Siggy started with a complaint. An Australian accounting practice we work with was sending a steady stream of engagement letters, authorities and declarations for signature, and paying per envelope for the privilege on a platform designed for global enterprises. The pricing punished exactly the high-volume, low-margin signing patterns that professional services run on. Worse, their clients had to create an account before they could sign, which is the single most reliable way to make a document get abandoned.
The practice asked a reasonable question: how hard could it be? We said we would build a proof of concept.
The principles we built it on
Because we were building for a practice that would be audited, and because we are an Australian firm that would rather be precise than impressive, we set some rules before we wrote a line of code.
- Align explicitly with the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth), and document the method of signing on every completion certificate. We never claim a document is "legally binding"; no software can make that claim. We show exactly what happened and let the evidence speak.
- No account to sign. A recipient gets a link, signs on whatever device they have, and is done.
- An append-only audit log that is treated as sacred. Every view, every signature, every decline is recorded and nothing is ever edited.
- A tamper-evident seal on the completed PDF, so that any change after delivery is detectable on verification.
- Australian hosting, Australian support, Australian pricing.
What happened next
The practice used it. Then a second practice, who had seen the completion certificates, asked whether they could have it too. Then a mortgage broker. Each of them was asking for the same thing: a signing tool that was honest about what it did, that did not make their clients jump through hoops, and that did not charge like a utility.
At that point Siggy stopped being a proof of concept. We rebuilt the single-tenant prototype as a proper multi-tenant platform with the same principles, gave it a name and a home at siggy.com.au, and started treating it as a product. The full story is in the Siggy case study. It is now an Ontology Analytics product in its own right.
What it taught us
The lesson we keep coming back to is that the principles are the product. Nobody chose Siggy because of a feature list. They chose it because the completion certificate told them exactly what had happened, because their clients signed without complaint, and because the pricing matched how they work. The same engineering discipline we bring to a government data platform turned out to be what a suburban accounting practice wanted too.
It is also the clearest example of what Axiom Data is for. We built it, we shipped it, it had to work in the real world, and it found its own market because of how it was built. We will write more as it grows.