December 1st, 2022

Jonas Carlsson & Björn Jeffery

(TLDR – sign up for the alpha here)

A safety pin instead of a button. Duct tape on a car door. Margarine when the recipe calls for butter.

What do these things have in common? They all work, but they’re not good. Not fit for purpose. They were designed with something in mind and ended up getting used for something else.

In the digital world, we have the same thing. The PDF.

It’s a great product and format, but consistently used for the wrong thing. And it’s time to break free from it.

Let us tell you about how we’ve been thinking about doing that.

A farewell to PDF contracts Think about NDAs and freelance contracts. The ones that linger in your inbox, or on a Google Drive somewhere. They might be signed – sometimes by one party, sometimes not at all. They have an expiry date that you probably didn’t pay attention to. You likely don’t even know how many people or companies you are currently in contract with (we interviewed loads of people about this, and none of them knew).

The PDF is part of this problem. We tend to think about a contract like a piece of paper, and the digital equivalent follows suit. But essentially, a contract like an NDA or a freelance agreement should be much more like a form than a paper. You fill in a few boxes with information and then you sign to confirm. We don’t need the underlying digital paper for any of these agreements to be valid. So why do we still use this old metaphor?

Introducing Paperwork For that past year or so, we’ve been slowly building a little project that we call Paperwork. It’s a tracker for NDAs and freelance contracts. We’ve spoken to dozens of users and interviewed them about how they work and what they need. Simply put – it was a mess. People described a necessary process that was arduous, slow, and boring. So we created something that was simple, reliable and fast. A new way to think about contracts – using forms and data. You can download a PDF if you really want to, but to be honest there’s no need.

Contracts as forms Rethinking contracts as forms also has other benefits. It allows you to save the data in a way that makes it useful to you. Like telling both parties when the contract expires. Or gives your finance team a visual overview of how many invoices they will be receiving this month. All of this information is today hidden in these PDFs that hardly anyone knows where they are, or what’s inside them.

By breaking out of the PDF, we can also help both parties of a contract to save time and know what’s going on. Paperwork is a system where both parties have access and can see exactly what has been agreed upon, ensures that everything is signed, and keeps all the contracts in one single place. While all other services focus on the signing process – we’ve aimed our attention towards what happens before and after. Getting peace of mind that everything is in order, and kept in the right place.

Bespoke software In order to make this work, there is an element of it being a bespoke process. You likely have your own contract templates that you prefer to use. If so, we will create them for you ourselves. Sure – this sounds like something that machine learning could do, but we need to get it completely right every single time. And we’re not confident that an automated system can do that yet. So for now, we’ll do it for you. It’s a one-time process and once it is done – you can use your templates as often as you like, with no delay.

This is not web3 or an NFT. It’s not a stable diffusion filter or an AI model. It is a small, straight-forward web project that simply asks – is the PDF good enough for what it is doing? For reusable contracts, we think it isn’t. And that’s what led us to Paperwork. If you’d like to become one of our first users, please sign up for our alpha here.