We use Common Paper for a bunch of our Cloud Service Agreements over at Trigo. Really saved us a ton in time and legal fees! Keep up the great work Jake & Ben!
Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
31–40 of 169 posts
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#32What’s the business model here? The agreements are free, so I’m guessing you make money on contract management? But small startups don’t really need this (not enough to pay, at any rate), and larger startups do business with big entities that won’t sign hyper-standardized contracts like these, for the most part. So assuming you’re charging for the contract management piece, who is the target customer (and how much do…
You're correct that we make money by charging for our software. It's free until you use it to close deals with more than 5 customers, and free forever if you're just using it for NDAs. Full details on pricing here: https://commonpaper.com/pricing/ Our target customers are B2B SaaS companies, and our goal is to have them start using us when they are small on the free version and grow with them. I agree that the bigger…
Free NDAs forever is great! I run a B2B SaaS/licensing business, and this pricing strikes me as really high. But perhaps others see the value differently. I can see how it would be useful to constrain negotiations to the various bits that your contracts allow. But given how much contracts vary, and how larger orgs want to use their paper, it seems like this is an uphill climb. And if my biggest, most important contracts are outside of your system, that makes the overall utility much lower for me.
One question: how do you make sure that all of the different allowable options make sense together? For example, I see a governing law option. Can you only select from a few, pre-vetted options? What if someone selects a jurisdiction whose governing law isn’t compatible with other provisions in your contract (for example, termination terms or indemnification)? You wouldn’t want to give your customers the sense that they can play with terms like Lego blocks and be guaranteed that the result is something sensible, if this is not the case.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#33Congrats on the launch! There's certainly a "problem" worth solving here. I'm a lawyer, and it's crazy that I occasionally actually have to negotiate non-substantive parts of contracts like severance clauses. There really should be standardized boilerplate for at least some provisions (like you're doing), where companies can quickly say "we are using the common terms", and if another side pushes back it raises questi…
> There's certainly a "problem" worth solving here. I'm a lawyer, and it's crazy that I occasionally actually have to negotiate non-substantive parts of contracts like severance clauses. There really should be standardized boilerplate for at least some provisions (like you're doing), where companies can quickly say "we are using the common terms", and if another side pushes back it raises questions.
This is exactly how it should be.
The last thing I want is "Customer A pushed back against 'We are your exclusive supplier no matter your future price increases' to be "common".
Even worse, the "standard" terms that an employee usually agrees to.
If some side (actually, their lawyer) pushes back on something, then it's not "common", now is it?
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#34Congrats on launching. This is a very new area for me. How does tech solve this problem?
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#35> The breaking point came when one of our customers was acquired by Oracle. They wanted to keep using our product, but had to move from our original contract to the one that Oracle uses. In exchange for this, they were willing to increase the price they were paying from $6,000 to $24,000 per year. This is a cool idea, but the irony here is that Oracle probably still wouldn't use the Common Paper contract and insist o…
Oracle and companies like it are definitely the hardest to get on board. That being said, our users have already closed deals with Fortune 500 companies using the standard contracts, and they see a big decrease in the percentage of deals that they have to do on their customer's contracts.
We're also encouraged by the examples of standard contracts in other domains that have gotten traction with large enterprises. Basically all of the big banks use the ISDA master agreement^1 for financial derivatives, and the vast majority of ads sold on the internet use the IAB standard terms^2.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDA_Master_Agreement
2https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IAB_4As-tsand...
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#36This sounds very interesting. Your website doesn't appear to be loading. (edit: It's now back up - thanks!) However, the idea of standard, programmable contracts is awesome! One question: In your example of being forced to use Oracle's paperwork - it's not clear how CommonPaper would solve that - wouldn't you still have been forced to use Oracle's contract?
Shoot, thanks for flagging the website. I think we have it working now but trying to make sure it stays up. For the Oracle example, big, old-school companies like this are definitely the hardest to get onboard. However, there are examples of large enterprises adopting standard contracts, including: The biggest banks in the world trade derivatives using the ISDA master agreement (here's an example of Bank of America t…
When you say Fortune 500 companies have signed your agreements, are these material agreements, or NDAs and small-dollar contracts? Or are they signing six- and seven-figure deals on your paper?
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#37Really cool resource and congrats on the launch! It would be great to see more supported countries, I guess beside some technicalities, it will be the same for many?
There are likely similar things already in some countries. I know Finland has IT-ehdot (IT-terms), they are made by a group of organizations (the Finland Chamber of Commerce, Technology Industries of Finland, Finnish Association of Purchasing and Logistics LOGY, Finnish Information Processing Association TIVIA and the Finnish Software and E-business Association) though they are not free. They tend to get updated every 4-5 years.
The attachments (essentially similar to the terms in Common Paper) are readable in English at https://it-ehdot.fi/tutustu-ehtoihin/ ("ENGLANNIKSI" tab), but the agreement template (similar to the cover letter) requires buying them.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#38I am building a business right now, and I need a standard contract for customers.
So this is exciting! I am delighted!
I just wish I were in the target audience. My business is not a startup, and I'm going to need specific terms because I'm a one-man shop. (How do you handle taking a vacation as a one-man shop? Work will effectively cease.)
Maybe I'll look at the contributor list and find an attorney in my state, which would still be vastly useful to me.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#39Congrats on launching. This is a very new area for me. How does tech solve this problem?
Your intuition is right, and in our view tech only solves part of the problem. We believe that the actual content of the contracts needs to get standardized, in addition to deploying tech against the contract problem
When lots of organizations use standard contracts, everyone becomes more efficient regardless of what tech they use (or even if they're just working with contracts manually). Standardization also enables us to build a different kind of software for managing contracts
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pricing page is here: https://commonpaper.com/pricing Small startups don't need contract management until they reach a point and then they wish they started doing it from day 1. :) "hyper-standardized contracts" I suggest you take a look at the app! While our terms are immutable, the contracts can be heavily customized. So instead of hunting down a random word in a PDF you can focus on the things the material changes…
Whoa, that’s pricey! If I have a handful of customers, I’d definitely not want to be paying $600/yr for contract management. I’m not sure what “support” entails (you aren’t offering legal services, I imagine), but this strikes me as really pricey. Good luck though!
Thanks! Not sure how many are a handful, but your first 5 customers are free (no matter how many different contracts you send them). You're still welcome to download and use the contracts