A year ago we shared why we, the people behind Signeasy, do what we do. The concept of Signeasy App came out of a personal necessity and a strong belief that our situation was faced by many people around the globe: getting a document signed and sent was a long and tiring process; an obvious pain nobody had figured out how to fix in early 2010. Granted there were few enterprise eSignature providers such as DocuSign, EchoSign (now Adobe) at the time, they were not the right solution for the average consumer or business person wanting the simplicity and convenience of signing a document instantly from wherever.
Intuition is a very powerful thing—more powerful than intellect.
— Steve Jobs
Signeasy took the first step in enabling the consumers to do so when we launched our App in July 2010. Since then we have grown from zero to hundreds of thousands of customers in 18 months purely through word of mouth, referrals and reviews in the blogosphere. Through sheer focus and continuous iterations based on customer feedback, we´ve taken Signeasy App to a level which excited the likes of Mashable, TheNextWeb, LifeHacker, Engadget, CNBC-TV and venture capitalists like Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet and Ty Danco to write about us.
If you are working on an interesting solution to a problem, there is a high probability of others doing the same.
In the eSigning space other start-ups such as SignNow.com and HelloFax.com were also tackling the same problem from a different angle: a web based product. Our approach has been mobile from start because the most ubiquitous thing people carry is a phone. Back in 2010 we followed our intuition believing that there would come a time where people would find convenient and secure to get signatures on any document through the mobile.
Recent studies have confirmed that the number of smartphones and tablets sold worldwide exceeds the number of PCs and laptops sold in 2011.
Additionally, people´s average spending time on the mobile apps has increased by 100% over last year, surpassing their PC consumption time, according to a study by Flurry.
While our intuition turned out to be true, other eSignature providers followed with their own mobile apps, incorporating the proven workflows pioneered in Signeasy App, we take that as a compliment and it proves we are not the only crazy ones because of healthy competition in this market.
While there has been a lot of debate regarding mobile vs web: Mobile First, Web Second by Fred Wilson and Web Second, Mobile First by Mark Suster, the order in which a startup needs to execute is subject to the market opportunity and their resources available. In our case, we maximize the impact of our resources by focusing on simplifying eSignatures through mobile phones and tablets.
We feel excited that 2012 is an inflection point towards mainstream usage of eSignatures and are fortunate to innovate in a space with growing momentum. We can’t wait to show all the cool features we have been working on for our customers. Finally we would like to close with Mr. Steve Jobs’s one comment who was an inspiration to us and helped us start this journey.
We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out.
This holds true for us. Happy signing and getting on with your lives sooner.
- Signeasy Team