Client SolutionsCustom Apps & SolutionsAutomations

Replaced their e-signature service with one they own, and gave it the thing SignWell could not do

They were paying SignWell per signature to send the same referral agreements to the same agents, month after month. I built the replacement. The agreement comes from their own Google Docs, is signed on their own page, is filed as a PDF in their own Drive, and their CRM is told the moment it is done. Then the part no e-signature service can do at any price: an agent who refers repeatedly signs one standing agreement, and every deal after that produces a finished contract automatically, without waiting on anyone to sign.

Open the live demo

Opens in a new tab. Click through it like a visitor would, nothing is a screenshot.

What a signer gets: the agreement on the left, the signing panel on the right, on the brokerage's own domain rather than a third party's. Invented brokerages and an invented deal throughout

The problem

Every referral agreement went out through an e-signature service that charged by the signature, and the bill grew with the business rather than with the value of the signing. Worse, most of the agreements were not new relationships. The same agents took referrals over and over, and each one meant another set of links, another round of chasing, and another fee to sign a document that said what the last one said. The two people who appear on every single agreement, the referring agent and his managing broker, were signing their own name several times a week as a formality. And because the contracts lived inside somebody else's product, the finished files, the templates and the record of who signed what were all somewhere the business did not control.

The office console, behind a passcode. Every agreement with its state, counted by status, searchable on the deal reference or the agent or the lead, and cancellable in bulk with a reason. Cancel is only offered where it would still work

Typing a name renders it in four script styles to choose from. Drawing and uploading a photo are the other two options, because a signer on a phone in a car park will not draw a neat signature

Signed. Nothing is assembled at this point: the system is holding the signature and waiting for the rest, and only builds the contract once the last person is in

What shipped

SignWell replaced outright, and the per-signature bill with it, by a system running on a $5 a month plan with the database on a free tier
The capability no e-signature service sells: repeat agents sign one standing agreement, and their later deals produce a finished PDF with no link and no waiting
The two people on every agreement stopped signing their own name several times a week, because their signatures are placed automatically
A standing agreement expires unless both the agent and their broker confirm it every ninety days, so nothing signs itself indefinitely
Templates, signed PDFs and the record of who signed what all sit in the client's own Google Drive and their own Cloudflare account
An office console for finding, cancelling and archiving agreements, so a wrong contract is a thirty second fix by the person who spotted it rather than a message to me
294 tests, and the whole thing handed over to the client's GitHub organisation with a deploy runbook and an in-app manual