InkSafe launched as a single-feature product.
Paste a contract. Get a risk report. See the red flags before you sign.
That was it. Clean, focused, useful. I was happy with it.
Then I started paying attention to what people were actually saying.
The feedback I kept ignoring
Every few days someone would try InkSafe and leave a comment, send an email, or post something that followed the same pattern:
"This is great — but what do I do when I need to send a contract, not receive one?"
"Can it generate a contract for me?"
"I don't have a contract yet — I need to write one first."
I ignored it at first. Single-feature products are easier to build, easier to explain, and easier to market. I didn't want to lose focus.
But the feedback kept coming. And eventually I stopped ignoring it and started actually thinking about it.
The realisation
The scanner solves one half of the contract problem.
Someone sends you a bad contract — InkSafe helps you understand it and negotiate better terms. That's genuinely useful.
But a huge portion of people who need help with contracts aren't receiving them. They're sending them. They're the ones who need to write the contract, set the payment terms, include the right clauses, and send it to a client before the project starts.
They don't have a lawyer. They don't have a template that's actually good. They have a Google Doc they copied from someone else three years ago that's missing half the clauses that would actually protect them.
That's the other half of the problem. And I wasn't solving it.
Why I almost didn't build it
Contract generation is a harder problem than contract scanning.
Scanning is relatively forgiving — the AI reads a document and produces analysis. If one clause gets misread the report is slightly less accurate but the user isn't harmed.
Generation is different. If the AI produces a bad contract and someone signs it and sends it to a client, real consequences follow. Missing a kill fee clause costs someone real money. A badly worded IP transfer creates a real legal dispute.
The quality bar is higher. The responsibility is higher. And I'm not a lawyer.
I spent a while sitting with that concern. Then I looked at what already exists — Bonsai, AND.CO, HelloSign's templates, dozens of others — and realised they all do this already, all with the same AI disclaimer, all without being law firms.
The disclaimer exists for a reason. Use it, mean it, and build something that's genuinely good.
What I actually built
The Contract Writer is a 7-step guided form inside the dashboard:
Contract type — 10+ options from web development to photography to consulting
Your details
Client details
Project scope and deliverables
Payment terms and structure
Protection clauses — individual toggles with plain English explanations
Review and generate
The generation itself runs through Gemini with a system prompt I spent a lot of time on. The instruction is to write as a senior contract attorney — formal legal language, defined terms used consistently, "shall" for obligations, "may" for permissions, dollar amounts written as both numerals and words, no placeholder text anywhere.
The results are genuinely good. A consulting agreement for an $18,000 engagement came back with proper WHEREAS recitals, a 3-stage payment breakdown calculated to the dollar, a 10-day cure period on breach, and weekly advisory calls scheduled for every Tuesday at 10:00 AM GMT — a detail the AI inferred from the project inputs.
The feature that ties it together
After generating a contract you can hit Scan This Contract and immediately feed it into the scanner.
That loop — write a contract, then check it for risks and missing protections before sending it to a client — is something no other contract tool does. It took about an hour to build once everything else was in place. It might be the most valuable thing in the product.
What the pivot meant for positioning
InkSafe was a contract scanner for freelancers.
InkSafe is now an AI contract platform for anyone who signs or sends contracts.
That's a bigger market. It's also a more defensible product — a platform is harder to replicate than a single feature, and the two features reinforce each other in a way that makes the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts.
The pricing reflects it too. Contract Writer is a Pro and Agency feature — it gives the higher tiers a genuinely distinct value proposition rather than just "more scans per month."
What I'd do differently
I'd have built both features at launch.
The scanner alone was always going to be a partial solution. The feedback made that obvious within the first week. If I'd launched with both I'd have had a stronger product hunt listing, a cleaner positioning story, and a more compelling reason for people to upgrade beyond the free tier.
The lesson isn't "build more before launching" — it's "think harder about what the complete version of the problem looks like before you ship the first version."
Where it is now
InkSafe 2.0 is live at inksafe.ai with both features. Free contract scan on the homepage, no signup needed. Contract Writer is on Professional and Agency plans with a 7-day free trial.
Still early. Still building. Still figuring out what the next right thing to add is.
If you've built something similar or have thoughts on the pivot — drop a comment. Always good to hear from other builders.
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