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This looks really cool. A small respectful note: As a consumer, if I didn't know about Paul's financial connection to HelloSign, I'd have liked to seen it disc
by mapgrep 14y ago
This looks really cool.
A small respectful note: As a consumer, if I didn't know about Paul's financial connection to HelloSign, I'd have liked to seen it disclosed in connection with his prominent endorsement.
I hope this comment isn't taken as an attack on HelloSign or Paul; Paul is known as particularly ethical (thanks in part to his suggesting Google's motto), and I'm sure he really believes what he says in the quote, and this does indeed look nifty. All the more reason to have a little footnote somewhere: So no one can blow this up by claiming anything is being hidden.
- guiseppecalzone 14y agoJoseph here, cofounder of HelloSign / HelloFax. Thanks for the comment. Paul Buchheit is an investor, so he got an early view of the plugin. We were especially interested in his feedback, since he created Gmail. As a company, we have made a conscious decision not to disclose our funding. But, for the purposes of transparency, we'd like to make clear that he's an investor.
- sharjeel 14y agoHow about changing the quote to "HelloSign for Gmail is awesome! I'm putting my bets on it!"
- jeromeflipo 14y agoSo you'll add this disclosure to https://hellosign.com/gmail https://hellosign.com/gmail?
- benatkin 14y ago> As a company, we have made a conscious decision not to disclose our funding. But, for the purposes of transparency, we'd like to make clear that he's an investor. I think the situation requires it. If you want to keep your investors secret you can remove the quote, otherwise you can just add that Paul Buchheit is an investor. You don't even have to change the markup. There is plenty of room to change it to "Paul Buchheit, founder of Gmail and investor in HelloSign".
- benatkin 14y agoI see this change was implemented. Way to go! https://www.hellosign.com/gmail https://www.hellosign.com/gmail This is auxiliary but it makes me more interested in using HelloSign. BTW I think it's even better for marketing this way. Now it's a double-endorsement.
- ForFreedom 14y agoHow different is it from digital certs or pdf signing.
- rdl 14y agoSigning with digital certs is an awesome idea but the technical infrastructure to make it work is pretty heavyweight -- it's more work for the first agreement than printing something out, signing it, scanning it back in. It's great once you have huge volumes of documents shared among the same people, but a very large up-front cost. For a lot of uses, someone is signing a single document to get signed up on your service, which is exactly when you don't want to add friction. The other benefit of the "fake handwritten signature" systems is they are a drop-in replacement for scanned forms in lots of workflows, and have legal standing (thank you fax machine).
- mapgrep 14y agoI actually didn't realize (or mean to imply) Paul was a direct investor. I just knew you guys were YC and knew Paul was a general partner in YC, so there was a real but indirect and not huge financial connection. Obviously the case for disclosure is stronger knowing that Paul is more directly invested (and it's good you're disclosing it). On the flipside, having Paul as an investor might actually be something worth bragging about -- you could be pretty bold with your disclosure if you phrase it right.
- SCdF 14y agoI didn't know. And now I do, and that quote seems incredibly scummy. You guys should really fix that. Or remove it entirely and go with another quote if you don't think you can make it work with that knowledge.
- joelandren 14y agoThanks for the feedback, we're updating the page now.