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I think I see what he's saying. In some places, there's a gap between open-source libraries that I can find, and services that Do One Thing. Recently, I dived
by RangerScience 9y ago
I think I see what he's saying.
In some places, there's a gap between open-source libraries that I can find, and services that Do One Thing.
Recently, I dived into the available options for online document signing.
I needed one thing (document signing) done well, with a few variations based on the few different integration situations I had.
Almost everyone had the same offering, which wasn't programmatic or flexible, but was drop-in (iframes). I could only do what they'd though to make possible.
On the other hand, I have trouble imaging what, say, a ruby gem for this would look like. Seems like it'd be pretty involved.
Compare this to, say, SendGrid, and other email providers. I get a lot of flexible functionality around one thing (sending emails), but the interaction is very much on my terms (via their API) rather than theirs (dropping in an iframe).
The only exception I found in the document signing world was HelloSign, which has a lot more in common with SendGrid than, say, DocuSign or RightSignature.
I don't think this is quite what he's talking about, but I do think it's indicative of the direction and forces in play.
- fonesca00 9y agoFor electronic signatures, try my solution at https://bulksign.com https://bulksign.com . I'd love to hear what types of integration situations you had.
- StavrosK 9y agoTrying to log in keeps telling me "invalid username or password", even though I just reset it...
- RangerScience 9y agoI took a look. What level of critique do you want? I think with a decent amount of effort, you can out-compete (as a product) all existing solutions except HelloSign. However, I would expect to run into serious issues convincing companies to switch. You would probably want to specifically target the new company / tech-savvy startup market, which I think are very underserved by the painfully antiquated leaders (DocuSign, RightSignature), who are targeted towards people who feel more comfortable with "enterprise"-style solutions. Our major issues were: - We needed to provide our own styling, etc, for integration on a responsive website. Existing iframe solutions used the provider's styling, and did not work well on mobile. - We expect to send out many more documents than get signed; thus, HelloSign's per-API cost would be to expensive for us.