Is it crazy to want to tackle the Agreement Management problem?
Hi everyone,
I am currently working on a product and I am trying to do a sanity check by re-checking the premise of the whole product idea. I am hoping to seek the thoughts and opinions of the community here to validate the business premise itself and if applicable, how to pull it off with a higher chance of success.
I'm new to Indiehackers so not sure if there'll be any responses to it but what the heck - I'm just going to try it anyway. :)
Story Time: I enter legal agreements with people here and there - both for business and personal reasons (e.g. rental extensions, NDAs, Buyers Agreement, freelancer Statement of work etc..). There was a memorable case where a freelancer screwed me over by demanding for a payment first before delivering the product, and then NOT acting as promised despite receiving the payment in full. I had to bring this guy to court to seek redress and justice. Despite getting the desired result, the whole episode of trying to build the case from tracing paper work / emails / texts was exhausting and emotionally draining. I felt the 'victory' was empty and objectively - it didn't achieve much besides the satisfaction of bringing a cheater to justice. The "protection" afforded by the Agreement felt like no "protection" at all - especially if you account for the legal costs, time investment, and how emotionally draining the whole episode was. Objectively, it would have been cheaper and less stressful to let the whole thing go. I was wondering how many people had decided to just let things like that slide, and let dishonest people get away with things so easily.
Fast Forward to today: It still bugs me after all these years, I haven't seen something to address this problem convincingly yet. Dishonest people are still getting away with it. I really want to do something about it and build a business out of it.
Right now, I'm developing a mobile app that helps people set up blockchain-based Agreements / Contracts. The mobile app will have template agreements for common or standard Contracts (e.g. signing a rental lease in a particular Country), or Users can customise and co-draft a unique one with their Counterparties if they so prefer.
I know I am not the first person looking to tackle this problem this way, and there are startups out there trying to tackle this in different ways. However, most put their tech as centre piece (e.g. blockchain / smart contracts this & that), and sadly, most of them are veiled as a method to justify using their cryptocurrencies. As far as I know, none of them are mainstream yet.
Just one of them many theories on why using digital tech to establish Agreements / Contracts are not widely adopted yet (at least in Asia) and not yet widely adopted but I may be wrong. I would love to hear from you, especially if you have had experiences in the digital Contracts & Agreements management space, either as a would-be Customer or as someone working on it.
So, what do you think? Am I crazy to want to solve this problem and maybe being too petty about the past issue? Or perhaps you are actively looking for solutions for managing Agreements/Contracts? If so, did you find a product that you are happy using? Or you tried a couple and concluded they are crap, and wished there was something else?
Anyway, love to hear any thoughts around these things. Also, this is my first post and not sure what's going to happen, but heck it - I'm going to put this out there just to see what happens.
Thanks for reading this! :)
You learned an important lesson about the legal system - justice isn't cheap, either financially or emotionally. Legal action is always the protection of last resort. Unless you have absolutely no choice, you should always be thinking two or three steps ahead and building in some kind of practical protections - not hypothetical "legal" protections that are just words on a piece of paper.
In this particular case, you don't need a blockchain contract service (I actually do think there is a potential use-case worth exploring, but it's definitely not this). It wouldn't have helped.
In this instance, you needed an escrow service, or the business nouse to say "NO" to a freelancer that wanted 100% upfront. If you want to build something useful, build the escrow service (though keep in mind you'd probably be up against stiff competition).
Oh yeah, escrow is definitely in it. The blockchain move is more of a matter of convenience really (for an MVP anyways) because I have direct experience in it. I reckon it would be easier to leverage on what I've worked on with smart contracts than to come up with a native non-blockchain one from zero. I don't have plans to market the blockchain aspect to prospective Users for sure.
I like the 'practical' angle you highlighted there, and to move away the legal semantics. I think it's a really good idea to explore product features that extends into establishing Preventive risk management stuff rather than providing reactionary "legal" ones which the current legal system seems to hinge on. Thanks for the advice @nickfisher.
Your solution don't solve the problem what has been highlighted in your story.
However Aggrement Management Solutions is a required tool for many companies. They are solutions like DocuSign, SignNow, PandaDoc, OneSign which helps people to get into aggrement and sign at the end of the document.
Even Adobe has a product in this category. It's more like a addon service to their Adobe Reader.
Now that said, apart from block chain technology ( which most of the business users don't understand ) how is your solution different ?
If you just want to enter the market and thinking is there a space for yet another product then YES.. there is. I don't see this space is too much crowded like other category.
Hey thanks for your thoughtful reply, @sachingk!
I have used some of those solutions you mentioned when working for a large company. A lot of them are quite corporate-y and features-rich. What is a partial mystery to me though is despite how comprehensive and well-marketed these big name products are, I still don't find many small businesses, freelancers, shop owners using them here. I'm aiming to figure out why.
It tells me that there are underserved people still conducting business either through formal legal services or none at all. My current hypothesis is that there is an "in-between" gap for a product that is perhaps something cheaper and less formal, easy to jump into an Agreement without as much fuss, and is still recognised legally. UX will be core I'd imagine.
I took away something good from your reply: I recognise that my product is not going to be snowflake unique and it doesn't have to be. I think that means the product has to do it much better, especially for people not using DocuSign and the likes.
The agreement process comes into picture with only big companies ( most of the time) . They are doing it not because they can legally fight back one day if something goes wrong. They are doing it because of 2 reason
In case of small business and freelancer both of the above 2 reason don't exists. Even in the small organization most of the contracts / agreements are finalized by founders of the organization. They generally don't find need to put it as a legal document.
If you position your product for this customer segment, then I am not sure if your product be will be in "must have" or "good to have" category for this segment of customers.
Interesting. The 2 reasons you mentioned that doesn't apply to small business owners & freelancers- surely the default business decision is wanting to be protected from dishonest acts? I reckon it'll be reasonable to assume that nobody wants to cheated on. But something(s) stopped these small business owners from moving it into some form of structured agreement (if at all). Trying to figure what this is.
Also you mentioned founders of orgs have agreements finalised but don't find the need to establish them as legal documents. Same thing - something stopped them from moving it to the next level of moving from Google Docs to structured Agreements.
If someone has first-hand insights to this, would highly appreciate it! :)
Even I am interested to know more on this.
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That's super true, it won't change the fact that he's going to do what he planned out to do all along.
That said, it changes the way I would have done things on my end though.
1.BEFORE Agreement:: Assuming sustained usage of Users using the product, I would have information from metrics related to how "honest" the User had been in his past agreements through past actions (not ratings by other people). Or that he's totally new and I need to be more wary in accepting looser terms (e.g. I would have insisted that I'd only transfer the payment AFTER he transfers the product and its IP over as a hard trigger clause). It'll raise a red flag if he's not going to budge on that.
DURING Agreement:: The mobile app would have a documentation feature to record progress/text/photos along the way which (may or may not) nudge him into fulfilling his end of the deal when it's obvious he's not going to do as promised towards the deadline.
AFTER Deadline:: I could have just used the app's documented digital trail from #2 as evidences in the small claims court including what he said, rather than spending 1 -2 weeks of filing the papers / emails / texts.