HN Explorer

From Please Review My App to Success

72 points by usiegj00 ↗ HN
Thank you to Hacker News readers. You helped us take an idea 428 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510656) to market and ink the biggest deal in our space (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Farmers-Insurance-Deploys-prnews-2031715293.html?x=0&.v=1). You rock.

7 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 27.7 ms ] thread
percept
Cool. Please: more success stories on HN!
patrickk
I'll second that. Congrats guys, great to hear this stuff. Inspires all the "dreamers" here including myself ;-)
glhaynes
Congrats!

Which suggestions did you implement? Were those decisions right, in retrospect? Likewise, which did you consider implementing but ignore? Any regrets?

usiegj00
+ Needing a sample document. That was key. We hit the nail on the head in focusing on end-user experience--which is what you saw when signing the first document. But users wouldn't know unless they actually signed something--so this suggestion was on the mark. At the same time asking a user to sign felt like heavy engagement AND was a little hard for a throw-away test of our funnel and feedback here aided our final decision for the successful test. In fact--our current signup is eerily similar to the well-pointed HN comments.

+ 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.