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!
Thank you!
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
#62Congrats Jake, Ben, and the whole crew. Another great Philly jawn.
But also we are fully remote!
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#63I’ve seen so many deals get hung up on the smallest legal issues. One time a company spent 6 months just negotiating the NDA before could even get to a POC that the champion kept pushing and wanting to do! I 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…
That's a good point, and the magnitude of the impact of speeding up sales cycles can be really surprising if you haven't done the math. We wrote a blog post about this last year with a model in Google Sheets that you can customize for your business, but the TLDR was that while holding everything else constant, moving the sales cycle from 4 month to 3 increases ARR by 46%. That's with the same starting capital.
Full blog post and math here: https://commonpaper.com/blog/impact-of-accelerating-sales-cy...
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Some of them are six-figure deals. I don't personally know about any seven-figure deals, but we only find out about a minority of the use of the agreements.
The NDA is definitely the highest volume agreement, however. And a lot more of the deals are for 10k than $300k.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I signed up, it's valuable to me at AppMana. Trust resonates with me. > 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 Le…
Oh interesting, I could see how a percentage of the transaction's value could totally change the incentives and behavior compared to hourly billing. Thanks for sharing that and for signing up
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#66Really 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 ever…
Oh wow, I have been researching standard contracts for years and I keep finding out about new ones. I'm going to read up on these Finnish standards, thanks so much for sharing.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#67This is one of those things that sounds cool at first but in reality, the sheer volume of edge cases because the real problem
I bet this is gonna raise funding though
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's totally fair, and it might be partially a function of price point. If, say we can help our customers close a bunch of deals at $20k each, that's very different than a company who has an average price point of $1k each. You're always welcome to use the agreements for free separate from our software. One thing I'll note is that we do support importing contracts on customer paper / or deals executed outside our s…
Can you help me understand how this platform, or the contracts alone, would help me close deals? I've never had a deal fall apart at this phase, or in a way that I could imagine this helping.
If the pitch is that it would save money on legal fees, then that could be a big value add. But if that's the angle, then my last question, regarding whether the docs are meant to be closed-universe and vetted, or open-universe and not vetted becomes critical. Founders wouldn't want to be changing options around and not realizing that they are creating confusing or unexpected results.
If they're supposed to still use a lawyer, then that blunts the value add (and the lawyer would likely resist the standardized agreement because it means fewer billable hours). But maybe you can get enough critical mass to be an 800-lb gorilla, like the SAFE has become? I appreciate the quick responses here, and am taking a look at the agreements to see if they could be relevant for our business.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#69You picked a great name! I wish we could see something similar for the HIPAA business associate agreements in healthcare. It's pretty standard language, and a substantial part of healthcare contracts. I had to chuckle about the choice of court example on your website - it comes up so frequently, even I am aware of it, despite being on the tech side.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#70I am just starting my small SaaS business and absolutely needed something like this. Favorite'ing this post and will return to it soon.
Good luck, great idea! From a technical perspective, I especially appreciate the notion that much of the wording can be standardized, with key variables identified and extracted as structured data.