HelloFax (YC W11) Launches HelloSign to Take On Electronic Signature Industry | Hacker News Reader

HelloFax (YC W11) Launches HelloSign to Take On Electronic Signature Industry

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46 pointserin_bury19 comments

I find this to be a fascinating example of the Y-Combinator effect. SignNow has been doing this for six months now, on mobile and the web, with the top ranked signing iOS app. Then they launched Online Notarization, after fighting years to get it legalized and rolled out. Despite all this, they've gotten barely a mention on TechCrunch, and PG shut down their Online Notarization post. SignNow & others can absolutely be fabulously successful, but Y-combinator in my mind really makes your life easier in a lot of ways.

Not everyone who works with electronic signatures reads HN or TechCrunch, though.

Agreed. It's just an interesting advantage. I don't think it makes you successful, clearly most Y-Combinator companies still fail.

I agree with your comment about YCombinator effect of making the startup's life easier than the rest. In the long run, whoever innovates faster and listen to customer's needs better will win the race, it might be one company or more than one company similar to how enterprise esignature market has been dominated by top 2-3 companies so far. Like SignNow, SignEasy App has been enabling mobile esignatures since July, 2010 and in fact, it was one of the first in bringing the novelty of esignatures using an iPhone/iPad and consistently ranked in top 50 business apps worldwide.

At the end, all of the new startups are all trying to make digital signature universally accessible to everyone and trying to innovate better as compared to the status-quo.

Thanks, Sunil

Disclaimer: I am the founder of SignEasy App.

This is awesome. I've recommended HelloFax dozens of times in the past year and a half or so for the awesome collaborative signing flow, and only a handful of time for the fax - though it's a lifesaver when I need to fax things.

The more widespread adoption electronic signatures get, the more convenient life will be in general. And more secure too - we've obviously understood secure digital signatures for awhile, but the cultural shift has just taken forever to move online.

I'd be curious to hear from the founders if there are plans around expanding the scope/security of signatures, and some of the worries around mutually-compatible implementations?

Nobody has mentioned RightSignature yet. They've been around for a while, and I've used their services for a long time as well (...and, helped bootstrap the codebase).

That said, I like the simple UI of Hello Sign thus far... but, I got a never-ending spinner when I tried to draw and submit a signature... and, when I tried to upload a document (it hung at "Converting...").

The price is definitely right, that's for sure. I'm very curious to see what the paid features are going to be... and how long things are going to be free. Running clusters of high powered document converting machines is not cheap!

Thanks for the heads up on the problem submitting the signature. We're working on it now.

-Joel from HelloSign

We had some load balancer issues. This should be fixed now but if you're still seeing any issues try logging out and logging back in.

-Paul, HF Dev

This is fantastic - I just sent a prospect a proposal to execute. I had thought about EchoSign but I just didn't want to deal with what looked to be an enterprise-y solution. I just emailed HelloSign support asking if it was possible to copy and paste a link to a document that needs signing so that I can paste that link into my Basecamp messages to my prospects. For now I prepare my Basecamp message and prepare the document for signature and ensure I post the BC message a few seconds ahead of sending the proposal via HelloSign.

Hi, we actually have a reusable link feature, so if you have an NDA or onboarding docs that you need on a regular basis, you can upload the file and share the link.

Could be used on a one-time basis as well. Check the "reusable docs" tab on the left hand nav.

I've been secretly hoping HelloFax would make this move for a while.

100% of the time I use HelloFax, I'm using it to sign things. This is a step in exactly the right direction.

We just fully onboarded a new employee without a single piece of physical paper thanks to HelloSign (HelloFax). It's awesome and saves us hours a week.

Makes a lot of sense from use case and branding perspective. Always used their product just to sign docs, and never to send or receive faxes.

Like someone else mentioned, the YCombinator effect makes the startup's life easier than the rest.In the long run, whoever innovates faster and listen to customer's needs better will win the race, it might be one company or more than one company similar to how enterprise esignature market has been dominated by top 2-3 companies so far. SignEasy App has been enabling mobile esignatures since July, 2010 and in fact, it was one of the first in bringing the novelty of esignatures using an iPhone/iPad and consistently ranked in top 50 business apps worldwide.

At the end, all of the new startups are all trying to make digital signature universally accessible to everyone and trying to innovate better as compared to the status-quo.

Thanks, Sunil Patro

Disclaimer: I am the founder of SignEasy App (Formerly EasySignMobile).

Finally!! I've been hoping HelloFax would do this for months now. This is exactly the right move and a good lesson for other companies that are faced with a similar two use-case problem.

Isn't there some commonly accepted cryptographic digital signature standard in the US, as it's the case in many European countries (where the user's keys are basically certified by a government agency)? Using simple pictures as "digital signatures" seems like multiple steps backwards to me.

Hi,

Our signatures are compliant with all US and EU digital signature laws:

2000 U.S. Electronic Signature in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) European Directive (EC/1999/93)