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Show HN: We are building the next DocuSign
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sangupta 2y agoLinks at the bottom of the site to X/LinkedIn/Contact Email/Github are all broken.
- brailsafe 2y agoRedefining (automatable) fillable PDF documents into a totally different form field and email system using string replacement?
- esaidm 2y agoWe 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.
- brailsafe 2y agoHow does this replace an an official employment form in any meaningful way?
- esaidm 2y agoWe 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.
- pdntspa 2y agoSo..... smart mail merge? I don't understand how the two things in the before/after slider thing are even related.
- biwills 2y agoPlease add links on your site to your Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
- esaidm 2y agoDone!
- numbers 2y agodomains don't matter that much but that missing `i` will trip up a lot of people.
- esaidm 2y agoYes! We will change it for sure, but that only cost us 10 box. But yeah, it causes confussion.
- kylephillipsau 2y agoI read it as snuggly until I realised what it was supposed to represent
- lyingnig 2y ago[flagged]
- jreynan 2y agoWhat's the difference with Docusign, Dropboxsign, etc?
- esaidm 2y agoWe 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 2y agoWho’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.
- mmwako 2y agothis guys are going to rebrand so hard...
- pedalpete 2y agoI 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.
- noodlesUK 2y agoI 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 2y agoNo, you upload the PDF and we grab to build a template with the inputs of the variables already placed.
- Molitor5901 2y agoDigital document signing almost feels like it should be baked into email systems by now. Having a separate service to do this feel antiquated.
- xnx 2y agoGoogle Workspace has it built in https://workspace.google.com/resources/esignature/ https://workspace.google.com/resources/esignature/
- verdverm 2y agoyup, I dropped Docusign when this landed.
- Molitor5901 2y agoWOW. Thank you, that is really great.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y 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 2y 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?
- jfengel 2y ago
- recursive 2y agoHow do you pronounce it? "We're going to use ess-jee-enn-ell-why".
- kulahan 2y agoI 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 2y agosign-lee makes more sense.
- kulahan 2y agoI have no clue how I missed this lol. Yes, this must be it, thanks
- dillydogg 2y agoI 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 2y agoAgreed. 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?
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI tend to not defer to marketing departments regarding how I pronounce company names, especially for made up words.
- esaidm 2y agoWhat 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 2y agoYou 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.
- cuu508 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI think the who are "we" information is missing. There are not much on the landing page to assure trust in the product.
- Gerardo1 2y 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.
- chiph 2y agoThe 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 2y agoSounds 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 2y agoYes - 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.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago“explained by a voice agent” Does this really help?
- esaidm 2y agoNot necessarily for business, but it can be tedious to understand documents right before signing them.
- JumpCrisscross 2y 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.
- Gerardo1 2y agoIf your agent materially misrepresents something, do you think you have any liability there?
- tonymet 2y agoi doubt real tech has touched this space, but please fix superior court efiling.
- dragonwriter 2y agoTech 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.
- t_mann 2y agoI 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?
- steveBK123 2y agoIt's to attract VC investment
- imglorp 2y agoThe 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 2y agoYou can run most of LLMs just fine with on-premises resources, nothing exotic needed.
- eddythompson80 2y 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 2y agoThat'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.
- crimsonnoodle58 2y agoThe 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/ https://www.docuseal.com/
- jppope 2y agoI had some issue loading the page as well. It seems like it doesn't like my adblockers or something
- PanMan 2y agoalso shows just a blank page for me. osx/safari
- sabaimran 2y agoLikewise, blank page. Mobile Firefox + ad blocker.
- sanarothe 2y ago<script src="https://cdn.gpteng.co/gptengineer.js https://cdn.gpteng.co/gptengineer.js" type="module"></script> https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer https://github.com/AntonOsika/gpt-engineer I believe I have identified the culprit.
- KomoD 2y agoSo they just prompted the site with lovable.dev
- theothertimcook 2y ago+1 for docuseal, so good.
- gigagorilla 2y agoFor another open source alternative, shout out to https://www.opensignlabs.com/ https://www.opensignlabs.com/ as well.
- dzonga 2y agosite can't even open :(. white space.
- esaidm 2y agoIt should be working, maybe was a temporary cut out.
- gbraad 2y 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 2y agoIf 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.
- austinallegro 2y agoLoosest 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.
- admiralrohan 2y agoWe are building the next DocuSign - why?
- mrweasel 2y agoI was going to ask the same. I don't even want to use DocuSign, so I certainly don't want another service like it.
- austin-cheney 2y agoThere 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.
- 0x69420 2y agoanother one? was one inflicted upon the world not enough?
- chiph 2y agoLooking 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?
- Jekjerowes 2y ago[flagged]
- shirajg 2y agoThrilling
- morgenkaffee 2y agoI 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 2y agoWhy would you replace DocuSign? Have you had any problem with it overall?
- kieloo 2y agoMaybe 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 2y agoWe are validating whether this truly constitutes an issue and if there is potential for innovation in this area.
- zebo123 2y ago[flagged]
- junto 2y agoAre you based in the EU or the US?
- esaidm 2y agoIn the US.
- jhnam88 2y agoLooks wonderful
- oschvr 2y agoThe 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.
- tiffanyh 2y agoUnderstand 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 2y agoAbsolutely 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
- nextts 2y agoEr.... 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 2y agoWe have scheduled with some people in the legal area to understand their concerns! :)
- alexpadula 2y agoBeen there done that. I created one called inscribe years ago. Good luck!