Show HN: We are building the next DocuSign
sgnly.com
sgnly.com
Hint: it’s not e-signature / pdf contracts.
DocuSign is in the trust business.
They have spent massive marketing dollars to create a trusted brand. They have even gone to court and won cases creating legal precedent their software can be trusted in contract law.
If your a CFO or company legal department, are your really going to use another service just because it saves you $2-3 per month … but from an unknown company?
(I’m not hating on the product. Just pointing out the dynamics at play)
That doesn't mean it's impossible to do, but recognize that technical features that are fun to build are maybe 20% of that journey.
Source: been there, done that
Now imagine that, but with AI. Now you can ask an LLM to expand on the main points in the contract. The person you’re sending it to can ask an LLM to summarize that expansion. You both can arrive at a different conclusions because after all, a break in communication is eventually going to happen between any 2 parties. Might as well super charge it.
Though my post is missing an /s that I didn’t think it needed.
One could literally vibe code this feature into a PR for OpenSign in like 15 minutes.
No thanks. Just authenticate the parties and record their agreement.
Also an open source DocuSign alternative that we use is DocuSeal. Not affiliated, just a fan.
https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer
I believe I have identified the culprit.
What about protecting the form data itself? If I were to use this in a medical scenario, are you HIPAA compliant? Or if the form included a social security number and date of birth - what steps are you taking to protect the person filling out the form against identity theft?
I am a fan of replacing docusign as a principle though.
I suspect that at one point they were hoping to use the .ly TLD, but that fell through and they had their hearts set.
Names, like products, are supposed to be easy to use. If your first thought is "wait how the heck do you pronounce that?" and then "why do they hate vowels so much?" you're already lost. Like, if I want to get to their site I'm going to have to guess how to type it into Google...? Signly? Sngly? Sgnli? Sgnly? Sngli? Can you even tell which one is right?
Why is this important to us? We're filling in official state forms and we cannot change them in any noticeable way to give their input box more room. Some states have crammed everything together and we have to work around their poor design as best we can.
That DS provides traceability, viewing history, and cryptographic signatures is nice for us, and may help one day in case of a lawsuit. It's not a must-have for us, but likely was important for them given they originated in the real-estate document area (lots of disputes there, I'm guessing)
What could help us is making the input box translucent, or hiding it until the user navigates to it (perhaps leave a small marker so they know they have to provide a value there).
So far as the templating, we've got that solved with Fluent (née Autotag). Most of their competitors are doing simple word replacement (mail-merge) but they allow us to add logic like if-else and select-case to our templates. You should look into doing that too.
I'm not sure I understand your comparison to traditional process.
It looks like you are not taking a PDF as an input. So I am supposed to write my documents in sgnly? Curly braces makes sense to engineers, I don't think the average person really understands that (though I could be wrong).
Why is what you are doing 10x better than docusign? "Up and running within a week?" I was getting documents signed with grabsign within 20 mintues. But maybe I'm not the target user, but then who is?
Maybe I'm confused about what Docusign does, and I know they do more than just manage signatures, but how do most people know/use them?
Also the sgnly domain, though nice and short, doesn't give me a lot of confidence for a b2b app.
Alternatively, is it a tool to manage writing contracts and other documents, and soliciting legally binding signatures? If so, I need to understand it more.
It is: S/MIME is well-supported.
Anything else is not a "real" signature, as far as I'm concerned.
Courts don't really care about ECDSA signatures or x509 certificates. They readily accept faxed documents, which are literally low resolution scans and are trivial to forge. Moreover "real" digital signatures still need key management, which is basically an unsolved problem in countries without government issued e-ids. What's the practical difference between docusign attesting that jonh smith signed a document on some web interface, and john smith signing a document with a s/MIME certificate issued by docusign?
Obviously as a computer scientist I want a render of my sig as an image/logo to underpin "the SHA512 checksum of the input byte stream under these canonicalisation rules <here> applied to this use of my X.509 private key" but in fact, I just have a clip of my signature as a PNG which Apple's preview tool pastes as an image into PDF documents and I send them on, and its fine.
Docusign is trash-theatre. Its secure because they say so. It may marginally add some value in some jurisdictions, I don't know.
Remember in Scotland, verbal contracts are binding with no need to witness. Bizarre! A family member nearly sold the flat under-value except the buyer was kind about it and accepted it was unintentional language not a verbal acceptance of offer.
Docusign's system is designed very specifically around the legal requirements of the US federal E-Sign Act, which guarantee, for transactions in interstate or foreign commerce, that even if there is a statute, regulation, etc., on its face requiring a written agreement, the electronic signature will be treated as satisfactory.
It did not become popular because it was viewed as particularly secure, it became popular because it was point-by-point checklist following the E-Sign requirements, and there are lots of entities who wanted to legal guarantees that come with complying with E-Sign.
> Remember in Scotland, verbal contracts are binding with no need to witness. Bizarre!
For most matters (there are some matters that legally--either by common law or statute--require a written contract) verbal contracts are binding without a need to witness in most common law jurisdictions (including the US); written and signed contracts are important even then because they provide evidence of both the content and the fact of the agreement, even when they are not required for a binding agreement to exist. Proving the existence and terms of an unwritten, unwitnessed contract when you want to take action over a breach by your counterparty can be tricky.
The same in the U.S., it's just a matter of proof.
I'm aware (I asked a similar question almost 10 years ago[1] - but my love-affair for S/MIME is really quite unrelated to legal-repudiation: it's about basic e-mail security: S/MIME gives us encryption, which is still really late-to-the-party as even today probably all of our emails could be read by our MX/MTA sysops; and S/MIME signatures solve SMTP's unauthenticated sender problem (and sidesteps all of the half-measures since then to try to put the cat back in the bag like DKIM, SPF, etc). All of this is far removed from DocuSign and other "document signing" services, really.
But yes, I'll readily admit S/MIME is entirely irrelevant outside of paranoid security.txt contacts and is practically unusable by the masses - and then some.
[1]: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/116896/are-docu... ) -
AI generated and legally air tight don't sit in the same room for me right now. But not sure about your target audience. Have you asked them?
Or is your target audience AI investors ;) ?
Also I associate PH with "Is Beta" even though that may not be a fair assumption.
The idea goes as follows: We take any existing signed document, remove the variables of your choice, and create a new, identical document template. You can then use it for signature purposes. Additionally, we automatically fill in repetitive information using the data we collect previously.
As soon as you modify the content or suggest what someone fills in, you are no longer a disinterested third party. Ask any notary or go look at DocuSign, they explicitly won't advise you on how to complete a form aside from basic things like making sure a field isn't blank or contains a number and not a string.
* Then there's "5x faster document workflows — AI that auto-fills, explains, and builds reusable templates in seconds." Which is yet another thing that is discreet from the above.
* If you're going to have features based on AI, you need to be very clear and very loud about how and to what extent your any AI feature has access to my data. I need a super-charged privacy policy there, and I want you to be terrified of the consequences of violating your promises.
* "Get Up and Running Within A Week" That's forever to sign a document, which I think is the central purpose of this service?
* Your comparison slider between the traditional process and yours is comparing two very different things: what looks like a government form and an email. I can't take anything away from that.
* At the top of the page there's a "give us your email for early access" box, but at the bottom there's a whole form. What do I get from one that I don't get from the other?
Basically, your site isn't clear about the focus of this service. I would guess the template things are the primary use-case you're interested in. And in general the landing page doesn't inspire confidence. Tell me about security. Tell me that you take having and working with my data seriously.
PDFs allow signing documents via encrypted certificate and PDF editing allows the creation of arbitrary signature fields on the fly. It’s all you need. It’s what the military has been using for all its business for more than a decade.
Certain areas of the military still use DocuSign even though they can do signatures better without DocuSign, because it isn’t about the signatures. It’s about the API DocuSign provides as a chain of enterprise automation regards to high quantity purchasing and fulfillment.
For a prototype it's ok.
Tagging documents isn’t really a big problem. Companies typically only have a finite, handful of contract templates that the admin tags manually.
Additionally, we automatically fill in repetitive information using the data we collect.
I don't understand how the two things in the before/after slider thing are even related.
It also makes it easy to apply professional edits to the template later on, whenever needed.
Sorry, but that is a bad name. Looks like a typo. Just saying. If you pronounce this the way you want it, you have to add "without the i".
Does this really help?
I’d be wary of my signature tool giving my employees and potentially clients legal advice.