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?
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?
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.
We launched with an Ask HN in 2008. Now established (self-funded) and if you check it out you'll see the execution is pretty elegant (esp. the tech). :-) Hah! It's actually the best product I've ever had the chance to work on.
Hackers that want to find success might find some inspiration from Daryl. He's dope.
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?