining a visa or a green card is a life-changing event; immigrants want a team they can rely on, someone to chat with and answer their questions. Our vision of the best immigration experience is the opposite of a self-service, impersonal experience with an AI. We believe in providing a warm, supportive environment with real human interaction.
People often ask, "If you still have lawyers on your team, why should I work with Tukki instead of going directly to a lawyer?"
We combine the best of both worlds: expert knowledge from lawyers and a highly efficient, customer-focused process enabled by our technology.
Neither can deliver the best experience to immigrants alone; you need both.
I admit, this approach didn't come without its challenges! It’s far more complicated to acquire customers, service them, get great lawyers, manage operations end-to-end, and build a great product than just focus on one section of the journey. Scaling is also much easier when you're building a B2B SaaS solution compared to managing operations. That's why, since day one, Tukki has obsessively focused on streamlining operations with technology to become exponentially more efficient and scalable than the status quo.
If you want to truly reinvent an industry, you need to go all in, and that's what we signed up for.
To tap into that expert knowledge from lawyers and efficient, customer-focused process enabled by our technology, start with our Visa Match tool, and find out what your best options for US immigration are.
WE CAN HELP
Need more clarity?
Find quick answers to frequent visa questions from our legal experts
Can my family be included in my EB-5 petition?
Yes. Your spouse and unmarried children under 21 can be included in the same EB-5 case and receive green cards as your dependents.
Does the Visa Bulletin apply to H-1B or other work visas?
No, the Visa Bulletin only applies to green card categories where annual quotas exist. H-1B, O-1, L-1, and other nonimmigrant work visas don't have priority dates and don't appear in the bulletin.
Once you move from a temporary work visa to an employment-based green card filing (through an I-140), then the Visa Bulletin starts to matter for you.
Does the $100k H-1B fee apply to every H-1B?
No. As applied by USCIS, the $100,000 fee attaches to new petitions for beneficiaries who are outside the U.S. and need consular processing to enter on a newly issued H-1B visa.
Change-of-status, extension, and amendment petitions for people already in the U.S., along with existing H-1B holders and renewals, have not been subject to it.
Which visa is better for a green card, H-1B or O-1?
If you qualify for O-1A, the EB-1A path is usually faster and cleaner, since the evidentiary framework overlaps and EB-1A is current for most countries on the visa bulletin.
If you only qualify for H-1B, you'll go through PERM and EB-2 or EB-3, which works but takes much longer for India-born and China-born applicants because of priority date backlogs.
How long does PERM take in 2026?
PERM processing at DOL has fluctuated significantly. Audits and supervised recruitment add months on top of the base window.
The full timeline (prevailing wage plus recruitment plus DOL review) commonly runs over a year before the I-140 can be filed. See Tukki's PERM visa guide for the current timeline.
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