Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Bonsai (YC W16) – bulletproof contracts and payments for freelancers

hellobonsai.com

102 pointsmthomasb40 comments

Hey everyone, one of the Bonsai co-founders here.

We're former freelancers who realized there's way more to freelancing than good design, development, photography etc.

Freelancing is a business and many freelancers lack the interest / skills to create effective contracts, manage cash flow properly, etc.

Our first two products are contracts & payments. We had a Stanford lawyer who writes novels on the side draft solid, plain English contract templates. We built a simple, helpful mad-libs style workflow to create the contracts. And finally, we have invoices that can be automatically generated and sent from those contracts.

Our initial users are getting paid about two weeks faster than they were before Bonsai.

Would love to hear what you guys think and answer any questions you have about Bonsai or the freelancing business in general.

Edit: Also, in TC: http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/22/bonsai-wants-to-be-the-free...

This is really cool!

I like the concept. I'm with another commenter in wondering if contracts to invoice ratio and low price affects your ability to profitably run the business. Me personally, Im also wondering if algorithms you use for generating contracts run fast enough that doing it takes almost no hardware and allows for liw price. Is that the case?

This looks interesting for me, thanks for sharing!

Question: what is your end-of-life plan in the event of acquisition or business shut down?

It depends. When are you expecting to go out of business?

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with them, I'm just annoyed by what you're insinuating. Dude. This is not a life altering business proposition. If your business is torpedoed because you suddenly forgot how to cut and paste, you've got other problems.

look nice

couple of questions

  - do you plan to make it work with something like Paypal API ?

  - maybe other language than English ?

look promising anyway

The app itself looks really nice, but I'm unconvinced this will be useful in practice. The number of times our company has sent a contract and had it accepted without revisions is literally 0, and I see no way to customize the terms of the agreement beyond the pre-filled fields.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: if this is intended to be a tool for generating, signing, and managing contracts there must be more flexibility in actually drafting the contract language. If it's supposed to be a tool for invoicing clients, I see no way to actually invoice for contracts provided by a third-party.

We're working on a big release this week to add flexibility, but the contracts definitely aren't for everyone.

If you're a decent sized agency working with larger clients, it probably won't be flexible enough. We try to cover the 80/20 cases and provide some flexibility, but we need to maintain some standardization for the ease of creation, integration with invoices, etc.

I talked to your support team about this. The contract, as a base, is good, but there are some clients that just need to change the language or other fields that are NOT editable from your interface. And that's the only reason I'm not using Bonsai.

Yep, we definitely understand the need for more flexibility. In about 1 week there will be many more options to edit.

The big reason we didn't do that sooner is that we didn't want the average user to think they had to really get into the details and tweak it, because the template is made to just work well in most cases. But have definitely seen the need for more flexibility.

A good equivalent would be the SAFE for startup funding. There are a few editable terms (most-favored nation, cap, discount) but for the most part it is standard. Saves everyone time, money, and headaches.

Will it replace priced VC rounds? Not at all, but a little streamlining goes a long way.

If I'm reading the pricing copy correctly, the contracts themselves are free and invoicing service charges $1 per invoice.

Is it possible to be profitable (in a successful startup sense, not casual/bootstrapped/side project sense) at that low level? Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see a lot of room for revenue growth here. I'd figure that the average freelancer as a handful of contracts a year so you're looking at $10-20/year per customer.

I'm not saying the idea itself isn't good. Anybody that's freelanced or done corporate invoicing knows the annoyingness of "We'll pay you within 30 days of deciding to pay you"[1]. Solving that problem would benefit a lot of freelancers. I just don't see this being a sustainable solution in the form that's being presented.

[1]: Quote is shamelessly stolen from a patio11 comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076590

Edited to add link to quoted comment

Remember that the main model of Silicon Valley is selling stories to VC's about how things will be profitable later or grow enough to be acquired on potential/userbase. They're not usually that concerned with profits upfront.

However, a service that's easy to automate can be maintained at low costs while scaling easily. I'd probably still charge a small, montly or yearly fee for contracts with a free trial. Just to cover operating costs.

As much as freelancers say they hate dealing with clients or invoicing etc, what it all comes down to is the difficulty of managing cash flow.

Contracts and invoices are the first step towards a few other cashflow management tools like invoice factoring, escrow, and others.

But definitely agree, you can't build a business on invoices alone, since those + payment processing are so commoditized.

When I was consulting, we'd send 20-30 invoices per month.

I like the concept, but what exactly about this makes it "13 days faster" or gives me "3x fewer late payments" ? Is this result just for non-enterprise contracts? People new to freelancing? I don't understand how you can make that claim, and it really rubs me the wrong way that you aren't clear about it.

I'm having trouble figuring out if this is a product that would benefit me. I'm a contractor / freelancer. When I take on a client, I receive a PSA with statement of work, and typically get paid on a Net 30 terms with Bill.com, mailed check, or direct deposit (however the client wants to pay me) managed with something like Quickbooks I'm guessing. The contracts are all very similar. Cash flow is definitely tricky because Net 30 is a pain. And invoicing is pretty easy. I use On The Job, create my pdf invoice, and send that to accounts payable on the first of the month.

  - Is this product for a certain type of contractor? Size client?
  - How does the flow work using your product?
  - Is my use outside of the norm of your typical customers?
  - What is different about your contracts that make them 'bulletproof'?

If you support 2checkout I would be able to use it in Bolivia, and many other latinamerica developers will also be able too.

Hiring freelancer for most international clients is more appealing if they are from other countries than USA, Canada an UK, for several reasons: like price, diversity, time availability, work culture etc.

... I'm sensing that someone will say that hiring freelancers from USA(or the first world country of your choice) has more advantages. The fact is that most of the long lasting freelance market is outside USA

Yep, definitely looking to expand international support for contracts and especially payments. That's one of our largest themes in feature requests right now.

Thanks for mentioning 2checkout, hadn't heard of them before. We've been looking into https://www.adyen.com for international payments.

Good thing about 2checkout is that it has already permeate the freelance culture, at least in south america.

Sadly I can't even use Bitcoins safely in Bolivia as it's legally baned here

Most south americans freelancers use either: Payoneer, Skrill, Wire Transfers, or 2checkout. Though 2checkout is more popular for ecommerce and small/medium startups.

I like this idea, and would probably use it. I only seem to be able to select "United States" (and subsequently choose a state) in the contract, though. Are there any plans to open it up to other countries? I see you can already choose GBP as a payment currency, for example, but not choose the UK as my location.

We do support US, UK, Canada, and Australia for contracts. About 20% of our users are Brits.

On step 1 of the contract creation process, what happens when you click 'United States'? Also, what browser are you using?

Oops, thanks. I must've missed that when I created my example contract so it got left as the United States, and then I couldn't change anything in the contract except the state.

I just created a new example contract using the United Kingdom in the first step, and all seems fine. Thanks!

Awesome, I'm looking into becoming a freelancer next year and will definitely try bonsai. Thanks and good luck.

Thanks :) Lots of our users are new freelancers or are making the transition from part to full time freelance.

We try to put together resources for them specifically, like a tool to visualize what they should charge: https://www.hellobonsai.com/rates

are those rates based off contracts in Bonsai?

Yep, sample size of a few thousand signed contracts

Looks really good, thanks for sharing.

Created a sample contract, nice and easy.

Are the contracts the same for US and UK? I've only created a sample UK one, but notice that you use the US spelling for 'license' as opposed to 'licence'.

Is there an option to export archived contracts?

Anyways, I'll likely be using this. Good luck with it.

Siiiick!

Any chance you'll handle tax remittances? Contractor taxes (esp) in Canada are kind of a quagmire.

Not yet but it's been very heavily requested. Definitely looking into it.

Have you built NDA, I Assignment, etc into these contracts?

Lots of people use Upwork for contracting, but would still like to send a contract with the right legal wording that they can sign.

Yep, the contracts include confidentiality and IP assignment.

We also see alot of users bringing projects to us from Upwork et al.

Could you talk about why I would choose you over using Upwork's default contract form? Or are you saying that people would move their project entirely to you?

Because there is valuable deterrence in using Upwork's rating system versus doing it myself.

Just completed my first contract/charge via @bonsai, I'm in love to say the least. Makes creating a contract and getting clients setup for billing a snap

Seems neat, commenting for later in case I decide to start taking up more freelance again.

bulletproof + free = ?

what happens when the contract is contested? and what if you lose?

I was thinking the same then I look at their page footer.

> Bonsai is not a law firm, does not provide legal services or advice, and does not provide or participate in legal representation.

So basically they are providing just the tool, you are still legally responsible and you have to represent yourself

One way to think of the contracts piece is as a RocketLawyer or LegalZoom verticalized for freelancers. We provide contracts that are written and maintained specifically for freelancers, and that beats 99.9% of the generic templates you'll find on the internet.

The fact is, nothing beats having a lawyer create and review every one of your contracts. However, that's simply not feasible for most freelancers. Our goal is then to provide something straightforward enough that will cover the majority of issues in the majority of cases.

Re the disclaimer, it's actually completely standard for any site that touches legal issues or content.

Check out the TOS of RocketLawyer (https://www.rocketlawyer.com/ter...) or LegalZoom (https://www.legalzoom.com/legal/...), two huge companies and pioneers in the field, and you'll find the same there.

so the product they assume zero responsibility is the headline for their company?

No, is on the footer

(obviously a bad pun joke)

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