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Just tried it out to make a Privacy Policy. Pretty neat! Only took a couple minutes to answer the questions.

One point of feedback: What you gave me was a Word Doc. I know Word Docs are the bread and butter of the legal profession, but I want to use this privacy policy on a website. That means I'll have to convert it to HTML, which means either getting really ugly HTML after I ask word to save it out, or having to copy/paste it and then reformat it.

It would be great if you could output a more convertible format, like LaTeX or Markdown.

Or just an HTML page with no styling, which can be copied/pasted into Word to preserve formatting, or saved directly.

Just have multiple "save as" options.

Got it. Thanks!

Thanks for the idea.

Thank you for this idea! We will try to fix it.

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.

Thank you for such a detailed feedback. This is extremely valuable and we will definitely reach out to you separately!

On each of your questions:

1. We don’t impose any license terms. It’s free to use and share for everyone. The reason being that we want people to share the news and get the benefit of AXDRAFT instead of thinking twice not to violate some kind of restrictions.

2. We don’t intend to monetize on personalization for now, but eventually we want to become a first point of contact for all startup legal work and this will become our source of revenue. We choose not to charge for personalization, because we want users to clearly feel the value between finding a free template on Google or using other services.

3. Market size comes from the number of startups and small businesses and the assumption that we will get around 100USD of fees per startup per month.

4. We will fix it and will hope for your help for this.

Yuriy, this looks useful and I’ll take a look at these for my own startup, but one point of clarification that you guys might want to double check with a lawyer: not having a license does not mean that anyone can use it, it means that no one can use it. Licenses aren’t restrictions, they are grants. Without a grant, no one is allowed to do anything with them by default.

You very likely need a license so your customers aren’t (technically) in violation. CC0 license is a straightforward one for these kind of situations, might be worth checking out.

Per usual: not a lawyer, certainly not your lawyer, please double check with an attorney.

We will check this and clarify this from the legal perspective. Our attitude is, as I described: everyone can use it. We focus now on getting the best documents, we will definitely have no claims and we will clarify this from the legal point of view.

Thanks for the point-by-point response! As I said my email is in my bio and I hope to hear from you soon.

Will do!

The difficulty with this sort of thing, in my experience, is that once you do need to hire a lawyer to review this sort of agreement, it turns out to be a lot more expensive in the long run than just hiring them and using their forms to begin with. They know their own language backward and forward so it takes them very little time to make a standard change to their standard form. Looking at an entirely new (to them) agreement, they have to analyze it from scratch.

If there were truly industry-standard forms that all attorneys were familiar with for these standard agreements, that difficulty wouldn't arise. That's how the residential real estate market in the US works, for example — standard forms for all sorts of situations approved by the real estate associations. It's sort of like how an open source infrastructure product will eventually become the cheapest thing to use because everyone already knows how it works.

Do you have a goal/roadmap for making your agreements the industry standard?

Thank you for this feedback. We are aware of this problem. We have faced it few times. This is why we will allow our users to connect with our network of lawyers, who are very well familiar with our language. Moreover they will be able to easily compare the document they receive from users with AXDRAFT template, so we expect the fee to be significantly less, compared to what you would usually expect from a lawyer.

I've found the opposite to be true. Several lawyers I've worked with have asked to see what I've started with, perhaps because they're used to people grabbing stuff off the internet. I really like this idea because the hard part in my mind is the negotiation with the other party, in part because it inevitably becomes more complex as you go. Having something to start with and iterate on is great. At the end, as long as it's a relatively simple matter, having a lawyer review it is probably going to be lots cheaper.

One thought I had for a future version -- why not let both parties access the document on the site and build it together? That's something I'd definitely pay for.

I'm going through the MSA one now:

>Customer I In this case customer will be Company, and you are the one providing services (Contractor). Choose wisely

I think there are some typos here and I'm not sure why I need to choose this option wisely.

Going through the questions, it looks like you are using "I" as a separator which is confusing.

>Do you want to include interest on late payments?

I think a discount for on time payments is better than charging interest. Interest makes it seem like the customer can delay payment if they feel like it.

>Should Contractor be able to remedy deficiencies in Services, if Company (you) does not accept them?

In question 1 the customer was the company and I was the contractor, but now they're swapped.

It sneaks in some terms I wouldn't agree to:

>all Work Product and other materials provided by or on behalf of Contractor will not contain any viruses, “Trojan horses” or other harmful code;

>Contractor would cause Company irreparable harm for which Company has no adequate remedies at law. Accordingly, Company is entitled to specific performance or injunctive relief for any such breach.

>require Contractor to pay the adjustment of $ Type in amount of reduction in fee, in case Contractor fails to comply with quality requirements for Services in USD I example: 500.

>keep copies of all books and records relating to Services during the term of this agreement and for three years thereafter. Company may upon reasonable notice and during normal business hours examine and make copies of all books and records relating to Services

When looking at the preview document I expected that at minimum I would be able to click on the green text and edit it. Ideally, I should be able to edit the whole document.

Sorry to say that I don't think I would use the service. It's a bit sloppy in places which isn't reassuring when generating legal documents. I don't think what it spat out was something that I would want to use. It seemed to be tilted in favor of the client where I'd rather send something in my favor/neutral and have them redline it if need be.

Plug: I offer an ironclad and very popular Master Services Agreement at https://msabundle.com along with other legal document templates. Similar set to what Axdraft has, but instead of being customizable via online wizard, I give you annotated source documents that you can fill out and edit to your heart's content.

Backstory: When I sold Hashrocket in 2011, I added a clause to the sale agreement that let me keep all the legal IP that I had developed over the years. A little bit after that I carefully prepared my well-honed MSA contract into a template bundle with different formats and annotations. Over the years I added more templates based on documents I've actually used in my businesses. It's a nice little passive income project.

Thank you for sharing this. Frankly, I don't think it is very good faith to sell your commercial templates on a launch thread of a product focused on free legal documents for startups, but users will make their choice.

Thank you for this feedback. This is really valuable. I believe the confusion started on the first question. After you choose it, you become a contractor in the agreement, not a customer, so many provisions are against you. We will probably delete this option to avoid confusion. We will also improve wordings and use of symbols to improve trustworthiness.

Regarding the editing, you should have received a final Word document with 100% ability to edit it. Preview is just to get a general sense of the document.

Regarding the discount on payments, thank you for the suggestion. We will add this option and we have specifically created a "suggestion" button on the website.

Thank you again for your feedback. It is very valuable! We will fix everything and let you know (if you want to).

>Thank you for this feedback. This is really valuable. I believe the confusion started on the first question. After you choose it, you become a contractor in the agreement, not a customer, so many provisions are against you. We will probably delete this option to avoid confusion. We will also improve wordings and use of symbols to improve trustworthiness.

This has left me even more confused. If I'm the contractor why would I want an agreement with many provisions against me? In that scenario I would want a contract neutral to in my favor. Something that will get me past my client's legal team while protecting me as much as possible.

>Regarding the editing, you should have received a final Word document with 100% ability to edit it. Preview is just to get a general sense of the document.

Ah, I stopped at the preview point.

Thanks again for the feedback. We will split this document into two separate agreements.

I actually liked having the option to be a contractor in the MSA. I spent a lot of time piecing one together for myself for that purpose, and something like this would have gotten me there 90% faster.

Thank you for a different point of view.

Congrats on launching! On this:

> Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar solutions are: 1. we focus on startups, which makes the content more tailored

We (Clerky) are exclusively focused on startups. We started Clerky specifically because there was no online service that was suitable for startups. Not sure if you meant for that first point to only apply to LegalZoom or RocketLawyer, but I wanted to clarify that.

Good luck with everything!

I don't think this is the right forum/thread to point it out but Clerky defaults to 10,000,000 shares while incorporating and this was a big mistake for us (and for most startups) down the lane as Delaware has higher taxes if the company has more than 5,000 shares (regardless of the share value).

We lost nearly a month's revenue paying off taxes and filing legal amendments.

Also you guys handed over my account to CSC as agent and we weren't even aware of it.

It sounds like you might have gotten some bad advice from elsewhere – most new startups with 10 million authorized shares pay a DE franchise tax that is very close to the minimum (around $400). There are two different ways to calculate franchise tax for DE - the "authorized shares" method and the "assumed par value" method. The letter DE sends out uses the former to estimate your franchise tax, which is usually some huge amount. But when you go to pay your franchise tax, you can just use the "assumed par value" method and pay what is typically a very small amount. I'll shoot you an email on this as well!

The minimum can be $150 if your shares are less than 5000. If the difference between $400 and $150 is inconsequential then yes it doesn't matter.

The advice was from Delaware government customer service.

Hi! Thank you for this and sorry for the confusion. The first point was meant to apply only to Rocket Lawyer and Legal Zoom.

Small design feedback: the I character you use to divide text in-line looks strange to me. I've actually never seen I used like that before. Perhaps you want to consider using | instead of I? Here's an example of the difference: https://i.imgur.com/NRiERLN.png (top is |, bottom is what you have now).

This seems like a useful service, although I'm curious what the business model is here. Is it entirely based on the "Request review by lawyers" button at the end? Do you think that the market of people who are willing to pay for lawyers but not pay for lawyers to draft documents is large enough? (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding the angle here)

I also was very confused by the pipe, which renders exactly like an uppercase I for me. [EDIT: oh wait.. it is an I? either way...] Replacing with a hyphen or colon would be a quick fix. Additionally consider bolding the main text and/or greying the subtext.

On a positive note, I really like the way prior answers appear below the current question on the survey!

Thank you for this! Very to the point. We will improve it.

This is a much needed alternative to the others. Are there any plans to bring this to the EU?

Thank you for the question. Yes, we plan to go to EU later (London and Berlin being a priority due to high number of startups), but for now we start with Silicon Valley, since the majority of startups are here.

Hey guys, this is awesome! To help with SaaS sales agreement for my own company, I started builiding a tool just like yours this past weekend. I am glad I did not invest a lot of time into it :-)

Thank you! Happy to hear that! We will be happy to personalize your documents, if you want to. Just email me at yz@axdraft.com or reach out via feedback button in the software.

This is a great idea. I just tried it out and had a couple of issues.

I wanted to see what a privacy policy would look like. I don't collect any user information but I was required to select at least one type of data that I collect.

Similarly, I accept payments but not via any of the listed payment processors, but I was required to select at least one of the payment processors.

I think both of these could be solved if you removed the requirement to select at least one option.

Fixed the problem with payment processors already. With the data it's a bit tricky, since almost every website collect some kind of data, so you probably don't need a Privacy Policy if you don't collect any data. Please let me know what you think about that.

Thank you for the comment. We will add option "Other" immediately. Sorry for missing that in the first place.

I was just thinking about how I could get an MSA done without spending thousands of dollars. I would be happy to pay for this. You should charge me something!

Guys congrats, will absolutely use this. As you grow, it would be great if you could also handle the more complicated aspects of priced-equity rounds. In the meanwhile, I think a lot of people would benefit from the advisory agreement and the vesting agreement for employees.

Thank you for the feedback. Advisory and vesting agreements are already on our road map. We hope to launch them after Demo Day.

An interesting idea. In my experience it’s investors, not founders, who are often the source of complexity in startup agreements. I’ve found that angel investors or investors without a huge amount of experience with common practice in the YC/SV world struggle with concepts like SAFEs and convertible notes — even if they’re otherwise sophisticated investors. And those types of investors are often the only ones ready to bet money on very early stage startups.

All that’s to say: don’t neglect the educational aspect of what you’re selling. Make it easy for founders to explain how your documents works, and make it easy for investors to trust the documents you’ve prepared.

This is a great feedback! I have never considered this aspect before. I think it makes sense to start some kind of blog on the website to explain legal matters in plain words, which startups can share with investors.

Another point to this is that we focus mainly on contracts, which startups use in their operational activity. I think this part is underserved most severely.

We have SAFE, because it is commonly requested by founders, but I think that Clerky does better job on corporate for now, since they have Board Consent+SAFE+signing+storage.

I would be significantly interested in something to help explain legal terms as someone with little experience with business, finance, or law. I'm interested to see how this turns out!

Thanks! We will work on that and will keep you posted.

This is quite great! I used other free services for quick privacy policies before and they were quite bad.

I would love to see a Terms and Conditions template alongside the Privacy Policy one.

Working on it. Hope to release it later this week.

Is this just for U.S.?

The documents are governed by US law, so they are useful, if you have a US company or some clients in the US. At the same time, documents, like Privacy Policy are pretty international, so if you are building a SaaS business or an app, you can definitely rely on them.

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?

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.

We don’t have a US company. But yes, we are selling to US customers.

I was looking for a similar service few months ago. The startup world needs this. Will be using you guys soon

Thank you!

Bookmarking for future use, definitely a much needed service for many startups.

Thank you! We appreciate it.

Will there be documents in Spanish or other languages soon?

We are planning this, but for now we focus in English.

Works good and well polished site. Bookmarked.

Thank you! We appreciate it.

i thought yc funded something like this back in 2011/12 called clerky.

It is true. Clerky operates in the same space, but currently they use different model (pay per document, essentially). We take a different approach and offer legal documents for free, but want to use this to become the first point of contact for startup legal work. We will monetize by offering tailor-made automation of contract workflow and follow-up legal advice on operational legal matters (like a virtual general counsel for startups).

Guys, I love this!

Thank you so much! Feel free to reach out to me anytime at yz@axdraft.com if there is something you want us to improve.

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