Hey dude--we're not a consumer service so rest easy! If you're running a business, you want a vendor that you can call (why folks running real businesses love Rackspace and hate AWS when things aren't working).
232 karma · joined February 16, 2009
Thanks for the shout-out Mr Owens!
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?
Hackers that want to find success might find some inspiration from Daryl. He's dope.
Really tho--if you have a passion for CS, but studied Physics, you have the capacity to excel. I fell in love with the ordered-ness of computers and self-taught myself programming in my teens. I went to college and studied Physics knowing I would likely not continue as a career physicist. During college I found that between my basic programming knowledge and physics requirements I had covered a large portion of the CompSci major (except for the upper division classes). I tested out of some and then took the others to end up with CompSci + Physics degrees.
Since graduating, I've benefited from my CompSci degree in areas like data structures, runtime complexity and parsing--but the rest of my CompSci skills were self-taught before or afterwards ("the Internet" was not in my CompSci curriculum).
I believe I've benefited more from my Physics training. Specifically--the Socratic method of looking at root causes in a systematic and problem-simplifying manner. And I've never been daunted by a hard problem or one that needs theoretical analysis for an elegant solution.
Given all of the above, some of the best programmers I've met have no degrees--so passion and willingness to self-learn trump all.
It was great feedback--comment #1 (1055 days ago) is in our app and boosted our conversion into solid double-digits: "You need a sample document, so people can test out the 'using your mouse to sign' part without signing up."
As an aside--you'd find "Managing Corporate Lifecycles" by Dr. Ichak Adizes a fascinating and relevant read. It talks through many of the concerns you express and offers solutions I've seen work wonders in practice. For instance, you express things like--"sales are down slightly" and "collegue waste[s] countless hours." I gather that you and your partner haven't delegated responsibility and authority in the area of sales. That is, who is _responsible_ for your sales? You? Your partner? And then, that person must get the authority to make decisions affecting sales.
In practice, you would both make weekly/monthly/quarterly updates for the areas you are responsible (given the responsibility and authority over). If Jan 1 you agreed to give your partner authority for sales, they would give you a measurable commitment say 5% month over month increase this quarter. You would track progress in the W/M/Q meetings, but would get no direct authority over their technique (if wasting time works for them...).
This doesn't mean you'd get no _say_ in things regarding sales. It means you'd only be an influencer, but have no decision-making authority.
Maybe you find after a quarter that you the numbers aren't getting met by your partner. Then you discuss remedies--which might include hiring a salesperson or you taking on the role.
Anyway--all of this is great if you are hitting organizational issues in your growth, but have a strong backbone of a relationship that first brought you together so strongly and has helped you build a successful business. If there are other systemic issues you'll have to address them too.
Congratulations on growing your business to this stage. These are some of the better problems you can have!
Get to charging quickly. Once you charge $1, you will treat the project as a commercial endeavor--it will fight for your attention over other work and it is incredibly rewarding.
But the real question is whether you are looking for strategic feedback on the app from these early users or if you are concerned that it is buggy and won't be charge-worthy initially. Can you elaborate?
Yes, a baby does change your life--in other more significant ways. The intensity of emotion cannot be described. But you will know it when you are holding your own son/daughter in your arms for the first time.
Don't dilly-dally. Have kids early. While you believe you are underfunded, underprepared and "distracted" with your tech startup.
Thanks for the feedback. We are in the process of expanding our data. You could have added your own information... what could we do to tempt you to?
The market for rental data has two big issues--the first is fragmentation--many rental listings only appear in locally traded publications (your local classified) and for only a limited time (a few weeks). The second issue is that much of the listing data is vague--"Beautiful home in Upper East Side." Which means getting detailed current and historical information is a tough problem. It's not just a tough problem for us either--it's a tough problem for Renters!
We have so many thoughts on how to bootstrap this that it's hard to start this conversation unless you're really interested in the answer. So... as a teaser, I'll tell you that we've already started a LARGE mechanical turk campaign to seed key markets. We've also started the process of importing a number of public records that don't give us rental prices directly, but will let us create a model for what the rental prices SHOULD be--given some insight we have to traditional CAP rates (what a property should rent vs its purchase price and current interest rates--to make for a good investment).
Given those approaches do you see any other opportunities for us to bootstrap?
On the other hand, I've been involved with enough startups to know that most of my attempts to commercialize my products will probably fail. So back to goals--you say yours is to escape your cube. Do you mean:
1. I want to escape the type of job that puts me in a cube.
2. I want to no longer work as a developer.
3. I want to no longer work--since I'm filthy rich.
Those span the gamut of goals and without knowing what you are really after, it's hard to give you advice on how to proceed. For the sake of adding some direct reply, let's assume it's #1 above. In that case, I'd say--keep honing your skills, demo your product and use it as a calling card for a job search with companies you think you'd be a fit with (maybe even Square). Don't bother the commercialization path and don't sweat the competition--since this is lateral to your goal of a better workplace--and a lot more achievable than a commercially successful startup.
Hope that helps.
+ Google Docs integration. Easy to do. Perfect fit. It's tough when looking at all the great SaaS services to partner and integrate with. This and Freshbooks were both great in terms of technical and market fit.
+ Request for API (we had one, but it wasn't open). Now a big contributor to volume.
+ Ignorance even in the tech community. This sounds bad to say--but we knew from the outset that the law was changed in 1999 to support online signatures (and in EU/globally in 2000). We assumed a portion of the market would know this--and we were surprised how few did (thanks doubting HN commenters :-). Even in tech--where we regularly agree to our jobs, gigs, Apple purchases and even financial services--all online.
- Well--it's not a traffic generator as Reddit can be. It's actually USEFUL and actionable comments from peers. It's like our own tech-maker-4chan. :-P
OK--so most of the comments were great and we did implement most of them. I'm trying to find ones we ignored or regretted implementing--ahh--right we did the multi-signing-public documents that were requested. These were for petitions and similar mulit-signer and publicly available documents. This was a great idea and we implemented it and we had zero usage of it.