In June 2015, while working on our 1st start up, where we worked closely with Trainers, Corporates – small enterprises to large enterprise and as a part of our business model there was a need to send quotes, get contracts signed, send invoices and manage payments to trainers & training consultancies. We also had a small inside sales team and a network of country associates through whom we were managing the business.

Many a times, Corporates finalized trainers from different geographic locations; mostly from different countries too and trust was the key aspect in these deals for which a solution which could handle all the above in a single process was the need of the hour. Securing all the signed contracts was a legal requirement and chasing clients for payments was turning out to be a big pain point. Accountants of clients used to delay the payments stating so many reasons ranging from - they didn't get the invoice to manager not viewed it or approved it.

Our sales team sending quotations were also not generating the required response which got our sales team’s morale to an all-time low. Their sales quota were not being met consistently. A detailed evaluation with one of my clients, now also a good friend, who also had this same pain point, gave me the answer. We found that employees (sales teams, to legal team to accounts team to in fact any team member) even now use out dated ways of sending business documents with no life in it. They have to use multiple solutions for different vendors to send mails. Send invoice, collect payments, securing content to signing and managing contracts. And sadly we didn’t find a single such system which could do all this.

I saw this as a big need and the idea made me go restless until I decided to take my core , super charged team for an ideation break and the agreeable part was that we wont come back until we have the basic idea of the product which can address this pain point. What a better place than Goa in India could we decide for this activity and luckily in exactly 4 days we could get the basic product idea and how that can be scaled up to a bigger product . We came back after a week ( last 3 days were one of the best days of our lives ) with an idea which we knew can change the way the current, dead, lifeless document management industry works. “A humanized document management platform” with the ability to collect esignatures and payments with a strong focus on document security was born. Sounds great. Yes, we are excited too and happily using it for our business in a big way now.

Is the product gonna be local or global was a question which never came to our mind as we were clear from day 1 that this product is gonna be a Global product considering the need and gap for such solution globally. We incorporated the company in the US and set up the development team in a tier 2 location based out of Kerala. India.

After 2.5 years, where are we now?
Sometimes a simple business need can be the reason for the start of a big business idea and slowly in 2.5 years we have built an amazing end to end platform to handle entire sales productivity. effyDoc is now just one of the modules of the effysales suite.

What does effyDoc do ?

effyDoc allows you to send humanized documents with your live audio or Video recorded live to each slide which gives a feel of as if you are in front of the client and explaining the document. The video can be of anything you want to show to the client including working of a part of the machine you are selling or sharing actual progress of the under construction building of yours to a worn out spare of your car. Use case can be anything and any client of any industry will be happy to use this. We can also collect signatures on this humanized document by selecting the location using a simple click and assign signers to that signature. A pay Now button added will link the payments to your bank account directly or collect payment via paypal . Detailed analytics empowers the sender on what happened to your document the moment you hit SEND which earlier was not possible.

Our Mission

We are on a mission to change the way companies use and work with documents. Documents are a very important tool used by Companies of all sizes but sadly the way it’s used hasn’t changed at all. Professionals sending business documents have no idea on what happened to the document the moment they click SEND. Lot of time is wasted to even get approvals due to the effort of taking a print, signing, scanning and mailing the document back. Collected invoices from clients is again a painful process and delayed payment also hampers the organizations growth.

Our Plans - We are now aiming to be a big name in this space and bootstrapped from day 1 in spite of some tempting offers for investments that came our way during this journey. The reason for not accepting any external investments was to build what we believed is the best solution with no pressure to sell whatever was made. We build 6 different apps( currently launching one with all the other under testing phase and will be launched in next few weeks) which can cater to different organisations and save them the cost of not buying multiple products from different vendors which doesn’t talk to each other too. Our focus is making the Sales resource super effective and productive and not just given him a CRM tool which helps in setting the process in place but with less focus on the person who is filling it.

We did a beta run with few select clients and the response we got from them was really encouraging. I am hopeful that this will help your business too. I would encourage you to try effyDoc and let me know how you find it. You can mail me on mahesh (at ) effysales (dot) com

effyDoc is part of the effySales suite and product of effyBiz Inc