DIG SOUTH caught up this week with Joe Floyd, CEO and founder of InsureSign, hot on the heels of the company’s acquisition by Formstack (a past DIG SOUTH Tech Summit sponsor and speaker). Floyd launched the super-simple, e-signature solution in 2012 after working for nearly 20 years in the insurance industry. Today, InsureSign is trusted by thousands of companies across a wide variety of industries. Get the low down from the CEO perspective as Charleston tech meets Indianapolis tech in the form of a merger between two highly-complimentary companies.
Describe InsureSign as a product and the effect it can have on a client’s business. We provide a platform to quickly and securely capture electronic signatures on any type of agreement or document.
What it’s like to grow a tech company based in Charleston? What are the advantages and challenges? Charleston has been fantastic for us. There is a wide range of tech talent here, and we have hired our entire engineering team locally. Also, our sales team is based in Charleston. It has played a big part in our success in attracting and keeping talent.
What advice would you give a new tech startup trying to launch from the South? Any big life lessons you could share? Get to know the landscape, and the people who have been in it for a while. It was very helpful to me to get to know several people locally that could either lend support or advice, or knew someone who could. It saved a lot of time when I could get to the correct person quickly when we needed a new hire, sales coaching, or even just office space.
Has deploying technology into the workplace of other companies also transformed the way you work internally? Probably. We get to see what other companies are doing because we need to give good advice on how InsureSign can benefit them. It gives us exposure to how others are solving challenges and I’m sure we take something away from every interaction like that.
What will the Formstack acquisition mean for InsureSign’s future growth strategy, and how will it impact the InsureSign team and company structure? It is all positive. We will be able to service larger customers with more complex needs, and the number of workflows that we can address will go up exponentially. The other “Formstack family” products are all beginning to work together well and we are excited about being a big part of that. We will have a lot more resources available as well, enabling us to focus on improving our product in ways that it was hard to get to before the acquisition.
Will Formstack offer any new tools or platforms such as data collection, form integration, or tech methodologies that will help InsureSign in the near-term? Yes, we are rapidly integrating both with Webmerge (another acquired company) and Formstack core products. We are moving rapidly to full HIPAA compliance and can handle document/workflow use cases from SMB all the way up to Enterprise clients. Lots of good things in the works!
InsureSign is relevant to so many different industries. How do you decide which markets to tackle first and what’s your penetration strategy? Our initial focus was on the insurance vertical, because that was my background – insurance premium finance. It is still our largest industry, but e-Signature regulations are the same across all types of businesses. Moving forward, we will go where there is the most room for growth of course – healthcare, real estate, etc. But we are designing our products to be able to fit perfectly with any company that is ready to utilize electronic signature.
Are you focused more on the South than other regions? Florida is our largest state customer-wise, but California is rapidly gaining and we are in every state and Canada. So, no specific regional focus. We will also likely begin to build a stronger overseas presence as well.
Are sustainability or social impact factors in your current or future business model? Not specifically, but it is worth noting that we have a positive impact on reducing the use of paper in a lot of cases. Even today there is a lot of Print, Sign, Scan, Shred going on in tons of companies. We want to replace all of that with a cleaner, more compliant way of getting documents signed. Hopefully one day the “paper” in “paperwork” will be somewhat of an anachronism.
