12 ms·

Launch HN: Axdraft (YC W19) - Legal documents for startups in minutes

172 points by yuriy_zaremba 8y ago

Hi HN! We are Yuriy and Oleg, founders of Axdraft (https://business.axdraft.com/en/business https://business.axdraft.com/en/business). Axdraft offers free legal documents for startups. We have built Axdraft, because we believe that sometimes founders don’t need 20-page ironclad contract, 2 weeks of negotiations and detailed explanation of all risks. On early stages you just want to have a good, balanced agreement fast to move the deal forward while it's hot. The biggest difficulty here is that lawyers push us to perceive contracts as unique and, therefore, not possible to automate. Usually, by saying unique, they mean that there are 20-50 possible variations of a clause in the contract. We are a team of brothers, who combine legal and tech expertise, Yuriy was a lawyer for almost 8 years at one of top law firms in Europe and when he started noticing that even the most complex legal transactions have many patterns, he reached out to his brother Oleg, who at that time was Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com in Amsterdam. We teamed up to try to figure out and automate most common variations and allow any young startup, as ourselves to draft a document, which they need now. We spoke to about 100 founders and came up with a list of top-6 contracts startups use, including: (1) NDA; (2) Pilot agreement; (3) Services agreement; (4) SaaS agreement; (5) SAFE; and (6) Employee onboarding. We are already working on Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Founders Agreement and LoI, which are top-4 documents requested by users. We will be more than happy to add other documents upon your request. Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar solutions are: 1. we focus on startups, which makes the content more tailored; 2. we offer documents for free, because I see little value in the legal document itself. The main value of a lawyer, in our view, is in counseling, sharing the liability and providing you assurances; 3. we offer plain English description of the implications for each choice you are offered when drafting a document; 4. to use Axdraft you don’t have to register, because we want to create flawless and super-fast experience for founders to create legal documents; 5. we are happy to customize documents of registered users with their logos, company details and some custom language upon request. We intend to monetize Axdraft by giving an option for startups to submit any document drafted with Axdraft or a document they received from third party for approval or review by a lawyer for a small fixed fee, which would still be much more affordable than engaging a law firm. Currently, we offer founder to founder review, which is not a legal review at all, but more a business advice from a fellow founder, who is eager to share his experience with similar contracts. We estimate the market for this product to be less than 1 bln USD at the moment, but we expect it to grow as the number of startups founded each year increases and as we expand into a larger 7 bln USD market of small businesses (under 20 employees) in the US. We are really excited to hear your feedback about Axdraft. Please try it out at https://business.axdraft.com https://business.axdraft.com (registration is not required) and let us know what you think.

golanggeek 8y ago
Awesome! How would it work for SaaS companies from other countries. For E.g. we are from India. So would these still be valid documents?
- yuriy_zaremba 8y ago
  Thank you for your comment! It would work if you have a US company or are selling to US customers, but, unfortunately, we don’t have documents for India yet. We may expand into this market later, but for now we are focusing on US. You can also benefit from the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy we will launch soon, since they are pretty international.
  - golanggeek 8y ago
    We don’t have a US company. But yes, we are selling to US customers.
philipkiely 8y ago
Hi guys, This is an interesting product! I generated a sample document to see what it looked like and I was impressed by both the simplicity of the document generation process and the quality of the output. I also think it is great that there is no signup, email, or any other gatekeeper preventing me from using the service. I frequently find myself involved in early stage projects where these sort of legal documents would be very handy. I would love to see the document types that you're already working on, as well as perhaps a freelance / work for hire Letter of Agreement, as many startups begin by putting food on the table consulting. A few things about the service: 1. What license, if any, are these documents generated under? I know sites like contractology let you use the docs for free but require attribution, or they can be used without attribution for a small fee. 2. Other than official legal review, do you plan to monetize any aspect of the service, such as the customization offered in the fifth point in the "main differences" section? Why or why not? 3. Where are your market size estimates coming from? Is the market that you are measuring the total amount that startups spend per year on legal expenses, or is it something else? 4. I was confused by some of the wording during the signup process "No I Makes sense, if pilot is very simple," for example, was an option. Regarding the fourth point, I have some experience working with European companies to improve the fluency of their website's English business and technical writing. My email is in my profile if you are interested in learning more.

172 points by yuriy_zaremba 8y ago

golanggeek 8y ago

Awesome! How would it work for SaaS companies from other countries. For E.g. we are from India. So would these still be valid documents?

yuriy_zaremba 8y ago
Thank you for your comment! It would work if you have a US company or are selling to US customers, but, unfortunately, we don’t have documents for India yet. We may expand into this market later, but for now we are focusing on US. You can also benefit from the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy we will launch soon, since they are pretty international.
- golanggeek 8y ago
  We don’t have a US company. But yes, we are selling to US customers.

philipkiely 8y ago

Hi guys, This is an interesting product! I generated a sample document to see what it looked like and I was impressed by both the simplicity of the document generation process and the quality of the output. I also think it is great that there is no signup, email, or any other gatekeeper preventing me from using the service. I frequently find myself involved in early stage projects where these sort of legal documents would be very handy. I would love to see the document types that you're already working on, as well as perhaps a freelance / work for hire Letter of Agreement, as many startups begin by putting food on the table consulting. A few things about the service: 1. What license, if any, are these documents generated under? I know sites like contractology let you use the docs for free but require attribution, or they can be used without attribution for a small fee. 2. Other than official legal review, do you plan to monetize any aspect of the service, such as the customization offered in the fifth point in the "main differences" section? Why or why not? 3. Where are your market size estimates coming from? Is the market that you are measuring the total amount that startups spend per year on legal expenses, or is it something else? 4. I was confused by some of the wording during the signup process "No I Makes sense, if pilot is very simple," for example, was an option. Regarding the fourth point, I have some experience working with European companies to improve the fluency of their website's English business and technical writing. My email is in my profile if you are interested in learning more.