agree.com raises seed round with 20,000 users in weeks, targets DocuSign with free e-signature plus payments

co-founder of agree. com. Great. And what is agree. com? It's a better docysine. Best part is it's totally free. Free e signature for everyone. But what makes it really special is we've combined invoicing and payment. At the end of most signatures, somebody has to pay someone. We just brought it all together. Okay.

When I hear When I hear free, I I I think I am I the product? What's going on? Are you selling my documents to foreign countries or something? We So, we operate like a fintech, right? We monetize the payments on the payment side. Yep. So, operates a lot like Stripe. Sure.

I can't I can't tell you how many times I've I feel like it's mostly with home services where I'm paying like for pest control and I'm like signing I'm I'm uh you know I'm like signing something and then I'm like okay like I'm ready you know again I'm ready to pay and then it's like oh well like zel you know zel me or whatever.

I'm just like really like this should be this should be built into one. What um I'm curious what uh what markets have you guys really focused on?

Uh initially just we're at Figma designers, agencies, freelancers, solarreneurs are obvious ones, but the big B2B SAS sales especially in tech startups, they're just moving so fast.

The growth trajectory is there and then I think you've pointed out something that's really interesting where if I say you have net 45 to pay, I think most of us think, oh, I'll pay on the 46 day. I'll stretch it out as long as I can. But usually we want what's on the other side of that transaction so bad.

We want to pay quicker. We I want my pest control done. I want my roof fixed. I want my contractor started. I want my sock 2 compliance quicker. So like delaying the invoice just doesn't make any sense, right? I want to go from execution of agreement. I want to pay quickly. Yeah. Don't stop that.

That's such a manual process right now. Everyone takes executed agreement, they send it over to finance. Somebody in finance manually creates an invoice, manually sends it over. It's just It's kind of weird in 2025. Yeah. Uh I got to ask, how did you get the domain? Yeah. So, uh it was always agree.

We knew that that was that was the word. Um but one day we're pitching and my co-founder says to me at the end of the pitch, the investor um missed. He said agree. com. It's like, oh, that that could be a problem. Got a nice ring to it. He's like, "Hey, uh did you ever go to agree. com?

" I said, "No, what if it's a porn site? " So, we go and it's clear that it hasn't had love in a number of years, but I I see I know there's a privacy policy and a privacy policy is going to be a legal entity. I track it down. I find the owner of that legal entity.

And then it was four months of uh pestering and wooing and because he's a high net worth individual. He didn't he didn't need to let it go for the money that we paid. Did he make you give you some equity? No. No, we did all cash. But, uh we did I did have to eventually sell him on the vision of the dream.

Be a part of the story. Yeah. like it'll be used for good. And I will never not do one of these interviews where that question won't come up. He will be like, "Yeah, I was at the beginning of Probably early. com guy, I imagine, just sat on a bunch of big fantastic.

" He he picked it up a few years ago for like 75k at an auction. Cool. Yeah. Wow. Uh what's the go to market been like? I imagine that there's some sort of like uh almost like viral loop where somebody sends something and then they get a chance to sign up and then you kind of grow from there.

Is there like a positive viral coefficient with this or Oh yeah. Yeah. And it's one where I pitched it just like that in the preede. Didn't realize how fast it would kick in and like how substantial that would be to us. So we launched the product September 4th. In a month there was a thousand users. Wow. Hey, not bad.

Yeah. 30 days later 10,000 users. Okay, that's impressive. And then 7 weeks after that it doubled to 20,000. But when I looked at those users, a third of them they came to us. Their origin story is someone sent them to doc to sign on the platform. they signed like you know let me give this thing a shot.

So that's kicked in that's been awesome. So we'll always talk about our customer but then our customers customer vitally important to us. Um and then now yeah the go to markets just uh we see the same thing on the invoicing side. So just more the the customer base itself is the biggest distribution engine.

How big is the company? I imagine it's like several thousand. Are you in tens of thousands of yet in terms of just employees? to run one of these businesses. Typically, it's uh five figures of employees typically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone likes to remind that Docystein 7,000. That's how many it is. I I I chat GPTed.

It would take four Titanics to fit all the employees of Docuign. Uh but we're we're a team of eight and I think this is what you're well,000 doing the impossible. the impossible docuign exact look at you guys when they're like we don't know how they do it. We don't know how they That's right. That's right.

Um payments too. We I mean we need to double Yeah. Everyone always wonders what is what are they all doing over there? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you actually do you actually have a um I'm curious if you have a read.

I I was always surprised that after you know Twitter was able to lay off you know such a huge amount of the workforce I was surprised that didn't inspire other similarly drastic uh cuts.

Have you been are you surprised in general at some of these more scaled enterprise companies that that they that they haven't tried taking a leaner approach yet?

I think the one of the secrets behind some of the B2B SAS in Silicon Valley is that there are an enormous amount of humans that power what we think is technology. And there's some companies where you can tell between like December 21st and January 1st the servers have gone down or something's not working. Oh, no.

The humans are gone, right? They're out of the office. This is a service as a software. That's right. That's right.

And so, I think for some of these organizations, um, you need a huge customer service staff, a huge support staff to make it all work because they're they're pushing buttons and pulling levers behind the scenes.

And so, they the tech deck is just so enormous that they they can't scale back even though they know they need to. And I think this is what we're seeing with AI. We know smaller teams can do more. They can do it faster.

Now, how do they start automating their workflows with Aentic AI or whatever tools they might be putting into place? Yeah, that's awesome. So, you so you're here specifically uh pitching designers and studios. Who uh who is the current customer avatar that you're going after at Config.

So, at 8, we got to do everything and anything to build the brand. So, I'm I saw some flyers that were just hanging out stack of them out there. I saw a stack of flyers.

I was like, "Oh, he's doing I've got an official partner coffee cart out front that I push and I make cold brew coffee people, me and my co-founder Will. " Um, but this conference is going on, right? Thousands of people here. Totally. May 6th through 8th at Moscone West.

Turns out Stripe Sessions is right across the street. The same dates within the same block radius. And my ICP is here. Why would I not be here?

So what I do, yeah, I'm here handing out cards, knocking on doors, giving out free coffee, whatever it takes, but just build that brand, get them to know what it is because for us it's an amplification.

The big announcement just went out about our seed round and so now we're doing interviews like this and just want people being like, "Oh, agree is everywhere. What's not everywhere? It's just everywhere that I know you're looking and you're listening and you're reading. " Yeah. Break down the round for us.

How how did it come together? Uh who's in? Yeah. So it was exciting because we we raised That was yesterday. That was yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. So this is perfect timing. We had closed three million preede in March of last year.

We launched in September and then once those viral loops started hitting and there was there was some interesting traction and so we had a number of investors start reaching out to us towards the end of the year expressing interest.

We were going to go to market with a round um either right before the summer, right after the summer. Um but then a few folks asked to preempt just say hey let's just let's just do it now. Yeah. So, we thought, let's formally go to market on January 6th and then it closed in two weeks, which was wild. Yeah.

So, it was beyond our own expectations and then we just made the big announcement yesterday. It's great to get it out. That's great. Um, I'm curious. I'm curious. Was some of the early push back from investors. There's always push back even if people are gen generally bullish.

You're just like, why hasn't anyone done this before or doesn't this already? This feels pretty counterposition against uh against um docysine, right? Because like it would be a massive upending to their business model. No, no, no.

I know it's I know it's highly I know it's highly disruptive, but but uh you know if if you look back somewhere around two years ago, it it felt like a lot of traditional SAS and we were like out of new traditional fintech and SAS ideas.

But the thing that became obvious is if you just you know brought a new approach or a disruptive you know pricing model idea deadly seriously. Exactly. Exactly. So so the biggest push back was this is too obvious. Yeah. Why doesn't this exist right?

So and that it was a great qu because I'm like glad you asked because what I'll always say in the pitch at that point is this is the last time we'll ever actually talk about docysine because this is about payments. This is about pay tax. This is about AR automation.

And it becomes very clear that the second question they shouldn't ask me is like what if docuine did this? Docuine can't become a payments company. The real question I'd have is what happens if Stripe across the street decides they want to do e- signature. Sure. Sure. That would be disruptive.

That's really interesting to me. What if they decided that owning the contract as a source of truth to revenue was really impactful to financial and CFOs. Like that would be really interesting. Well, hopefully they're not listening. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the problem is you still have to be really They have their conference right now and we're live. Yeah, they're busy so they can't be listening. They're watching backstage. We know John and Patrick are on stage. They can't be watching this right now. That's great. Uh, what was your background before this? Yeah.

So, um, longtime entrepreneur, had a had a startup back in 2007, then it got acquired by Twitter in 2012. Oh, cool. Had a few exits, a few other startups in between, but most most pertinent to this one is me and two of the folks that worked with me even at that first company.

We started up a fintech that got acquired by Brex. Oh. And Brex brought us into um build out expense management. Sure.

specifically invoicing bill pay and this is like right before we all meet our friend chat GPT but before the uh GPT3 beta goes out and the best technology we have at the time to scan and parse invoices is called OCR optical character recognition Brex's position was spare no expense use the best technology it's Google it's 87% accurate reliable like it's just not great for financial services it means we still need human in the loop there are human beings pulling levers pushing buttons but that June when we get access to the GP.

The whole world's freaking out. Gen AI, Gen AI. Turns out you put generative AI on top of OCR, it closed that 13% error gap almost instantly. So, we knew that, oh, legal documents, huge because the generative nature of generative AI, right? It's context aware.

So, it can read the document and start to infer and imply things and fill in those gaps. That was huge unlock for us. Yeah. Uh, were you at Twitter postacquisition for a little bit? Yeah, I was at No, no, I was only at Twitter preipo. Okay. And I was only there I did my my year. Your year.

What was it like working there? It was awesome. Uh, but I always talk about it as is equal parts frustrating and fascinating because the site's still going down. They're still fail. Oh, wow. But it was fun for us. It's 140 characters. It's still no photos, no videos.

They they just acquired Tweety 2, so they didn't even have their own apps yet. They just got Tweet Deck and Tweety 2, so they're starting to get their own app. But this was the mantra of let's be mobile first. Yeah. Right. So, we're watching them for the first time figure out what happens. Yeah.

Because that famous photo of when the plane lands in the Hudson, people forget that's a tweet pic. Yeah. But that's not Twitter. That's tweet pick on Twitter. That's a separate Twitter separate service, right? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Very very decentralized back then. Now you can't even link out to anything.

It's completely different. Yeah. Now it's like for everything. Do not put agree. com in in a post. No. It hurts us. It hurts us. Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm sure. I'm sure. Um, are you finding any luck with um like the the world of venture capital and and startups sending safe notes around on a group?

So, this one made it easy on the pitch. Um, I didn't have to explain the pain. All VCs are like, "Yeah, this is a miserable experience. I hate moving money with my bank. " Yep. I I don't like working with DocYsine. Docuine's not a bad company, but people get a visceral reaction.

It's like Microsoft Teams or Jira and nobody likes Docu Sign and so um yeah when we told them that the way you invest in startups it'll be your workflows will be better. It's like oh that's an immediate aha.

Is that a different product on the fintech side because it's a more of like an investment wire than just a payment. It's different in that um to monetize the way just the benchmark against Stripe invoicing and billing. They take 6% blended 4 to 7. Oh yeah. You don't want to take 6% of like a Yeah. VC investment.

The the psychological moment for people is $50,000. If it's a $30,000 SAS charge and you take66, nobody really even notices the millions. Yeah. 50,000. But on our 7. 2 million, I'm not paying anything of that. But there is a place in fintech where people take a 6. Yeah. Because what do I do with the 7. 2?

I don't spend it right away. I put it into a bank and then it go a row bank if I can plug them. But no, it goes They just been so great to us. But um it goes into uh treasury account and I make you know greater than 4% interest on it. Got it. You know what the rose Mercury Brexit take 6%. Right.

So so the agree um act two it's coming out uh this October the agree count by default will be a treasury. Yeah. So we want founders doing their safes on the platform. We want all the money flowing through it and then it would just make sense just to leave it in agree.

Don't don't move it to another bank because I didn't have a treasury. I had to go to row and I had the checking but then I had to create a treasury account on top of it. Interesting. That makes sense. Um, well, our next guest is here miking up. Anything else you want to share with the stream?

Just love having you guys in. Hey, uh, today we always say it's the last day you'll ever pay for Docside. So, there we go. What a I feel like you're going to get a season at some point because I I feel like I can't wait to tweet that C.

There's something weird about startups that like they're very hesitant about even if they are building a direct competitor or something, they're usually pretty hesitant about saying it out loud for a variety of reasons. Just inviting competition. He's bold. He's brave. bold graph. Take all of it. 7,000.

It's When you guys While you guys are in town though, if you happen to hit the blue bottle on uh Second Street, there's a billboard that's going up right as we speak. There we go. All it says is today's the last day you'll ever pay for just one block from HQ. That's putting the heat on. I'm poking the bear.

We're going to see what happens. Thanks for having us. Good luck out there on Congrats on the new round. Thank you. Thank you. Good to meet you. That is bold. Well, hopefully he's uh buying billboards on adquick. com. We are of course sponsored by AdQuick. Of course, we should tell you about all interesting.

I feel like it's the the treasury functionality feel like it makes sense potentially for if you're like an SMB. Yeah. But if if you're a startup that raises through like a docuign like product, are you going to leave money in that corporate treasury? Yeah, you probably want to pay your employees, do all sorts of stuff.

I don't know. Anyways, very bullish on the product overall. Good to meet you. What's happening? You too. Hi. Hi. Uh, you can throw on uh headphones if you want to hear yourself, whatever you want. Are we twins? Yeah, we're brothers. Technology. We're not related, actually. We're not actually related.

You guys look so much alike. Um, it'll be easier. You can you can adjust. Uh,