How a two-person SaaS team kept paperwork from blocking a fundraise

The problem

A pre-seed B2B SaaS team (two technical co-founders) was raising their first institutional round. Most prospective investors did not need an NDA, but a handful — a corporate venture arm, a strategic operator-LP, two angel investors with adjacent portfolio companies — did. Separately, the team was finalizing three advisor agreements with industry experts who would receive small option grants. All of it was happening alongside running pitch meetings six days a week.

What they tried before

The founders had a startup-friendly law firm on a deferred-fee arrangement, but every redline cycle ate two business days. During an active pitch week, two days is two missed meetings. The team tried using a friend-of-friend founder's old NDA template, but it had been lightly customized for that founder's deal, contained the wrong governing law, and embarrassed them when a sharp-eyed investor pointed it out.

What changed with Contract.DIY

• 01

  Used the Mutual NDA template for any investor who requested confidentiality before seeing the data room — typed the investor name, hit generate, sent for signature in under five minutes.

• 02

  Used the Advisor Agreement template for three formal advisor relationships, with vesting schedule (4-year vest, 1-year cliff), scope of involvement, and a clean termination clause.

• 03

  Used the Independent Contractor Agreement when bringing on a part-time designer, with IP assignment language and California-appropriate worker-classification carve-outs.

• 04

  Kept their startup-friendly law firm engaged for the priced-round documents (SAFE / SAFE-MFN, the term sheet, the financing agreement). Contract.DIY handled everything upstream of that.

The outcome

During the most intense fundraising week, the team sent 11 NDAs and got 9 of them back signed within the same business day. Total time the founders spent on contract paperwork that week: under 90 minutes. The round closed on the founders' originally projected timeline.

The team uses Contract.DIY for the high-volume, low-stakes-per-document agreements that recur across the fundraising and early-hiring lifecycle. They use their law firm for the documents where bespoke legal craft actually moves the needle on the company's outcome.