Your main pitch is on open source standardized contracts and that definitely resonates, but as a current Ironclad user where they’re our single-most expensive SaaS subscription, your contract lifecycle management system built for startups is what resonates for me. Do you plan on offering migration services from Ironclad? That would amount to importing our workflows and repository.
Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
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Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#52I 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, whi…
If you send us a note at support@commonpaper.com, we'd be happy to make an intro to one of the attorneys on the committee. They can potentially help with configuring the standards for your business and/or drafting something custom if none of those are a fit
I still might use the contracts, though. Thank you.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#53Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#54I think what’s cool about CommonPaper is not just having the negotiations scoped to smaller areas but also the affect on the sales cycle. If can trim months off a deal process, that can help save a startup in terms of resources spent and dollars coming in earlier.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#55Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#56Congrats on launch! By the time YC published the SAFE, it had a lot of soft power and influence in early stage investing, because it could coordinate with every YC startup in the batch and give them cover if an investor had an issue with the SAFE. They essentially had a "union" (on the startup founder side) with critical mass, which when they all demanded the use of the SAFE instead of bespoke docs (which many invest…
For us, it's about providing day 1 value to the users of the contracts that does not depend on the agreements already being widely adopted. One example of that is our Stripe integration, which enables our customers to automatically bill their customers once they sign a contract. This uses the information already in their contracts, and it saves a lot of manual work and helps them get paid faster, and is separate from the negotiation benefits.
The other thing I'll point out is that our users have been seeing more success in using the standard contract from when we released our original NDA. Instead of losing an arm wrestling match because they have less leverage, they can say something like, "We adopted this standard agreement created by a committee of attorneys." That doesn't work every time, but we've seen some companies cut the percentage of their deals on customer paper in half.
We've seen a big range of reactions from attorneys. While we have some big supporters (and committee members) at law firms, we've gotten more traction with in-house counsel. I think it's at least partially because of the reasons you outlined. I do hope to get all the law firms on board as a channel eventually, but for now, we're focusing our energy on the companies themselves.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#57Love what you’re building here. How are you guys thinking about potentially integrating LLMs?
How would you integrate an LLM into this?
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#58> Everything about contracts was frustrating, both at those startups and the larger companies that acquired us. In Hollywood, a lot of stuff is agreed upon without a contract. How does that work? If your instinct is to say "it's a disaster," this will fail.
I don't have experience with contracts (or the lack thereof) in Hollywood, and that's interesting to hear. One guess is that it might be a relatively small community where the same people and companies do business with each other over and over. In a community like that, some of the jobs that contracts do in other industries might be done through norms and relationships. I enjoyed "Why Trust Matters" by Ben Ho ( https…
> If you're open to it, I'd love to hear more about how you've seen this work in Hollywood.
There's so much to say. But maybe the most important thing to you is that entertainment lawyers are customarily paid 5% of the transaction's value to their client. So you get quality and often creative legal advice, with aligned incentives, whether you're Leonardo DiCaprio or some nobody.
Every startup is a nobody.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 contra…
One thing I'll note is that we do support importing contracts on customer paper / or deals executed outside our system. We only have a subset of our features for those, but all of your contracts can be together in the same system.
On the options making sense together, the standard agreements are created by 40+ attorneys specializing in tech law and commercial contracts. They design our contracts to reflect what is industry standard with a focus on creating a fair and balanced starting point. That being said, each company chooses how they want to configure their own cover page. We provide tooltips and help articles on what the terms and variables mean, and companies can work with their attorney to set it up initially or include them in the workflow. We can intro our users to attorneys who are familiar to with the standards and do good work.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#60Congrats on launch! By the time YC published the SAFE, it had a lot of soft power and influence in early stage investing, because it could coordinate with every YC startup in the batch and give them cover if an investor had an issue with the SAFE. They essentially had a "union" (on the startup founder side) with critical mass, which when they all demanded the use of the SAFE instead of bespoke docs (which many invest…
I appreciate that, and you're right that overcoming the cold start problem is the key to establishing a standard. We've tried to learn what we can from how YC published the SAFE, as well as other standard contracts like the NVCA model docs, IAB standard terms, ISDA master agreement, etc. For us, it's about providing day 1 value to the users of the contracts that does not depend on the agreements already being widely…
Excited to see this take off!