8:42 AM - Inbox triage
I open the Sealwax dashboard before my coffee is cool enough to drink. Six new signups yesterday. Two of them from a /r/freelance post I made last Thursday about NDA horror stories - that still drives traffic. One signup attributed to organic search. The SEO content is starting to move.
Revenue dashboard shows $387 in new MRR this month. Down from $420 last week. Someone churned on Friday. I need to know who.
My email is quieter than usual. Three customer messages. I skim them first:
Carol Reyes at Reyes Family Practice asking if she can use a draft NDA for her medical coding contractor before the agent generates one. ("I like to read a template first.") I'll respond to her around 2 PM.
A Slack message from my customer support rotation channel comes through at 8:47: Marcus_ai, my automated agent process, has flagged a draft as "out of scope." I pull it up.
Rafael Cortes used the form to describe a freelance video editing engagement for a production company, but buried in his details was: "Work involves editing footage from legal proceedings." That's a red flag. Media liability, chain of custody, potential evidentiary issues. The agent correctly declined to auto-approve. I add a note to follow up with Rafael by 10 AM.
I click through Stripe to find who churned. Sofia Martinez. She'd been on the paid tier for four months, using it mainly for one-off contractor agreements. No cancellation reason in the form. I add her to a mental list to check in with - maybe a billing issue, maybe the product wasn't sticky enough for her use case.
10:15 AM - The flagged draft
I call Rafael Cortes. He answers on the third ring. He's a freelance video editor, and yes, the legal proceedings footage is part of the gig. Discovery clips, he says. His understanding is that the production company - a documentary outfit - needs standard confidentiality language, nothing specialized.
I walk him through the risk: jurisdiction, chain of custody, whether the footage itself or just the edit is under NDA, whether there are third-party rights involved. He says he'll check with the production company and call back. I log it in Linear (our internal tracker) as a one-off escalation and mark it "waiting for customer."
By 10:22 I'm back in the dashboard. The agent is waiting for confirmation on two other drafts. One is a standard three-month contractor NDA for a marketing freelancer in California - no flags. I approve it. The agent routes the doc to all parties and logs it. The second is mutual NDA for a designer and a startup in Delaware. The startup wants perpetual confidentiality clauses. The agent flagged this as non-standard and not recommended. I review the draft notes. The agent is right. I leave a comment for the operator path: the agent should recommend a 5-year sunset instead, and if the customer wants perpetual, they need to understand the enforceability issue. I reject the draft and the system sends a message back to the freelancer: "We flagged something. Here's why, and here's what we recommend."
12:30 PM - Lunch and the metrics check
I eat a sandwich at my desk and pull the weekly metrics report. It's not automated yet - I run it manually from the dashboard into a Google Sheet I've copied three times now. By next month I'll have this in Zapier or just accept the click overhead.
Week to date:
- 24 signups (target is 25, we're on track)
- $1,200 in new MRR (higher than I expected this early)
- 34 active users with at least one draft in progress
- 8 executed NDAs (signed and stored)
- Churn: 1 (Sofia Martinez)
The numbers are small but they're moving in the right direction. The $12/mo tier is actually converting better than I thought. Most freelancers are using it for one contract at a time, but a few early adopters are using it for ongoing client relationships.
My Slack notification pings. One of the docs I approved this morning has been signed by both parties. Happy path. The confirmation email went out automatically.
1:47 PM - Customer escalation
Carol Reyes emailed again while I was working. She's asking if she can get a custom clause added to the template about work-for-hire vs. independent contractor status. The agent doesn't customize yet - that's future functionality I'm still building. I write back:
"Hi Carol, Great question. IP ownership is separate from confidentiality, and you're right that it matters. For now, the free template handles the NDA piece. For the work-for-hire clause, I'd recommend having your contract attorney review the services agreement separately. Happy to talk through which standard language works for freelance relationships in your state if that helps. Let me know. - Alex"
I don't send it yet. I let it sit, re-read it, and hit send. It's honest about the product's limits. She'll either upgrade to the paid tier to move faster, or she'll handle IP outside of Sealwax. Both are fine.
2:15 PM - Bug fix
I notice one of the PDF templates isn't rendering page breaks correctly on longer documents. The signature block is breaking mid-page sometimes. I pull the GitHub issue from Linear (I tagged it last week), write a quick fix to the LaTeX template, and push it. I test with a 4-page NDA. It renders clean now. Deploy to staging. I'll push to production tomorrow after one more review.
Rafael calls back at 2:44. The production company says they'll sign a standard NDA. Confidentiality applies to the creative edits, not the source footage - that's already under their own legal hold. I generate a new draft through the agent with this clarification, tag it as approved, and route it. Rafael should see the link by 3:15.
3:52 PM - Pipeline review
I open the dashboard's future pipeline view. Thirteen freelancers are in the "draft generated, waiting for review" state. That's good. It means they're actually using the tool past signup.
I notice one user has been stuck in "reviewing draft" for eight days. I pull their ticket. It's a complex mutual NDA between two creative partners. The agent did its job, but the freelancer is probably negotiating language with the other party. I send a quick email: "Still working through the draft? Happy to help clarify anything or walk through the sticking points. No rush."
The other eleven are moving through the funnel normally. Three converted to paid tier yesterday and are adding custom reminders and saved templates. The free tier is working as a hook.
4:31 PM - Manual work
Sofia Martinez, the person who churned, is worth understanding. I look at her usage logs. She created five NDAs over four months, all got signed, no complaints in her account history. I search her name in my email and find her signup note: "I help freelancers find work and negotiate contracts. Trying Sealwax as a tool to offer to my client network."
She was trying to resell, not use it herself. The free tier doesn't support that. We don't have a partner program yet. I make a mental note: this is a real segment (intermediaries, not direct freelancers) and I'm losing them to churn.
I send Sofia a message: "I saw you moved on from Sealwax. We didn't have a good path for you to offer this to your network yet. If you'd like to talk about a partner or reseller structure, I'd rather not lose you."
She'll either ignore it or reply. Either way, it's useful data.
5:15 PM - Revenue reconciliation
Stripe is showing a small discrepancy in this month's MRR calculation. Two of the new paid signups are showing zero subscription amount. I check their billing profiles. Both got stuck on the payment page during the annual plan selection flow. I see the bug now - the year option isn't validating properly. I fix the form validation and send both users a recovery email with a direct link to complete checkout. One completes it immediately. The other doesn't reply, but I've reduced the friction.
6:08 PM - Closing the day
I review the Linear board. Twelve items. Three are bugs, two are feature requests from customers, five are "escalations I logged today," two are "future roadmap stuff."
I close the dashboard, Stripe, Gmail, and Slack in that order. It's 6:15 PM.
This Tuesday was solid. Six new signups is on pace. One escalation (Rafael's video footage NDA) went from risky to routine with a five-minute phone call. One churn led to a strategic insight (intermediaries are a real segment I'm not serving). One bug got fixed. One small revenue leak got patched.
The agent is doing the drafting and routing. I'm doing the judgment calls, the customer conversations, the pattern spotting. It's real work, but it's work I can do between other things.
Tomorrow I'll follow up with Rafael to confirm his NDA got signed. I'll run the full weekly report and figure out if Sofia's intermediary segment is worth building for. I'll push the PDF template fix to production. The agent will keep running.
This is the actual shape of running it.