EchoSign - Frictionless SaaS

By Vivek | December 11th, 2006 at 02:02 pm ET         

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.

Links:
EchoSign