Roger Wants Signing a Contract to Feel Like Signing Up for an App

Every founder has a version of the same ghost story. The pitch went well. The demo landed. Someone on the other side said yes. And then the contract - a PDF, an attachment, a login nobody remembers - sat in an inbox until the enthusiasm cooled and the deal quietly died. Roger, a New York company that went through Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, was built on the theory that this is not a paperwork problem. It is a product problem, and it happens at the exact moment a business is trying to say "done."

Roger makes electronic signature software. That sentence undersells it and also, usefully, explains it. The company's pitch is that signing a contract should feel less like wrestling a document and more like signing up for an app: open a link, tap through on your phone, and finish in the time it takes to wait for coffee. The tagline the founders chose - "the best way to sign contracts since handshakes" - is a joke that also happens to be the entire strategy.

The problemWhere deals actually leak

Sales teams obsess over the top of the funnel: leads, demos, pipeline. Roger's insight is that a surprising amount of revenue never makes it out the bottom, and the culprit is the signing step itself. Existing tools were built for enterprise legal departments, not for a customer trying to sign on a train. The friction is invisible on a dashboard and expensive in reality.

The last-mile drop-off

Interested prospect — 100%

Verbal yes — strong intent

Contract sent — waiting on signature

Signed on time — where the old flow stalls

The claim from Roger's own customers is blunt about the stakes. "We've gone from losing people at the contract stage to 100% signed within minutes," one founder is quoted as saying on the company's site. Whether or not the number holds for every team, the framing is the point: the contract is where trust either gets written down or gets lost.

The productTemplates, alerts, and a place to find it all later

The signing experience is the front door, but Roger has quietly built out the rooms behind it. Reusable templates let a team update and send an agreement in seconds rather than rebuilding it each time. Approval workflows route a document to the right people before it goes out. Smart alerts and reminders chase down deadlines and flag renewals before they lapse - the kind of thing that gets forgotten until an auto-renew clause surprises someone. And every signed contract lands in a centralized, searchable repository with tagging, so the agreement you signed eight months ago is not lost in a folder called "final_v3_FINAL."

Underneath, the signatures are legally binding, with multi-signer support and audit trails for the record. There are API integrations for teams that want signing embedded in their own workflows. It adds up to a lightweight version of what the industry calls contract lifecycle management - without the enterprise contract that usually comes attached.

The business modelPay for what you sign, not who logs in

Pricing is where Roger tips its hand. Instead of the per-seat subscription that defines most business software, Roger charges by the signed contract. The first five are free, the next batch runs a few dollars each, and the rate drops as volume climbs. Templates and user seats are unlimited at every level. Enterprise plans exist for teams that want white-glove support and deeper integrations.

How Roger prices (pay-as-you-go)

0–5 contractsFree forever

6–20 contracts$4 / signed contract

20+ contracts$3 / signed contract

EnterpriseCustom · APIs · support

This is a strategy dressed as a discount. Seat pricing punishes a growing team for adding people. Usage pricing ties the bill to the thing the customer actually values - a closed deal - and lowers the barrier for a small business to try the tool without a procurement conversation. It also aligns Roger's incentives with its users: the company only really wins when its customers are signing more.

The competitionUnbundling DocuSign, one narrow slice at a time

eSignature is not an empty field. DocuSign is the household name; Dropbox Sign, PandaDoc, and Adobe Acrobat Sign all compete, and Ironclad sits above them for heavyweight contract lifecycle work. Roger is not trying to out-feature any of them. Its wager is that incumbents optimized for large legal teams left a gap for the smaller companies who just want to send something clean and get it back signed, fast, from a phone.

Approach	Typical pricing	Built for
Roger	Per signed contract	Startups & SMBs, mobile-first
Legacy eSignature	Per seat / annual	Enterprise legal teams
Full CLM suites	Enterprise contracts	Large, process-heavy orgs

Reviewers on sites like Capterra tend to land on the same notes: the interface is clean and modern, mobile signing is quick, and setup is friendly for people who are not especially technical. That last point matters. A tool that only power users can drive is a tool that stalls at the contract stage all over again.

The customers Roger describes are not general counsels. They are heads of sales who want a deal signed before a competitor calls back, HR leads sending an offer letter to a candidate who has three other options, finance teams collecting vendor forms, and founders who are, for now, all of those roles at once. Those users share a trait: they are not shopping for a contract platform. They are trying to finish something. Roger's job is to be in and out of their day as fast as possible, which is an unusual goal for software that would normally want more of your attention, not less.

The peopleAn operator's-eye view of paperwork

Roger was founded around 2020 by Michael Wang, who serves as CEO, alongside co-founders Merry Sui Yuan and Garrett Wu, the company's CTO. Wang's background runs through capital markets, and by several accounts he has also been involved with a large group of restaurants - a business defined by a steady grind of vendor forms, lease renewals, and compliance documents. It is the kind of resume that explains a product aimed squarely at the unglamorous middle of running a company. The team came through Y Combinator's W21 batch under partner Brad Flora and has stayed small.

That smallness is part of the story. A four-person company competing with a public one cannot win on surface area. It can win on being the obvious choice for a specific person - the founder, the head of sales, the office manager - who needs a signature back today and does not want to think about it. Constraint has a way of clarifying a product. When you cannot build everything, you have to be right about the one thing you build, and Roger's one thing is the signing experience itself.

It also shapes how the company grows. Enterprise sales tools tend to spread through top-down deals negotiated by procurement. Roger's usage-based pricing and instant setup point the other way: a single person tries it on a real contract, it works, and it spreads sideways to the next team that watches a deal close cleanly. That bottom-up path is slower to headline but harder for an incumbent to dislodge, because it is rooted in a habit rather than a contract renewal.

The takeawayWhy the boring last click matters

There is a lesson in Roger that travels beyond eSignature: the last step of a process is often the most neglected and the most valuable. Companies pour effort into acquiring interest and comparatively little into the moment that interest becomes a commitment. Roger picked that moment and built a whole product around it. Ten years from now the winning eSignature tool may or may not be Roger. But the idea that the signature is a growth surface, not a formality, is one plenty of businesses could borrow tomorrow.

For a startup, an HR lead onboarding a hire, or a small vendor closing its next order, the pitch is refreshingly modest. Send the thing. Get it signed. Find it again later. Roger's ambition is not to reinvent the contract. It is to make the part where you sign it disappear.