HasGeek collects 150+ signatures per month with Signeasy

The Company

HasGeek was founded on two core principles: building tech communities and peer review of tech practices. In 2010, when the company first launched, universities and businesses simply could not keep engineers and tech practitioners up to date with quickly-emerging technologies. HasGeek stepped in as a way to inform, train, and educate tech “geeks” by learning from their peers. The peer review practice has helped hundreds of speakers get feedback on their ideas from reviewers and interrogate problem-solving approaches/impact of their work.

The Use Case

HasGeek has two divisions: HasGeek Learning, which is the platform hasgeek.com, and HasGeek Media, which runs its own events (and hosts on the platform hasgeek.com). For example, Rootconf is for infrastructure, JSFoo focuses on JavaScript, and The Fifth Elephant is for data and data science. That’s just about 150 speakers to keep track of in a given month, and just as many documents to process. The editorial team – which is in charge of sourcing and managing content – processes onboarding documents, contractor agreements, and release forms, all of which need to be signed by speakers. Meanwhile, the finance team crunches invoices and payment information for the events.

Before Signeasy, HasGeek Media used PDFs and paper vouchers to collect signatures from various parties. The speakers then had to print, sign, then take a photo or scan the document to send it back. “The entire workflow itself was very tiresome,” said Jayalakshmi, an account executive at HasGeek.

After accumulating boxes and boxes of paperwork (companies in India are legally required to keep documents on hand for 7 years for auditing purposes) and suffering through an inefficient signature workflow, HasGeek decided it was time to take their paperwork online. “Before Signeasy, everything was paper,” said Anand Venkatanarayanan, Chief Financial Officer at HasGeek. “Now, 99% is Signeasy.”

“Signeasy is the base of our operation. We just can’t live without it.”

- Anand Venkatanarayanan, Chief Financial Officer at HasGeek

The Solution

HasGeek researched a number of softwares before deciding on Signeasy. While other platforms either forced guests to create an account if they wanted to sign, didn’t provide audit trails, or only offered per-document pricing, ours was quite the opposite. It ultimately had the perfect blend of features that HasGeek wanted and needed. These days, “Signeasy is the base of our operation,”said Anand. “We just can’t live without it.”

Audit trail for compliance

Every month, an external auditor checks up on HasGeek to ensure compliance. Before Signeasy, the process was drawn out and messy, since everything was stored in boxes as physical paperwork. Thanks to our digital audit trail, they can quickly and easily prove that the documents in question have been signed by the recipient without having to store or produce physical proof.

Refreshingly transparent billing

It takes a lot of organizational firepower to keep track of every single document your company signs – so Anand wanted to stay away from per-document pricing. “That’s not easy, that’s hard on people,” he said. “You want to be able to use [the software] as much as possible.” Signeasy’s subscription pricing was therefore a perfect fit, especially when it comes to keeping track of expenses and facilitating scalability.

No guest signer account needed

Most companies try and provide a hassle-free experience for their collaborators, and HasGeek is no exception. They appreciated how signers are able to complete a document without needing to register for a Signeasy account, allowing them to offer a seamless process for external contributors.