Two weeks after launching Pactar on IH — what I learned, what I changed, and what I'm building next
Two weeks ago I posted here about Pactar — a contract negotiation and signing tool I built because I kept signing PDFs I half-understood.
The response was better than I expected. 25 comments, real conversations, people sharing their own contract horror stories. A few of you tried the product and gave me honest feedback. Thank you for that.
Here's what happened since.
What the comments taught me
One thread kept coming up, worded different ways by different people:
The counterparty experience is your distribution channel.
I knew this intellectually when I wrote the post. The comments made it concrete. Every contract has two sides. When the other party clicks a Pactar link and sees a contract broken into plain-language sections instead of a wall of PDF legalese — that moment is the product marketing itself.
Brady put it best: "Is it obviously Pactar, or does it just feel like a clean document?"
That question stuck with me. The answer right now is: it's somewhere in between. That's not good enough. The counterparty experience needs to be so clearly better than what they're used to that they immediately want it for themselves. I'm treating this as the most important UX problem in the product right now.
The segment question I couldn't answer two weeks ago
In the original post I asked: who's the right first customer? Freelancers? Agencies? Small business owners?
I've spent the last two weeks thinking about this. My answer has shifted.
Freelancers feel the pain. But they're slow to pay for tools, especially tools they use a few times a month. The math is hard.
Small agencies and SMBs — 5 to 20 person operations without a legal department — feel the same pain and have a very different relationship with business tools. They're used to paying for software. They close more deals. They have more at stake per contract. And they're sending contracts to clients, not just receiving them — which means they control the counterparty experience.
That's who I'm building for now. The product doesn't change. The positioning, the examples, the copy — those are changing.
One competitor worth noting
Yesterday, Legora announced $100M ARR in 18 months — the fastest any enterprise software company has ever hit that milestone. They're backed by Bessemer, serving law firms like White & Case and Linklaters, and just closed a $550M Series D.
This is not my market. Legora sells to legal departments at Blackstone and Barclays. I'm building for the agency owner who doesn't have a lawyer at all.
But it validates something important: the legal AI category is real, it's moving fast, and buyers are willing to pay serious money for products that reduce the friction in legal workflows. The enterprise end of the market is getting crowded. The SMB end is still wide open.
What I shipped
A few things have changed in the product since the post:
The parsing is more reliable. A few early users hit edge cases with unusual PDF formatting. I've made the Claude parsing prompt more resilient to messy real-world documents — better section detection, better handling of contracts that don't follow standard structure.
The counterparty onboarding is cleaner. When someone receives a Pactar review link for the first time, the experience now does a better job of explaining what they're looking at and what they can do. Still room to improve but meaningfully better than two weeks ago.
A contract wizard is in progress. Right now you have to upload or paste an existing contract. A lot of people — especially agencies — want to create a contract from scratch. I'm building a plain-English wizard that walks you through a few questions and generates a complete Service Agreement, SOW, or NDA using AI. No legal templates to hunt for. No blank page to stare at.
What I'm still figuring out
The counterparty flywheel is theoretically the best growth mechanism in the product. But I'm still learning how to make it reliable. Someone receiving a Pactar link for the first time needs to have a great enough experience that they sign up — not just review the document and move on.
If you've been on the receiving end of a Pactar review link, I'd love to know what that experience was like. Did you understand immediately what you were looking at? Did it feel useful or confusing? Did you sign up afterward?
And if you're running a small agency or a small business and deal with contracts regularly — I'd genuinely love to get on a call. Not to pitch you. To understand how contracts actually work in your operation right now.
Pactar is free for your first contract. If you haven't tried it yet: pactar.app
