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My cofounder emerged from the womb with a business plan in hand

doeswhat.com

9 pointsusiegj006 comments

> Our biggest competitor is paper.

And not the very popular DocuSign which has been used for the majority of the apartment leases I've signed in the past few years and buys gigantic billboards advertising itself in metropolitan areas?

Or Adobe EchoSign.

There's plenty of established competition in this space.

Have to say I had the same idea couple month ago (wanted to call it RapidSignature) and was researching. Because this is so simple to program and there are plenty of competitors - some like HelloFax give you this feature for free, others like SignNow (really awesome), I gave up. Further, I think they are misleading customers saying its legally binded signature. It can't be. If you sign someones document and they copy and paste it to some other document, you can't prove you haven't signed it. OR they may not prove you signed it. Anyhow, without your hand written "blue pen" signature, anything else is a photocopy that can be cut and paste and xeroxed.

If they are compliant with ESIGN then there is no reason it's not legally binding.

http://www.echosign.com/public/static/faq.jsp#five

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esign

DocuSign, RightSignature and EchoSign have broken away from the rest of the market--it's really tough to create a lightweight contracting experience that is usable by 99% of the internet population. That plus a long lead time to enough adoption to pay bills and you've got a space that I bet will look roughly the same in 3 years' time.

You are right that now most people have experienced an electronic signature--even at the grocery checkout counter. But walk into your bank, apply to your local retailer or call the plumber and you'll be writing on paper. The general estimate is that we are at 1% adoption today. We also believe that in ten years nobody will be demanding more paper in their lives and business workflow.

Kinda crazy that we've stayed rooted to such an inefficient and archaic practice, eh?

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