Ever wonder how companies manage contracts? If not, don’t feel bad. Sometimes the most inconspicuous industries are actually some of the most interesting and offer some of the best workplaces for devs.
Contractbook was founded with the ambition of creating “a contract management platform where small and medium-sized businesses could manage their contracts in the easiest possible way without having to pay for a legal professional or invest millions in a locally-stored program that requires you to hire a hoard of bald IT-support guys in baby blue shirts reciting from a Bible-sized user manual just to figure out the basics”. They’ve recently announced a $30M Series B, 4 months after having raised a $9.4M in Series A funding. They’re currently looking to expand their tech team, which is why we’ve “sat down” with them so you can get to know the company better.
In one paragraph, can you explain the company’s product or service?
Contractbook is a software company that enables small and medium-sized businesses to manage the entire lifecycle of their contracts in an automated end-to-end flow. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Gradient Ventures, and Tiger Global, Contractbook was founded in Copenhagen in 2017 and serves over 150.000 users in more than 75 countries, facilitating their work with data-driven document automation.
Contractbook is a cloud based contract management software which takes care of the whole contract lifecycle. This includes contract creation with the help of templates, contract collaboration and drafting, as well as offering a host of different ways for all parties involved to sign the contract. Contractbook’s capabilities don’t end there, they also offer fully secured cloud storage of all contracts via cloud hosting which is in compliance with GDPR rules and regulations, ensuring all customer data is stored securely and safely.
What impact/added value does your product or service have on customers?
Contractbook makes everyone feel like a legal professional by making it easy to manage the whole lifecycle of contracts — no need to print contracts anymore. Here are some of our customers’ awesome testimonials: https://contractbook.com/customers.
In a small sentence, can you describe your industry/sector?
Contractbook is entering the smart contracting space, who’s biggest players currently are DocuSign and PandaDoc. Contractbook’s aim is to go after the SMB market in order to help even the youngest company win and make contracting headaches a thing of the past.
At what rate per year is your team growing?
Our team grew from around 30 people to over 100 in little more than a year. Our future growth plans depend of course on performance, but as we speak, we won’t grow more than by 20–30 additional people. Needless to say, our plan is to keep the team relatively small, and focus on optimizing processes rather than throwing more hands and minds at the problems.
Do you promote people inside the company?
Short answer is that we are always looking to fill our vacancies with the best people, however the way we do it at Contractbook is that we will always look within first, before making our vacancies public. We are a people-first company and understand that creating the best solution within the smart contracting space requires the best people working on said solution.
Speaking of promoting people as in helping them grow — this happens continuously at Contractbook, being a research-heavy and innovative company. Not only are you allowed, but also encouraged to grow in your areas of expertise, as well as discover how other departments work, or even participate in their projects.
If yes, can you describe why it’s important to promote/ move people internally?
In order to keep developing our talent and promoting a culture of cross-functional collaboration and an asynchronous working environment, employees should be encouraged to explore different avenues and be proactive. This has a two-way benefit: Contractbook having the best people develop to even better people, as well as encouraging responsibility and proactivity from the employees’ side, which positively impacts not only their career but may also spill over into their personal lives.
What is your team’s general vibe?
A friendly, asynchronous work environment which encourages responsibility and problem-solving. Ways which teams work vary as to what part of the company the team is in. We work in agile spirit, without falling into pitfalls of scrum fanaticism — each team works a little bit differently, incorporating methods and practices that fits their scope and workflow best.
What is the thing most employees like about your company?
Friendly, asynchronous work environment which allows everyone at Contractbook to structure the work day with maximum efficiency and flexibility. This being said, there definitely is structure to the work day as each team tries to have a daily and perhaps a weekly retrospective. Contractbook also tries to do big team meetups at least once a year in order to promote a healthy work-life balance and get to know everyone.
How do you go about promotions and career progression?
We will always look within our organization first before taking a job listing public. This is because we want to reward our employees for staying with Contractbook and continue helping us kill the PDF! It also helps foster and promote self-learning and self-responsibility, which is at the core of how we work at Contractbook.
What would the first week of a Developer at Contractbook be like?
Every dev goes through the onboarding process and checklist at their own pace (security, intro to the codebase, tools…), but we encourage developers to contribute to the codebase as soon as possible, through small starter tasks. It’s not uncommon to have developers push their first contributions to production in the first week. On top of that, designated buddies help newcomers to get up-to-speed both with work, as well as with social and cultural aspects.
How can a Developer be successful at Contractbook?
We are looking for proactive, self-driven, self-managing folks who enjoy working in teams. The cross-functional nature of our teams means that developers can do more than just programming tasks if they want to (collaboration with designers, product managers, taking part in product discovery, honing QA and testing skills or communication or security or devops…).
If you want to be part of Contractbook’s amazing team, keep an eye out for this blog post because we’ll soon add all their open job positions here!
You can also check out this testimonial from Vlado, their backend developer gone fullstack, if you want insider info on what it’s like to work in Contractbook as a dev.
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