Show HN: We are building the next DocuSign

76 pointsposted 6 days ago
by esaidm
(sgnly.com)

99 Comments

tiffanyh

5 days ago

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

4 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

> 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.

bofadeez

6 days ago

That's it? You could fork OpenSign and stick a RAG agent on the side of it in a couple hours I guess. Not much going on though.

eddythompson80

6 days ago

It wouldn’t be a HN post without someone sizing the work as “a couple of hours” and a “$5/month cost” after all.

Though my post is missing an /s that I didn’t think it needed.

bofadeez

6 days ago

But... that's all you're doing though? Because one could fork OpenSign and stick a RAG agent on the side in a couple hours, right?

One could literally vibe code this feature into a PR for OpenSign in like 15 minutes.

intelVISA

6 days ago

Shh, don't let the VCs know.

imglorp

6 days ago

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.

cyberax

6 days ago

You can run most of LLMs just fine with on-premises resources, nothing exotic needed.

crimsonnoodle58

6 days ago

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/

jppope

6 days ago

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

sabakhoj

6 days ago

Likewise, blank page. Mobile Firefox + ad blocker.

PanMan

6 days ago

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

morgenkaffee

5 days ago

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

5 days ago

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

chiph

5 days ago

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?

recursive

6 days ago

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

jfengel

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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)

crazygringo

6 days ago

Agreed. Hope they change the name ASAP. I saw it and the first thing I thought was, I'd never trust a company that decided that was a good name.

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?

kulahan

6 days ago

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.

ANighRaisin

6 days ago

sign-lee makes more sense.

kulahan

5 days ago

I have no clue how I missed this lol. Yes, this must be it, thanks

CoastalCoder

6 days ago

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

recursive

5 days ago

I wasn't deferring to any marketing departments. But the fact remains, I still do not know how to pronounce it.

etothet

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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?

chiph

5 days ago

Yes - we make every effort to get them as close as humanly possible - spending lots of hours matching fonts, images/watermarks, layout and even spelling & grammar errors. We don't want someone at the state office to reject a submitted form because it doesn't "look right". At our volume, that would be bad.

admiralrohan

6 days ago

We are building the next DocuSign - why?

mrweasel

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

5 days ago

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

5 days ago

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

noodlesUK

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

sangupta

6 days ago

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

nextts

4 days ago

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

4 days ago

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

Molitor5901

6 days ago

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

DaiPlusPlus

6 days ago

> 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.

gruez

6 days ago

>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?

ggm

6 days ago

Came to say this. Courts have been dealing with intent vs proofs for a long time and the intent is central. Some jurisdictions used (maybe still do) stipulate real hand on real pen in real ink, sometimes even colour of ink. But at large, your intent to declare something by signing even with an "X" is taken as such.

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.

dragonwriter

6 days ago

> Docusign is trash-theatre. Its secure because they say so.

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.

RandomBacon

6 days ago

> Remember in Scotland, verbal contracts are binding with no need to witness.

The same in the U.S., it's just a matter of proof.

DaiPlusPlus

5 days ago

> 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

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... ) -

jfengel

6 days ago

Legally I don't think DocuSign will attest to anything. I wouldn't trust that for anything significant. It's only good when everyone is going in good faith. If there is a serious dispute you need lawyers.

contravariant

6 days ago

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.

dragonwriter

5 days ago

I mean, you can argue anything, but there are a multiple things required by (e.g.) the Federal E-Sign Act in terms of both capabilities and content, and DocuSign is structured directly around that, and “any email that has anti-spoofing set up” is not. You could build a workflow around such an email system that met the E-Sign requirements, but there is a reason people choose packaged solutions that already do that.

mc32

6 days ago

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.

tommasoamici

6 days ago

It is CFR11 compliant. Source: I work on Box Sign.

austin-cheney

6 days ago

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.

esaidm

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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.

cdblades

5 days ago

* 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.

esaidm

5 days ago

Thanks for the feedback! We will work to make the message more clear.

cuu508

6 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

oschvr

5 days ago

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.

alexpadula

3 days ago

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

jreynan

6 days ago

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

esaidm

6 days ago

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.

brycelarkin

5 days ago

Who’s the target market for this?

Tagging documents isn’t really a big problem. Companies typically only have a finite, handful of contract templates that the admin tags manually.

brailsafe

6 days ago

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

esaidm

6 days ago

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.

pdntspa

6 days ago

So..... smart mail merge?

I don't understand how the two things in the before/after slider thing are even related.

brailsafe

6 days ago

How does this replace an an official employment form in any meaningful way?

esaidm

6 days ago

We don’t replace the official form — we work with it as-is. What we do is take a version of that form, identify the dynamic fields, and generate a template that can be reused while keeping the exact format. This makes it easier to generate pre-filled forms without touching the official layout.

It also makes it easy to apply professional edits to the template later on, whenever needed.

numbers

6 days ago

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

esaidm

6 days ago

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

biwills

6 days ago

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

kylephillipsau

6 days ago

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

gbraad

6 days ago

> 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

5 days ago

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

6 days ago

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

esaidm

5 days ago

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

junto

5 days ago

Are you based in the EU or the US?

mmwako

6 days ago

this guys are going to rebrand so hard...

JumpCrisscross

6 days ago

“explained by a voice agent”

Does this really help?

esaidm

6 days ago

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

JumpCrisscross

6 days ago

> it can be tedious to understand documents right before signing them

I’d be wary of my signature tool giving my employees and potentially clients legal advice.

cdblades

5 days ago

If your agent materially misrepresents something, do you think you have any liability there?

austinallegro

6 days ago

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.

tonymet

6 days ago

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

dragonwriter

5 days ago

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

6 days ago

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