Show HN: We are building the next DocuSign

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)

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?

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.

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?

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/

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

We are building the next DocuSign - why?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.