Why We Rebuilt Our eSignature Experience with SignNow

When we first built white-labeled contract signing into LaunchBay several years ago, we picked a vendor to get started with. It was the right call at the time, but the cracks started to show.

As our business grew, so did demand and usage of LaunchBay's built-in contract functionality. This functionality replaces other tools our customers have used in the past, like DocuSign, HelloSign, and PandaDoc, letting their own clients sign and submit contracts right inside a white-labeled portal that's indistinguishable from the rest of their platform.

In this article, we'll break down what the migration from our previous eSignature provider to SignNow looked like, and why it's made a real difference for the businesses running onboarding and implementation through LaunchBay.

Why We Decided to Switch

The software companies, agencies, and consultants using LaunchBay are now sending 10,000+ contracts and documents a month through our platform.

At that volume, we knew it was time to level up. We needed a stronger foundation, one built for functionality, scalability, and security at scale, not just the basics, and one that could integrate seamlessly with our platform.

So we went looking for a partner to build that foundation with. We evaluated around a dozen eSignature vendors and landed on SignNow. As our CTO, Zack Garbow, put it when we sat down to talk about the transition:

"We explored a dozen vendors and decided on SignNow because of its features, strong API, and robust security."

Turning Every Customer Onboarding Into a Successful Launch

Most eSignature tools do one job: get a document signed, then get out of the way. For us, signing was never the whole job. A client signs off, and onboarding needs to start moving that same day. Put the contract in a separate tool and that handoff becomes a gap, and gaps are where launches stall.

So we built our own contract template editor in-house on top of SignNow's API, turning the whole arc, from building a contract to a client signing it, into one continuous part of LaunchBay.

Build the template once, and it's not a favor to your future self. It's a repeatable launch sequence. Custom fields, signer roles, signing order, set up once and reused for every client after that. Client number 10 gets the same smooth kickoff as client number 1,000.

Our Senior Engineer, Josh Gill, was surprised by just how much building it in-house paid off:

"I expected our own template editor to be kind of a slow part of the process. But once we got into it and started discovering the flexibilities and deeper integrations it gave us with our own platform, that ended up speeding things up."

Total Visibility: Signatures Never Block Progress

Signing outside your core platform means nobody can see what's actually happening. Did the client sign yet? Is it sitting unopened in an inbox? Someone usually has to go find out.

Not when signing lives natively inside the workflow. Every contract task in LaunchBay automatically mirrors the signing order, so clients and internal teams can see exactly who's signed, who's next, and who's still pending, whether that's a simple client signature, an internal approval, or a multi-party agreement. Nothing sits waiting on someone who forgot it was there, and nothing quietly blocks a project until it's already behind schedule.

A Branded, Loginless Experience for the People Actually Signing

It would be easy to tell this as an internal engineering win and stop there. But the people who matter most are the clients actually signing, and for them, it should feel like one continuous experience with the business they're working with, not a detour to some third-party tool they've never seen before.

Building the editor in-house is what made that possible. Clients sign inside their own white-labeled, loginless LaunchBay portal, the same branded space where they're already onboarding. No account to create. No new interface to learn.

We also added custom field auto-population, so contracts show up already filled in with information LaunchBay has on file: project details, pricing, dates, whatever's needed. Nobody's retyping anything they've already handed over once. As Josh put it:

"Because of how simple it is for businesses that use LaunchBay to pre-fill information in their contracts, this ends up saving a lot of time on the client portal side, since those customers don't need to refill information they've already given the team."

More Than Onboarding: Contracts for Whatever Comes Next

Onboarding is where this story starts, but it's not where contracts stop being useful. The same template editor, signing order, and loginless portal experience that kicks off a new client relationship works just as well for everything that comes after: final sign-off on a deliverable, a change order to an existing scope of work, a retainer renewal, an NDA, or an internal approval that needs a paper trail. Same portal, same visibility, same easy signing experience, whatever the document.

Set Up in Minutes, Connected to Everything Else

None of this is worth much if setting it up is a project of its own. Drop in a contract or agreement you already use, and it's fully configured, fields, roles, and all, in a few minutes. No starting from scratch for every new client, no waiting on an engineer to get involved.

And because LaunchBay connects natively with HubSpot, Zapier, and a robust MCP connector, the moment a deal closes in your CRM, that data can flow straight into LaunchBay to kick off a new project and populate the right contract template automatically. No manual handoff between the sales team closing the deal and the onboarding team picking it up.

A Foundation Built to Scale With Us

Whether a LaunchBay customer is sending 100 signatures a month or 10,000, the experience needs to hold up exactly the same way: predictable, reliable, and never something that slows down onboarding and implementation.

SignNow has given us the integration partner we needed to deliver an exceptional signing experience, for the businesses running onboarding through LaunchBay, and for the clients they're bringing on board. As Zack sums it up:

"Overall, switching to SignNow has been a really great experience. It really feels like a native solution that we provided, rather than a third-party tool. Their support, functionality, and security posture are all top-notch, which makes us feel really confident as we continue to grow our business with them."

Want to see how contracts and eSignatures work inside LaunchBay? Book a demo or try it free.

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