Show HN: We are building the next DocuSign

[tiffanyh]

Understand what business you’re really in.

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)

[Valodim]

Absolutely this. This is a business of trust, which means you need certifications, marketing presence, squeaky clean legal documents, and brand recognition before you get anywhere with your customers.

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

[t_mann]

I don't get what the AI agent is for - the way I know of DocuSign is to use it to legally effectively sign documents such as contracts. Those would typically be prepared by (human) legal experts. I'm wondering what niche has documents that are critical enough that they need legally effective signing but uncritical enough that you can trust an unaccountable AI agent with drafting them?

[eddythompson80]

> the way I know of DocuSign is to use it to legally effectively sign documents such as contracts.

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.

[imglorp]

The last thing I want is extremely private or sensitive documents being given to some cloud service for training data.

No thanks. Just authenticate the parties and record their agreement.

[steveBK123]

It's to attract VC investment

[crimsonnoodle58]

The home page doesn't seem to load on my mobile? Just a blank page.

Also an open source DocuSign alternative that we use is DocuSeal. Not affiliated, just a fan.

https://www.docuseal.com/

[sanarothe]

<script src="https://cdn.gpteng.co/gptengineer.js" type="module"></script>

https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer

I believe I have identified the culprit.

[gigagorilla]

For another open source alternative, shout out to https://www.opensignlabs.com/ as well.

[jppope]

I had some issue loading the page as well. It seems like it doesn't like my adblockers or something

[sabaimran]

Likewise, blank page. Mobile Firefox + ad blocker.

[theothertimcook]

+1 for docuseal, so good.

[PanMan]

also shows just a blank page for me. osx/safari

[chiph]

Looking at your privacy policy - it appears that your statements are about protecting the account info (the firm or person who has signed up for Signly)

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?

[morgenkaffee]

I use Docusign cause it looks official and grown up. With this product I worry about the name and domain name looking like phishing or a typo.

I am a fan of replacing docusign as a principle though.

[esaidm]

Why would you replace DocuSign? Have you had any problem with it overall?

[recursive]

How do you pronounce it? "We're going to use ess-jee-enn-ell-why".

[jfengel]

I'm sure they want it to be "sign-ly", and that was the least awful domain they could afford.

I suspect that at one point they were hoping to use the .ly TLD, but that fell through and they had their hearts set.

[dillydogg]

I agree, I saw the name and thought "this will be hard to get off the ground with that name". My guess is signly (pronounced sine-lee)

[kulahan]

I presume it’s supposed to be “sign-ally” or something to that effect? Really strange choice for a b2b app imo. Seems like it’d be better for an iPhone app name than anything.

[CoastalCoder]

I tend to not defer to marketing departments regarding how I pronounce company names, especially for made up words.

[etothet]

I also came here to say this. If you really want to compete with Docusign, you’d probably benefit from a name that decision makers can obviously pronounce. It seems silly, but it will be a barrier for some.

[chiph]

The current problems we're having are DS covering up adjacent text with their input box. You can specify a starting width, which helps sometimes. But they have a minimum font size of 9pt and minimum input box height of 22px and we often need to go smaller.

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.

[esaidm]

Sounds interesting! Those tools preserve the original document's style — do the documents you sign follow a specific legal format or design that needs to be maintained?

[admiralrohan]

We are building the next DocuSign - why?

[mrweasel]

I was going to ask the same. I don't even want to use DocuSign, so I certainly don't want another service like it.

[pedalpete]

I currently use GrabSign, which doesn't have a great UI tbh, but I've never tried docusign.

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.

[kieloo]

Maybe I’m just not your target customer but I honestly have no idea why I would want to replace DocuSign or how your tool is different. You may want to clarify your positioning.

[esaidm]

We are validating whether this truly constitutes an issue and if there is potential for innovation in this area.

[noodlesUK]

I don’t really understand what this is from the landing page. Is it a signature tool where you’re signing an arbitrary existing document? If so, I need to know whether it’s legally appropriate for my situation, and that means eIDAS for me.

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.

[esaidm]

No, you upload the PDF and we grab to build a template with the inputs of the variables already placed.

[sangupta]

Links at the bottom of the site to X/LinkedIn/Contact Email/Github are all broken.

[Molitor5901]

Digital document signing almost feels like it should be baked into email systems by now. Having a separate service to do this feel antiquated.

[xnx]

Google Workspace has it built in https://workspace.google.com/resources/esignature/

[DaiPlusPlus]

> Digital document signing almost feels like it should be baked into email systems by now

It is: S/MIME is well-supported.

Anything else is not a "real" signature, as far as I'm concerned.

[mc32]

SaaS are now adding e-sigs as a feature (Box, Google, etc.) Some workflows still need DS but it’s fewer and fewer. Box, I think, can be CFR11 compliant.

[contravariant]

Pretty sure that with any email that has anti-spoofing set up correctly you could argue that a simple email reply would be equally valid.

[nextts]

Er.... sounds cool and everything but the main conern I'd have is "does this protect me legally"

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.

[esaidm]

We have scheduled with some people in the legal area to understand their concerns! :)

[esaidm]

What would you change on the landing?

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.

[mike_d]

You can't have an AI that fills in things automatically and then expect a signature on that document to be legally binding.

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.

[Gerardo1]

* You aren't clear about the goal. The middle of your screen says "Redefining Document Signing" in smaller font but in a blue pill. Immediately under that in large font it says "Turn PDFs toContract Templates in seconds". Which is it? Those are not the same thing.

* 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.

[cuu508]

The name "sgnly" makes me think it is an electronic signing service, but from your description it seems it converts documents into templates (and partially fills them?). Perhaps consider a name change?

[achempion]

I think the who are "we" information is missing. There are not much on the landing page to assure trust in the product.

[austin-cheney]

There have been many attempts to compete with DocuSign in the past. Most of these fail because they miss the point that it isn’t really about digital signatures.

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.

[oschvr]

The lovable favicon makes me trust it less. It means the code is not done by an accountable human that can do something if my documents get leaked or your site hacked.

For a prototype it's ok.

[jreynan]

What's the difference with Docusign, Dropboxsign, etc?

[esaidm]

We transform the PDF into a template and identify automatically the variables. We automatically fill in repetitive information using the data we collect in previously docs.

[brailsafe]

Redefining (automatable) fillable PDF documents into a totally different form field and email system using string replacement?

[esaidm]

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.

[alexpadula]

Been there done that. I created one called inscribe years ago. Good luck!

[numbers]

domains don't matter that much but that missing `i` will trip up a lot of people.

[esaidm]

Yes! We will change it for sure, but that only cost us 10 box. But yeah, it causes confussion.

[biwills]

Please add links on your site to your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

[esaidm]

Done!

[kylephillipsau]

I read it as snuggly until I realised what it was supposed to represent

[gbraad]

> Sgnly

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".

[nosioptar]

If someone sent my mom a link to a site called Sgnly to sign a document, she'd assume it was phishing and delete the message. I'd probably do the same.

[dzonga]

site can't even open :(. white space.

[esaidm]

It should be working, maybe was a temporary cut out.

[mmwako]

this guys are going to rebrand so hard...

[junto]

Are you based in the EU or the US?

[esaidm]

In the US.

[JumpCrisscross]

“explained by a voice agent”

Does this really help?

[esaidm]

Not necessarily for business, but it can be tedious to understand documents right before signing them.

[austinallegro]

Loosest privacy policy ever. As for the AI element, is there no option to opt out? Assuming this start-up is US-based, so you won't be getting any EU customers so, GDPR and EU<>US Data Transfer, EU AI Act 2025 etc.

[jhnam88]

Looks wonderful

[shirajg]

Thrilling

[tonymet]

i doubt real tech has touched this space, but please fix superior court efiling.

[dragonwriter]

Tech firms can’t just do that, someone in the relevant government (either state or county, depending on how the courts and their supporting administrative services are organized in your state) has to both have the motivation and funding, then either in-house or outsourced solutions can be sought.

[0x69420]

another one? was one inflicted upon the world not enough?