Teaching calculus to a chicken

Trying to build a contract database on top of PDF and Word is like trying to teach calculus to a chicken.

PDF and Word were invented more than 30 years ago for a completely different world. That was a time when document formats were designed to look like paper and be printed onto paper. You can still see it today. They were designed for humans to create and for humans to read.

These days we do everything on a screen, digitally. In order for something to be human-friendly, it first needs to be machine-friendly. And this is what makes PDF and Word so disastrously difficult and messy to build systems on top of. Many companies still do it because of how popular those formats are, but you can only get so far before you hit the limit of what can be done.

For what they’re designed to do, PDF and Word are fantastic. But they are incompatible with building a rock-solid, future-proof contract database. From day one, we realised that the key was to transform your documents into something more programmable and then build our product on top of those new Smart Documents.

What does that mean for you? Much better accuracy, infinitely easier to use, more powerful automations, incredible search, less of your money going towards wasteful development trying to teach calculus to chickens.