How would this work for my 18th century agrarian business?
Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#122Big fans of Jake and the team at Common Paper - we're happy users at Meltano. Congrats on the launch!
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#123It feels to me like where this is going to fall down is first contact with any business term that isn’t neatly covered by one of the form agreements. Not to say that this can’t be great for ordinary course arrangements that neatly fit within one of the defined buckets, but I’d be pretty wary (as either a business or a legal advisor) of any impulse to fit even a minimally bespoke deal into one of these templates. Cont…
I just re-read the parent post, and was really struck by the reference to “documents filled with unstructured text.” I mean, that’s exactly what commercial contracting is - it doesn’t easily map to a simple schema outside very, very basic transactions. Fundraising and the SAFE is different because that transaction is really one of the simpler ones at the end of the day - $x for y% of the company based on a valuation…
I agree that a cloud service agreement is more complicated than a SAFE, and that's a result of the fact that the underlying deal is more complicated.
We use the SAFE as an example of a standard contract because it's one that our target users are familiar with. We believe that there are a lot of lessons worth learning from the SAFE's success, along with other standard contracts like the NVCA Model Docs, IAB Standard Terms, ISDA Master Agreement, etc.
Our users have signed thousands of contracts and closed millions of dollars of deals, so it's working for at least some commercial contracts. Of course, this is a tiny percentage of the overall market. Our bet is that it can become a much larger portion of the market, even if it doesn't get to 100%
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#124How would this work for my 18th century agrarian business?
It's all the same principles
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#125Big fans of Jake and the team at Common Paper - we're happy users at Meltano. Congrats on the launch!
Thank you Taylor!
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#126Why the ceremony around signing with on-screen mouse movements, if the resulting digital signature could be copy-pasted into any other draft?
I have mixed feelings about this. We embed Dropbox Sign to handle the signature step, so that part of the experience is straight from them.
They handle the steps of making sure it's a compliant, legally valid signature, which is great.
However, a lot of the ceremony as you called it is not required to make it a legally binding signature, it's mostly to make people feel like it's legit.
We may take this in-house at some point to streamline it, but Dropbox has been a good partner to us, and I'm grateful that they enabled us to get up and running quickly.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#127Really sad to see https://sso.tax/ being employed here. Please let your customers use your software securely.
This is just asking for a long off-topic thread but as one of HN's resident SSO nerds: you don't have to listen to people demanding that you eliminate the "SSO tax". Paying for SSO is super annoying, and I'd rather not pay it either, but I'd even less rather see companies go out of business because they're not generating revenue. This "tax" is popular because it's one of the more effective customer segmentation lever…
Any other segmentation levers?
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#128Why monthly pricing for what is a 1 time agreement
We charge based on the number of customers with whom you have at least one active contract. Many of our users find that they will sign multiple agreements with the same customer, eg an NDA, CSA, DPA, and then another CSA to upsell or renew at the end of the term.
Our goal for our product is to help with the entire lifecycle of the customer. From entering into the initial agreement, to getting paid, to keeping track of your obligations across customers, to upselling and renewing, to answering diligence questions when you're raising money or getting acquired.
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#129Congrats on the launch! Common paper helped me customized my first contract and had the customer signed it within 3 days, all without having to pay for a lawyer. Fantastic product that helps founders.
Thank you!
Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts
#130We've been using CommonPaper for our contracts and NDAs since we started selling. It's been super useful during negotiations and makes it way easier for clients who don't have lawyers to understand what's going on in the terms. Congrats team on the launch!
I appreciate you taking a chance on us when we were brand new!