The best startup ideas come out of something everyone hates, says this founder

Sunil Patro and his wife, Ananda

While working as an engineer, Sunil Patro came to the conclusion that his dream was to create his own product. Now, this is a common (and usually fruitless) realization, sort of like making a New Year’s resolution to change your life – one of those fine thoughts that doesn’t usually get anywhere.

For a bit, Sunil meandered around doing the usual thing. He switched between jobs, trying to feel things out, and, one day, in that sweet spot right between a job and his next offer, he decided to take a trip to Cancun, Mexico. While on the beach, he received a job offer from a mobile application company based in Palo Alto, California. He then spent forty dollars over the next ten hours stumbling around Cancun speaking broken Spanish in order to find a shop with a printer where he could get a physical copy of the contract, sign it, re-scan it, and fax it over to the company.

For some, this moment would have been an irritation that ended when they returned to the beach to resume sipping on their Coronas. For Sunil, the promise he’d made to himself about creating a product weaseled its way into his brain.

Over the next few years, Sunil’s idea took flight. In 2009, it landed in Coimbatore, India, where Sunil spoke with a developer about an app that would allow people to sign documents on their cellphones. Eight months later, the first version of SignEasy was launched in the app store.

Next, he quit his job, got on a plane to South America, and backpacked through the Andes Mountains while working remotely on the product with one other person – his soon-to-be wife, Ananda. Things moved fast, and, soon enough, Apple featured the app in its “What’s Hot” section with SignEasy being sold for US$2.99 on all app stores. Sunil and his wife decided to move back to India to officially focus on turning their product into a business.

They applied for the third batch of the Microsoft Ventures accelerator program, expanded their team, and worked on their business model. Popularity picked up, with the first few clients being small businesses that were starting to use SignEasy for their consultants in the field. Those consultants would then recommend it to their other clients, and, within the next few years, SignEasy would go on to be featured on both test devices in Apple retail stores and its iPad campaign, launch a web application for desktops, and open a beautiful, glass-walled office in the middle of scenic Koramangala, Bangalore. This is where I met Sunil Patro.

Now, the story sounds simple enough. Keep an idea in the back of your head, and wait for the right moment to hit. For most of us – and I speak mostly for myself – the hard part is waiting, and then waiting some more, and then a little bit more after that. “You just have to go for it,” says Sunil in response. “Sometimes, you just have to choose something and do it.”

As he explained it to me, it seems like that’s the plain and simple tagline for SignEasy: a couple’s eternal pursuit to find the best way to sign documents online.

Chasing the signature

The application revolution was exciting because it meant the introduction of lightweight services that didn’t take up too much space. It’s also helped create one of SignEasy’s most important qualities. “Our journey in the last two years has been to provide a compelling, cloud-based solution that’s mobile-centric and simple enough for anyone to use,” Sunil explains. “This means that it should not have all of the weight of a conventional enterprise solution.”

Ideally, Sunil explains that SignEasy will one day reach a point where people can share functionalities and use app extensions to make signing documents as easy as possible. It’s already somewhat there with iPads – Apple has released screen sharing for apps as a feature – but Sunil explains that they eventually hope to standardize this offering across all platforms. “People shouldn’t have to import a document into our app, or vice versa, or whatever. It should exist as a platform. SignEasy is here to complete a workflow.”

Sunil’s keen eye for market trends is another major driver behind SignEasy’s success and it’s one of the few Indian-made products to become really successful in global markets. Despite this, it’s important to remember that it’s an easy product to replicate. Other competitors include HelloSign, a freemium service that has a slightly higher subscription pricing plan and also charges when customers use its API. Still, Sunil explains that the game of differentiation is one that’s long-term and strategic. “Do you know how we got on the Apple store?,” Sunil explains. “We waited to see what features they were releasing with each new update and added those into our product. When Apple announced a fingerprint detector, we implemented that into our app, and waited patiently for Android devices to release that feature. The way to keep yourself different is to keep improving your product, with a long term roadmap.”