Meet Aboard Sign

A few weeks after the smashing success of TinyLittleOffice, the brainchild of my co-founder, Paul Ford, we’re happy to announce our next incredibly simple Aboard Foundry project: Aboard Sign, the world’s easiest document-signing tool.

Read this in your best made-for-TV ad voice:

Need some people to sign a document digitally? Just do this:

1. Email everyone that should sign it.
2. CC sign@aboard.com
3. Attach the document
4. Hit send

This will fire off a process that will allow everyone to click, review, and sign the document. Once everyone signs, a digital signature is kept on an anonymized public log. If you’d like to confirm that the document in hand is fully executed, you can verify it at any time in your web browser to confirm its authenticity. 

Note what’s not there. You don’t log in. We don’t store the document. Here’s a video to show you how it works.

Why build this? I’m a lawyer by training. Unlike normal people, I love contracts—especially short, crisp contracts in plain English. But I also know that most people find contracts confusing and alien, and that most digital signature services are too complex, filled with countless steps, hidden upsells, and lots of archaic workflows. They’re legal theater, and they charge a lot of money to do some cryptographic math that’s already built into absolutely every modern computer.

This pisses me off every time I have to sign something, and as Aboard’s CEO, I have to sign a lot of things. So I sat down with the team and we worked together to improve the user experience of signing contracts, with a focus on simplicity and security.

Less is more (software)

Early versions had way, way too many features. Sure, you can make anything quickly and easily with AI, but do people really want to use what you’re building? In spite of all those humming data centers, it turns out that making something that people want to use didn’t get any easier. In fact, all this digital stuff we keep pushing out into the world seems to be turning people off. 

That’s because people don’t want more software—they actually want less. The irony is that AI, used wisely, is just as good at taking bloat away from code as it is at adding features.

By standing up Aboard Foundry, we’re doubling down on this principle. That doesn’t mean every project will be this minimal. It just means that the user comes first—their time, and their privacy. AI feels pretty heavy today, and coding harnesses love to suggest countless features. We should be fighting that tendency every day. That’s not what users actually want.

I hope you enjoy Aboard Sign and get real value out of it. We’re all ears if you have feedback or feature requests. Let a thousand leasing agreements, freelance contracts, and agreements to sell sofas be signed!

And if you want to build the future of simple, usable software with us—either as a client, or as an employee—get in touch. hello@aboard.com.