An entrepreneur was recently asking me about an example employee handbook and what to include in it. After immediately sending over a copy of ours, I emphasized that the best thing to do was to use EchoSign and have each employee digital sign the current employee handbook once per year. EchoSign makes things so much easier, faster, and more maintainable compared to traditional signing of documents. In the United States, an electronic signature is viewed as the exact same thing as a normal signature in the eyes of the law (more background on electronic signatures).
Startups should use EchoSign for all contracts, and here are some of the most common:
- Employee handbooks
- Customer deals / purchase orders
- Partner agreements
- Stock options
- Investment docs (the last angel round I invested in was done entirely through EchoSign)
E-signature and programs like EchoSign represent a much more efficient way of doing business and should be embraced by startups.
What else? What are your thoughts on startups using EchoSign for all contracts?
David Cummings on Startups 
Hi David,
Compared to paper documents yes EchoSign is a huge time saver. OTOH when we used it at Ignition Alley I felt it was overly complex and annoyingly difficult to use (maybe it’s gotten better.)
Recently though Charlie O’Donnell blogged about Docracy which isn’t exactly the same but has me far more excited than EchoSign. Check it out:
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2012/9/13/why-docracy-is-the-most-revolutionary-company-of-our-time.html
-Mike
Those who are preparing for the future may not like an ad hoc signing process and could benefit from a more enterprise approach like Yozons Open eSignForms (www.yozons.com), as the SaaS costs are similarly low for small users.
We recently went through a real estate transaction, and our agent used Docusign for the whole process. https://www.docusign.com
Brilliant ideas, each one of them, but I’m not sure of the application in my country – Nigeria. Our local laws may not regard electronic signing equal to normal ink signatures. But I’ll have to find out.
This can be a huge time saver.
Great article! However, if you are looking for an easy-to-use and a huge time saving digital signature service which happens to be part of a complete document management platform, GroupDocs is a beneficial alternative. Have a look here:
http://groupdocs.com/apps/signature
We’ve used EchoSign for more than a year. We have it all tied into our site. We pay about 375 per month and have found it to be MORE than worth it time and time again.