YC has switched over to HelloFax and we love it. With 250 companies we have to deal with a lot of faxes, because every later funding round or acquisition means we have to sign stuff. So not having to deal with actual paper faxes makes a big difference for us.
I dont' want to come off as a naysayer - I can see this taking off - but I do have some real questions. Maybe someone can enlighten me.
Don't you keep hard copies of these documents? Just wondering. For us, if it requires a signature, we usually need a hard copy (original) for our records.
Since we are printing it out (or receiving via fax in the first place), it seems just as easy to walk over to our $40 fax machine and send it (via our $9/mo Vonage fax line).
Don't be silly. It's reasonable to plan for disaster scenarios, especially in this case where it's something important, and the probability of disaster is unknown. Do you look both ways across the street, even if you have the walk sign?
At least we heard about this one before it got acquired by and then shut down so that the founders could work on companion technologies in their new company.
Kudos to HelloFax, this is exactly what I've been seeking for a long time. I've been making do with MyFax's intermittent free trials but this service is worth paying for.
Having more functionality isn't necessarily better. Laser-sharp focus on doing one thing better than the alternatives just shows that you really understand what your users want and can sometimes make you stand out more in a competitive environment than having more features.
Guy Kawasaki always brings up the story of Tam's Art Gallery in Hong Kong. In one of the markets there, there are dozens upon dozens of shops selling all kinds of souvenirs from shirts to toys to electronics. But the store that gets the most business is Tam's Art Gallery, which is well-known and stands out because it only sells stone stamps.
That store example is flawed. They stand out because of a well-executed marketing strategy built around being a single-product shop, but in the end it is a matter of execution rather than of just not selling more products. In other words if they were selling three products, and if they were well-known, they would've still gotten most business.
The focus of my project is "laser-sharp" and streamlining things like faxes are just background processes that don't get in the way of the actual user functionality at all. Users take less than 30 seconds to set that part up and never have to think about it again. So if anything, in my particular case, it actually only makes me stand out more in the competitive environment as you say.
There is of course no way you would have known that, so excellent post otherwise. Everyone here should know that too many features can definitely break an application (coders' brains too lol)... the only time tons of features are beneficial is when they don't get in the way.
I love HelloFax. Really, I do. Started using it a few weeks ago, and discovered undocumented features that were EXACTLY what I wanted. Before when I ran a web dev company I had to sign contracts all the time, and this was my process: save from email -> word -> enter text / insert image (signature) -> print to pdf -> efax. Now I can do it via HelloFax in about 1 minute.
+1 We got a chance to use HelloFax very early on, and we never actually sent any taxes - we were using it to sign documents: vastly superior to my old way of scan&convert to PNG, open in Gimp, paste my signature, merge layers, convert to PDF... Ughh. So it's not just about faxing.
I second that. HelloFax makes what used to be a huge pain really easy. I've tried other options in the past (borrowing someone's fax, other clunky e-fax systems, or a trip to Kinko's) and I'm happy I'll never have to do it again.
So the only thing that differentiates it from the thousand-odd online fax services that have been around since the 90s is that it lets you skip the "photoshop my signature onto this image" step?
I'd say this would be a tough business to be in, unless of course you had the schmooze power of YC behind you. Amazing how that can transform a site like this that would otherwise live out its life in a little crack on the 3rd page of Google for "online fax" into a viable business.
(I suppose it also helps if all your competitors stop improving their products in 1998.)
As co-founder of an online fax service[1], I'll be watching HelloFax closely. It's a mature market, but most of the existing players are crappy, so I think there's a big opportunity here. It's a difficult marketing problem, though. AdWords advertising for fax related keywords is very expensive, and there are services out there that offer completely free faxes (even if they are cluttered with ads). Perhaps the signing functionality offered by HelloFax will give them enough differentiation to generate good word-of-mouth awareness.
Perhaps the signing functionality offered by HelloFax will give them enough differentiation
I think the editing capability is key. The signature feature might work for a device with a stylus but is difficult with a mouse. I opened up an image editor and wrote my signature with a mouse. The result wasn't legible (at all), and more importantly, it didn't match what I consider to be my legal signature. So users would probably need access to a scanner to upload the signature image.
Hey nhebb, Joseph here, co-founder of HelloFax. Check out the third option for signing, which is taking a picture of your signature and emailing it to sign@hellofax.com. Then, we automatically place it on top of your document. That skips the scanner :)
Yes, a thousand times, yes. This is great, I hate having to dig up a fax machine when I want to fax something. Unless I can find one at an office, I have to go to Kinkos, because I don't even have a phone line.
Every time someone asks me to fax I have this same problem. Though it is normally a paper form someone has given me to fax, and without a scanner I would still be stuck.
You can generally get away with using a digital camera to "scan" your document before "faxing" it via email, or with one of these online services.
Faxes, almost by definition, are just one notch this side of unreadable. People who are used to receiving faxes are used to receiving Faxes, so your crappy digital camera work with visible shadows and wood table behind might actually be a step up from the norm.
I am terribly sorry but due to the need to get a green image my company has forbidden the use of paper. It's totally stupid but my boss is a complete environment nut and I could get into real trouble if I broke the rules.
I sorry the fax machine is busted. We are required to attempt to have it fixed before we can get a new one, but the repair guy won't get here until Monday.
Big companies do stupid stuff all the time. Take advantage of this.
Sure that would cover 1% of the reasons I have to fax. Normally I am dealing with someone like a real estate agent or a government department or something I have to have witnessed etc I can't do that.
Possibly they could go with something along the lines of "Never have to find a fax machine again", as I see it useful for when your dealing with some large company one off with crazy old processes that require you to fax something through.
This is great. I have a fax/printer/scanner at home for this purpose, but I am lucky if I send 5 faxes a year. Plus, if I ever drop the landline, it won't work. I really like the idea of paying per fax. None of the subscription services make sense for a casual user. Good luck HelloFax.
If the casual user has to ever receive a fax, then I don't see how to get around a subscription, after all, you have to have your own fax number to receive a fax, right? There isn't some technology by which users could share a number and use an extensions as a discriminator, right?
If you could allow me to receive fax with the same kind of pricing, that'd be awesome.
Whenever someone ask me for my fax number, I start sweating. It rarely happens, but when it happens, I'm stuck.
Let me buy a "disposable" fax number for 12-24 hours for $2. I don't want to pay monthly for something that I rarely use, but I'd be happy to pay a flat fee to receive a document.
This is a very crowded and somewhat mature space, which makes for an interesting marketing problem. I'd love to hear about how you guys approach it in some future blog posts!
I use eFax today, and it's a terrible service IMO. Very sloppy interface. IAAL, and I'm constantly presented with the problem that hellofax solves. I'm current using RightSignature as a way around it, but it's not an ideal solution since I have to upload and template every incoming document that needs my signature. Otherwise, I have to deal with paper, which cramps my style,
Little misleading... it says "throw away your fax machine" but has no support for receiving faxes.
I'd love to use a service like this, even at $1.99 per fax, but without receive support (so sad that companies sign first and want to fax to you) it's no good to me....
we use it to send & receive faxes because we don't want to buy a fax machine :-)
I have a small 50 line ruby script that converts attachments from emails into outgoing faxes, and a 10 line ruby script that converts incoming faxes into emails with a pdf attachment.
You should try freeswitch instead -- the rxfax thing from Asterisk would sometimes truncate incoming faxes. Not sure why.
Congrats on the launch! HelloFax is a fantastic product, and an excellent example of launching an MVP when you have just enough features to make some group of users very happy.
The ability to sign documents within the app alone has been an incredible time saver. It makes you think "How is this not the default way to send faxes yet?"
That's one of the problems we solve. That's a big differentiator between us and other electronic signature companies. With HelloFax, the other party doesn't have to accept electronic signatures - just faxes.
We've actually used HelloFax ourselves to fax Wells Fargo.
Not to be a downer, but this brings to mind Fred Wilson's warning the other day about bridge-technology startups: "Most of the time they do really well while the transition pain [from old- to new technology] is high but once most individuals and enterprises have made the change, their business slowly disappears." http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/bridge-technologies.html
Will you guys have an API? Also I guess the problem for the infrequent user who wants to receive a fax is the id problem...Say for example that I want state farm to fax me a document. If you go with a pool approach and match by phone # expected, then there could be interceptions. The safest way seems to be to have a dedicated # (if it were always from a savvy source, you could have them post a unique code that you could ocr to identify, but you can't rely on that for the general case)....How much does it cost for that? The other difficulty is what happens if I use the service, get my state farm fax and stop using the service. If the number is then recycled, then if state farm decides to fax me something else without notifying me, it then goes to someone else (and may have data in it)...A difficult problem. Good luck!
Really one of the most useful startups I've seen in a while. I would definitely use their service.. but, unfortunately, I usually need to send faxes to non-US numbers and that is, at this moment, still not supported.
Still, great job, you guys, I wish you all the luck!
Fun fact: Where I live, to sign up for Apple's iOS developer program, I had to fax my personal/creditcard details to Apple. That requirement was so bizarre it took me a while to wrap my head around it.
(To their credit, I got a confirmation email from them in about a single day)
The article didn't mention it, but you can also sign and send the document via email (with the document as a PDF attachment). Or just download it as a PDF. We eliminate the print/sign/scan steps.
The last time I bought a house we had to fax the contracts back & forth (with the estate agent as middleman, of course) until we agreed. It's not like any of us want to use faxes, but sometimes you have to. And if we hadn't had a fax machine at work, I'd have paid a few dollars for a temporary fax number.
Looks like a promising start. Hope things go well.
D'oh. I was excited that I might actually be able to throw out my fax machine. I just sent a fax through HelloFax and the service seems to be very useable. I went through the interface trying to figure out how to add a credit card to my account and determine how expensive the service is. But they don't have pricing yet.
My small business uses Packetel for incoming fax-to-email and a real fax machine for outgoing faxes. I would love to get rid of the fax machine and the stupid copper phone line it requires.
All I have to say is, Thank God! I look forward to using this the next time I have to deal with sending a fax. And once you can receive faxes and do everything in one place...For the dedicated fax #, do you have any plans to do this for infrequent users who don't need a regular #?
I love how this could essentially be used as a way to bypass physical signatures which are still required by some painfully-useless laws. I shall keep this in mind if I'm ever required to fax something.
We're great for when you need to fill-out or sign a document. You can upload it (we support all common file types), sign it, fill it in, and fax it within minutes. Much faster than printing, signing, and scanning.
I hope you get to give it a try soon. Let us know what you think!
Is it possible to print directly to the fax service? That's what we've did once for a very similar service: Provide a server using the Internet Printing Protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Printing_Protocol) that clients configure as remote printer (this works fine in Windows and Linux, we didn't test OS X at this time). The things that a user has printed are stored in an "outbox", where the user can just click on an item and specify where it should be sent. The advantage of this method is that you don't need the upload step and that you are able to support any application (without requiring users to convert the data to PDF first).
You know the "Try it" in the learn more section, I found it a little bit annoying that it takes you to the homepage instead of back to the learn more section.
It will work to send a fax to a US number from another country, right? I only need to send 2-3 faxes a year, and currently do it from a dial-up modem on an ancient computer over my US VoIP line that I have overseas. I very rarely need to receive faxes, so sending is all I'd need. This would really take the pain out of those occasional faxes!
Neither did I send any faxes in the last few years nor did I use any other online fax services, so I refrain from commenting about your site but please do change the favicon to your site logo. :)
You know what - I concede. I had a 2nd look, and I don't think I fax more than 20 pages per year, and with your editor, there is zero reason not to use you over faxzero.
I'll have to test out the validation process, but on 2nd glance, it looks good.
