The Facebook Effect (and Business Apps)

Q3 was a strong quarter, with a strong finish in September, for EchoSign.

We celebrated crossing 1,000,000 users -- and added another 78,000 in September.  At that rate, we'll add another 1,000,000 users in less than a year - 1/3 of the time it took us to get to the first million ;)

What's happening?  Well it's not that the entire world is deciding overnight to move to e-signatures.

Rather, it's something you might call The Facebook Effect.  The Facebook Effect (a term we're coining here -- attn Richard Lewis) is where an application that you started to hear about a few years ago begins, seemingly years later, to become more relevant, more common, more mainstream -- and then shortly thereafter, dramatically expands its footprint.

Where were you when you first heard of Facebook?  For us, it was in late 2004 from college students.  However, it wasn't clear how relevant it would be to us in the business world (Facebook wasn't even open to alumni, let alone the general public then).  Around early 2007 we started to receive more and more invites from tech-centric business partners as Facebook opened up, but we mostly ignored them.  By 2008, our aunts, uncles, grandparents, bosses, partners and customers were all connecting with us on Facebook.

And all the time.   

The Facebook Effect is similar in business apps, but it takes longer.  Viral exposure is measured in months, not minutes.  Small businesses in particular are often laggards, too busy to investigate new web services.

But then it hits.  Years after you first heard of it, you start to hear a lot more.  And then, a little later, it's all around you.

Signing contracts, closing customers, on the web.  It's happening.  The FaceBook Effect will be here in 2010 for web signatures.

Comments

[twitter.com/cncpartners]

I agree totally and am sitting here in my condo in San Francisco going thru our new MicroCredit website section which will use your app inside of Salesforce for our business in the Philippines!

All our users are on Facebook as well and are demanding it from us this next year.

~Clint