3 Reviews - Add a review

1. IT|Redux - First Koral, t&hellip  |  April 10th, 2007 at 9:38 am

[…] With its strong document management capabilities, Koral will allow Salesforce.com to better manage unstructured data, but being able to store documents is not all that exciting if you cannot produce them from structured data, nor share them outside the boundaries of your organization. For such purposes, I would recommend that Salesforce.com takes a look at ThinkFree and EchoSign (covered here and there). […]

2. Vivek Puri  |  April 17th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

EchoSign — Frictionless SaaS

For the past year, EchoSign team has worked on developing their SaaS contract management application that I feel should serve as a model for other startups in this field. Personally, even I did not realize how excellent a product was being built at EchoSign, until Jason Lemkin invited me over to his office to checkout the new features they have launched lately. I was just amazed at the number of integration points and features they have developed since their launch in January 2006. Customer acceptance of this effort is reflected in their customer signup rate, and the awards they have recently won, including the “Best of Show” at the Office 2.0 Conference.

the best thing I like about EchoSign is the frictionless workflow built into the system. If you want to give EchoSign a try, you don’t even need to signup for the service. Just upload a contract with a signature, or choose to e-sign the contract, and you are all set to go. If you like it, signup for the service, and email the contract to recipients, for as many of them as you want. Any contract you send out, EchoSign saves a copy to your account. The real frictionless deal is that the recipient does not need to signup for an account at EchoSign. Recipients can just sign the contract and send it back by email, or fax it on the 1-800 number provided by EchoSign. As soon as EchoSign receives the contract, it gets updated on your account.

EchoSign has built numerous other features that you wish most of the other web apps had. You can set the order in which contracts get signed, email contracts to hundreds of people simultaneously, archive your existing contracts, automatically add e-signature, password protect the contract, view history of changes to a contract, search inside contracts, view contracts online or download PDF’s, print contracts without bothering about font and printer driver conflicts, share contracts, add notes, send reminders to recipients, etc.

And all these features for a secure application are free for individual users, and cost a tiny bit for advanced plans. The Pro version costs only $12.95 a month, and the Enterprise version is priced at $20/sender per month (5 sender accounts required).

Recently EchoSign launched quite a few important enhancements to its service, including the public release of its API, ability to e-sign contracts from BlackBerries, Treos, and Windows Mobile devices, and real time updates on contracts on the Enterprise/Team account homepage. Besides this, EchoSign has also integrated its product with Salesforce.com and seen a big uptake in its service since then. Currently EchoSign has enterprise customers that have taken up to more than 100 seats per account, and EchoSign is also in the process of rolling out integration with some of the largest enterprises, including BT. As for the future, users will soon have Microsoft Outlook integration and further rollouts with CRM products.

Very clear product and market/customer focus comes from the 2 co-founders of EchoSign, Jason Lemkin who leads EchoSign, and Jeff Zwelling, President. Combined, they have extensive experience in the field of Internet and software startups, and also exposure to business development, sales, and legal areas. Funded by Storm Ventures and a few more individual investors, EchoSign hopes to break even very soon.

Coming back to the reasons why I think EchoSign is a model SaaS application — Free for individual, paid plans for high demand users, and enterprise plans for team based access, complete data storage and access, continuous enhancements, API access, and integration with top SaaS services. I think these are the items that should be on the priority list of any SaaS startup.

3. IT|Redux - Office 2.0 Too&hellip  |  July 14th, 2007 at 12:12 pm

[…] If you include sponsorship agreements signed with sponsors and statements of work signed with service providers, about 100 contracts have to be signed by the multiple parties involved with the conference’s organization. In order to make it paper free and reduce time-to-close, we are using the excellent EchoSign electronic document signing solution. The workflow we used last year has been described in this past article, and will remain pretty much the same this year. Yesterday, I even signed a contract from my iPhone. […]

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