We have built Axdraft, because we believe that sometimes founders don’t need 20-page ironclad contract, 2 weeks of negotiations and detailed explanation of all risks. On early stages you just want to have a good, balanced agreement fast to move the deal forward while it's hot. The biggest difficulty here is that lawyers push us to perceive contracts as unique and, therefore, not possible to automate. Usually, by saying unique, they mean that there are 20-50 possible variations of a clause in the contract.
We are a team of brothers, who combine legal and tech expertise, Yuriy was a lawyer for almost 8 years at one of top law firms in Europe and when he started noticing that even the most complex legal transactions have many patterns, he reached out to his brother Oleg, who at that time was Senior Software Engineer at Booking.com in Amsterdam.
We teamed up to try to figure out and automate most common variations and allow any young startup, as ourselves to draft a document, which they need now. We spoke to about 100 founders and came up with a list of top-6 contracts startups use, including: (1) NDA; (2) Pilot agreement; (3) Services agreement; (4) SaaS agreement; (5) SAFE; and (6) Employee onboarding. We are already working on Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Founders Agreement and LoI, which are top-4 documents requested by users. We will be more than happy to add other documents upon your request.
Our main differences compared to Clerky, LegalZoom, RocketLawyer and similar solutions are:
1. we focus on startups, which makes the content more tailored; 2. we offer documents for free, because I see little value in the legal document itself. The main value of a lawyer, in our view, is in counseling, sharing the liability and providing you assurances; 3. we offer plain English description of the implications for each choice you are offered when drafting a document; 4. to use Axdraft you don’t have to register, because we want to create flawless and super-fast experience for founders to create legal documents; 5. we are happy to customize documents of registered users with their logos, company details and some custom language upon request.
We intend to monetize Axdraft by giving an option for startups to submit any document drafted with Axdraft or a document they received from third party for approval or review by a lawyer for a small fixed fee, which would still be much more affordable than engaging a law firm.
Currently, we offer founder to founder review, which is not a legal review at all, but more a business advice from a fellow founder, who is eager to share his experience with similar contracts.
We estimate the market for this product to be less than 1 bln USD at the moment, but we expect it to grow as the number of startups founded each year increases and as we expand into a larger 7 bln USD market of small businesses (under 20 employees) in the US.
We are really excited to hear your feedback about Axdraft. Please try it out at https://business.axdraft.com (registration is not required) and let us know what you think.
by Andrey
Azimov