Back in 2019, Apsis Labs had a problem. We were sending out a few documents a month (SOWs, new MSAs, an NDA or two --- the usual stuff you deal with at a creative agency of any kind), and we kept making mistakes. Most of these mistakes were trivial:

• we left a placeholder johndoe@example.com in as our primary point of contact;
• we left the signatory as Noah Callaway, even though it was me (Wyatt Kirby) sending out the documents;
• we sent out a contract with our previous business address in the header;
• we forgot to update our Holiday week policy in a new MSA.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this really mattered. We signed all those contracts, we didn’t have to go to arbitration or court, no one actually complained when we reduced our hours by 20% for holiday weeks without prior written notice.

But we still wanted to reduce errors and improve handling time, so we migrated our contracts to Google Docs. We standardized language across clients by creating templates, and cut down on version control by using real-time collaborative editing. Things got better, but mistakes continued to creep through. And worse, we were still spending a lot of time and brainpower on correcting these minor mistakes instead of building great software.

While Noah and I were waiting for a flight at SFO, we wrote the first lines of code on a new project that would eventually become Ream. As we sat at the same laptop, getting the application up and running with your classic “Hello World”, we set out a few guiding principles for how we were going to simplify our contract workflow:

• Provide a straightforward method of templating our most frequently written documents: our MSAs, our SOWs, our NDAs.
• Produce consistent, well-designed documents by removing all but the most basic set of formatting choices from the editing interface.
• Deliver an end-to-end best-practices workflow for our small-business negotiations.
• Make placeholders a thing of the past by extracting key terms to a single location that would flow through to every occurrence in the document without double checking.
• Organize our contracts --- both drafted and executed --- by party, giving us a clear and concise way to find up-to-date information about what agreements were active, near renewal, or expired.
• Most importantly (to me, debatable if anyone else cares): always export PDFs with consistent, sane file names.

And that was it. We had our first version of this project running within 2 weeks: at its core it was just a pipeline of ‌Markdown to HTML to PDF, layering some CSS template magic on top. We added the world’s smallest CRM on top and a minimal state machine for tracking the document’s lifecycle, and we set it and largely forgot about it. For 5 years, Ream chugged away in the background, generating and storing every document Apsis sent between 2019 and... well... today.

Why you can use Ream today

After a few years of using and refining Ream, we started to notice stories that echoed our own frustrations: files like ACME contract 1 final SIGNED (1)(1).docx getting lost for days in email threads, awaiting signature and/or review. Frustrations that we didn’t have anymore, because Ream, for all its rough-around-the-edges internal-tool jank, was just the right amount of structure on top of our organization. We’d been blissfully writing code the whole time, keeping our heads above the swirling tide of administrative paperwork that was exhausting a lot of our clients and friends.

So, we decided to really explore whether our homegrown tool could offer value to other small businesses.

We think it can.

Through Ream, we are dedicated to making the needlessly complex process of contract management clear and straightforward for everyone — especially small businesses and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to have a lawyer manage every document, but also can’t afford to miss important details or deadlines.

We're actively onboarding beta users, and you can sign up at https://reamdocs.com. Take a look, sign up for an account, spread the word, give us feedback, and let us help you manage your contracts.