For the past year, EchoSign team has worked on developing their SaaS contract management application that I feel should serve as a model for other startups in this field. Personally even I did not realize excellent product built at EchoSign, until Jason Lemkin invited me over to his office to checkout the new features they have launched lately. I was just amazed at the number of integration points and features they have developed since their launch in January 2006. Customer acceptance of this effort is reflected in their customer signup rate and the awards they have recently won including the “Best in Show” at Office 2.0 conference.
Best thing I like about EchoSign is the frictionless workflow built into the system. If you want to give EchoSign a try, you don’t even need to signup for the service. Just upload a contract with a signature or choose to e-sign the contract and you are all set to go. If you like it, signup for the service and email the contract to the recipients to as many people you want. Any contract you send out, EchoSign saves a copy to your account. Real frictionless deal is that the recipient does not need to signup for an account at EchoSign. Recipients can just sign the contract and send it back by email or fax it on the 1-800 number of EchoSign. As soon as EchoSign receives the contract, it gets updated on your account.
EchoSign has built numerous other features that you wish most of the other web apps had. You can set the order in which contracts get signed, email contacts to 100s of people simultaneously, archive your existing contracts, automatically add e-signature, password protect the contract, view history of changes to a contract, search inside contracts, view contracts online or download PDF’s, print contracts without bothering about font and printer driver conflicts, share contracts, add notes, send reminders to recipients,………………..
And all these features of a secure application are free for individual users and cost a tiny bit for advanced plans. The Pro version costs only $12.95 a month and Enterprise version is priced at $20/sender per month(5 sender accounts required).
Recently EchoSign launched quite a few important enhancements to its service including the public release of its API, ability to e-sign contracts from Blackberries, Treos, and Windows Mobile devices, and real time updates on contracts at the Enterprise/Team account homepage. Besides this EchoSign has also integrated its product with Salesforce and seen a big uptake in its service since than. Currently EchoSign has enterprise customers which have taken up more than 100 seats per account, and EchoSign is also in process or rolling out integration with some of the largest enterprises including BT. As for future, users will soon have Microsoft Outlook integration and further rollouts with CRM products.
Very clear product and market/customer focus comes from the 2 co-founders of EchoSign, Jason Lemkin who leads EchoSign, and Jeff Zwelling, President. Combined they have extensive experience in the field of internet and software startups, and also exposure to business development, sales, and legal areas. Funded by Storm ventures and few more individual investors, EchoSign hopes to break even very soon.
Coming back to the reasons that I think EchoSign is a model SaaS application – Free for individual, paid plans for high demand users, and enterprise plans for team based access, complete data storage and access, continuous enhancements, API access, and integration with top SaaS services. I think these are the items that should be on the priority list of any SaaS startup.
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EchoSign
January 12, 2007 at 4:05 pm |
[...] EditGrid joins the group of some of the most innovative and timely Salesforce AppExchange integrations that I have covered till date which include EchoSign, Koral, CentralDesktop, and Spanning Salesforce. Salesforce with its user oriented approach provides the best breeding ground for these productivity apps that can rattle enterprise class players Microsoft, IBM, EMC, and others. For a small price users can get first hand experience of the productivity tools which they feel are important in their everyday workplace. This methodology goes opposite to the existing mind set, where users need to wait on their IT Managers to go through the entire review process before dumping the product ’cause of high licensing and maintenance costs. A high-featured spreadsheet that has no upgrade pains associated but instead gives you the advantage of new features getting rolled in automatically all for $5 is THE bargain you should grab without thinking twice. [...]
February 16, 2007 at 11:27 am |
[...] Last time I had written about SoonR was when it had secured $6 million funding. Since than, SoonR has been working on getting the “Powered by SoonR” sign on more number of places besides its site. Last year they entered into few very significant partnerships with large telecom companies including Tata Indicom, Swisscom, and enterprise webmeeting service provider WebEx. This has taken the weight off the shoulders of the startup and not to look for quicker ways to monetize its product and better concentrate on providing a good user experience. SoonR service is now used by users in over 200 countries operating over 500 different types of mobile handsets. In addition to that SoonR since its launch 1.5 year back has securely encrypted and stored over 150 million files for its users to access from their mobile. SoonR along with EchoSign, WuFoo, CentralDesktop, and SmugMug, Pando are some of the startups to learn from – great products backed by good monetization strategies. They haven’t experienced viral growth, but each of them is on a steady upward curve. [...]
June 12, 2007 at 3:27 pm |
[...] Just as EchoSign delivered the perfect online contract management solution appealing to SMBs, and Freshbooks nailed the online invoicing market for SMBs, PayCycle is seeing rapid adoption of the service by small businesses. Some of the more exciting deals at PayCycle in the recent past include private label offering in partnership with one of the nation’s largest financial institutions, and renewed Microsoft Money Home & Business partnership for the 5th consecutive year. Do you have a plan for [...]
June 19, 2007 at 4:16 pm |
[...] On one side EchoSign and DocuSign take care of contract emailing, follow-up and storage, and on the other side Coventi enables collaboration and commenting on documents. Middlepost is playing the middle ground by trying to combine the features from both to offer tracking of the changes, comments, finally getting the documents digitally signed. A tough sell I would say, since market for online contract management tool that also needs collaboration features ain’t going to be that big. [...]