Bonsai: Bulletproof contracts, simple e-signing, escrow for freelancers
hellobonsai.com
hellobonsai.com
Can I just say that you should be very careful about describing your contracts as "Bulletproof".
There is honestly no such thing as a bulletproof contract.
Secondly, telling people that "top attorneys" drafted the contracts is meaningless. That strikes me as just pure throw away marketing speak.
There are many things to consider when drafting this type of agreement and I'm just not sure that your description of the service should give freelancers great comfort.
Just my two cents. I do love the idea and know first hand the importance of having a contract in place.
I don't know much about law, but a lawyer told me that law isn't black and white. It's gray. So, bulletproof probably goes against that.
Puffery has no place in the practice of law or -in this case- legal document drafting.
The courts take a dim view of this sort of thing where people might detrimentally rely on this explicit promise that Bonsai's contracts are "Bulletproof".
Fee being yearly or monthly? When setting up the variables it was displayed as monthly - but this is not conveyed anywhere in the contract which will default to the Clients best interest (yearly).
One nice idea we've come across is a trivial discount for early / on time payment (~1-3%). We've heard anecdotally that it helps!
- sample without the need to provide an email e.g. show at least one and offer more samples when email is provided
- what's the pricing / cut you take from the money transferred through your service?
I believe that its going to take them quite some time to start offering escrow services, due to the strict escrow regulation and the (very high!) costs associated with that. My bet is that they won't offer it until after raising their Series A.
Stripe and Braintree can also support some versions of escrow, depending on how long you want to hold the money for and the amount.
- Agree re email. Reason we did that is we realized most people don't have the need to create a contract immediately, and unless they bookmark us, they may not remember "that cool website that does my contracts for me..." Providing the sample contract + other relevant educational material in the meantime to stay top of mind was the best short term way to do that.
- Regarding transaction fee, right now we're really only looking at escrow, which depending on the transaction size and deal we're able to get from the third party escrow provider, it should be somewhere around 2-5%.
No kidding, I have my first meeting with a potential client in an hour, and last night I was thinking in my head "How do I even talk about guaranteeing payment?" and then I see this when I woke up.
Thanks for building it!
Still, I love the idea and actually want to find a reason to use it.
If this can be a high-end equivalent of those low-end escrow services, that will be nice.
How do you reach your target audience with a company name and URL like yours? Could you provide a sample contract without the need to enter a valid E-Mail address?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazons
[2] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dap...
I don't really care about contracts but escrow would be useful. I mean, I don't care about a formal legally binding contract that covers canada-Indonesia, phillipines, UK, etc. that would be complicated. But having a secure way to pay outside of elance/up work would be nice.
Also, when I click "let us know" it opens the mail app on my iPhone. I haven't set that up. You would have better luck if the email was also displayed.
I recently open sourced my legal docs on Google Docs, so people could share docs, ask questions, and help each other. Legal docs are expensive and the language is very obscure. Let's utilize our legal experience and help each other out. Here's my post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10100848
It's as if the drafters, after taking great pains to make the contract clear and straightforward, decided "well we better put some magic words in there or people won't think this is a binding contract!"
1.3 Payment. The Client will pay the Designer a flat fee of $10,000 once the work is finished. Of this, the Client will pay the Designer $2,500 before work begins.
1.5 Invoices. The Designer will invoice the Client for work done monthly. The Client agrees to pay the amount owed within 15 days of receiving the invoice. Payment after that date will incur a late fee of 2% per month on the outstanding amount.I'm a client who's just looking for a cheaper/nicer way to send payments to my freelancers.