How digital signatures save nerves and money - proof from practice: Radim Studzinski (#192)
Martin Hurych- před 3 dny
- Minut čtení: 27
Still signing papers? Then it's quite possible you're burning tens of thousands a month at your company for nothing. Or time, or nerves, or filing space.
Doesn't that sound sexy? Exactly. Paper is no longer safe, no longer fast, no longer efficient. We've just gotten used to it. And as it happens, convenience is the biggest impediment to progress.
DigiSign is proof that a signature can be not only digital, but also a strategic advantage. In this episode, Radim Studzinski, Sales Director of the Pardubice-based company that is conquering even the biggest players on the market, demonstrates how the signature process can be digitized from A to Z - not only for banks, insurance companies or Rohlik, but especially for small and medium-sized technical companies. Maybe even yours.
You'd be surprised how much unnecessary work you do. And how much you can automate. From business contracts to HR documents to re-signing thousands of contracts in a matter of . And what's the best part? You don't have to be a corporation or an IT firm. You just have to want to. And pick one document to start changing it all.
In this episode, you'll find out
This isn't a theory. This is the reality that someone else is living in companies right now instead of you. the episode - and you'll see that the pen no longer belongs in business.
"Pick one document and start with it. If the digital signature proves successful, move on with the company. Just don't be afraid to get started."
Radim Studzinski | CSO @ Digital Solutions, s.r.o.
How digital signatures save nerves and money - proof from practice
(transcript)
What motivates him to run a marathon in under 3 hours?
Martin Hurych
By the time we get to the company, the position and the digital , I've had a bunch of runners here already, try to run occasionally too, but now I have someone who has a goal of running a sub-3 hour marathon. What's driving you to do that?
Radim Studzinski
After 40, I guess such goals come. Some people will buy a watch, some will buy a convertible, some will buy a motorcycle, but these things don't mean anything to me and I've enjoyed running, so why not make this a goal. enjoy the journey, I train four times a week, I have a systematic plan from my coach Milos Škorpil and if I can imagine in my head that I can do it, I believe that one day it will work. I started only relatively recently, six months ago, to train consistently and I feel that there is a shift every day.
Martin Hurych
Fingers crossed, because as an amateur I had the feeling that either a pro or a non-professional could do it in under 3 hours.
Radim Studzinski
I'll still be an hour behind the very best in the world, so still plenty of hobby runners will confirm,
that anyone can run under 3 hours if prepare systematically.
Martin Hurych
In fact, I have people coming in here that under 4 hours is an accomplishment.
Radim Studzinski
We each have a completely different goal and the achievement is to complete it. Of course I respect everyone who completes it in some way, but this goal is a challenge for me.
Is he the face of DigiSign's success?
Martin Hurych
I'll keep my fingers crossed and I hope you do. Radim Studzinski, head of sales, business
Director, Head of Sales, the face of DigiSign's success in the market over the last 4 years. Is it possible to put it like that?
Radim Studzinski
I don't consider myself a face at all, we do it very much as a team, the team is absolutely great and I think the product does that. The developers are at such a that the product is very much liked by our customers then on the technical side and I just talk about it nicely and then the people themselves want it. So it's not about any one face, nobody stands out in my opinion, there's no star, I absolutely don't consider myself a sales guru or anything like that. You're always moving, you're always learning new things, you can't fall asleep and use 5 year old methods, I'm interested in new things, but that's what makes DigiSign the right team.
Where has DigiSign grown in the last 3 years?
Martin Hurych
Sometime in the early days, about 3 years ago, Ondra Riha, the founder and owner of Digital Solutions, the company that develops DigiSign, was here. Back then we talked about the company, the reasons behind it and a lot about the technical background. Come tell me what has changed in the company since then? Where has DigiSign grown to?
Radim Studzinski
The company almost doubled in size. When I was there at the beginning of the product, there were 30 of us, there will be almost 60 of us, so even Ondra has to strategically solve some other spaces in Pardubice so that these people can fit and have a place to sit. What's changed is that we've added hundreds more clients, when I was there from the beginning we had one paying client. It was very hard to get that product through and it took six months to even sell it to other clients, but there were a lot of dead ends. Then we had to go down the route of some clients like different love brands that gave us a reference, and then you're just throwing those names around and telling these other potential clients who's all using us already.
Now we have a pretty large quantity of inbound leads and we have to qualify and evaluate correctly who is the potential customer and who is the person who just wanted to sign 2 or 3 documents. That's also quite a challenge and it's not exactly easy either. So the process is always changing, I had to dig through it a lot in the beginning and now we're getting quite a few of those leads ourselves because the product is simply visible. When you sign a contract with someone, that person sees that it was DigiSign and if they liked it user-wise, why not just call me and say they want it too.
How to survive the first stages of a trade?
Martin Hurych
When you've got something new that you believe has potential in the , but those people don't see it yet, 's awfully hard and I meet a lot of marketers at that stage. What motivates you at this stage to stick with it and keep going
forward?
Radim Studzinski
You have to believe that it will. From the first meeting with Ondra Říha, which was planned for 2 hours, we talked for about 6 hours, you recommended me by the way, so thank you very much again. I'm very happy there now, I'm very happy there and it just clicked. I didn't believe technologically in the product because I didn't know it well technologically, but I guess I trusted the Ondra thing there's no other way to do it. I'm doing it relationally, I'm doing this business with people and I'm doing it with those people as well.
So, even though the first success wasn't there for the first 3, 4, 5 months, I kept going, I kept showing it to 3, 4 potential a day, until it gradually dropped in every now and then. It's about some consistency, I guess I would compare it to running again. The goal of running a marathon in 3 hours doesn't happen in a year, it's a simple process that if you stick to it and you have those incremental steps in there, it's bound to fall into place. Everybody who goes into a business, even if I don't have a stake in that business, has to believe that it's going to happen or they wouldn't be doing it.
Why don't companies still use digital signatures?
Martin Hurych
So let's look at the digital signature itself and the current situation. When you work with Ondra, you perceive the product, the competition, the situation on the market, you have it somehow loaded, somewhere in the moment you're helping. Then I'm slightly out of it, and for me personally, for example, digital signature could be considered an adopted technology because it's hardly talked about, so that's why you're here. On the other hand, I'm always blushing when someone sends me something digitally sign. So what is it that I don't think the vast majority of companies, at least in my bubble, still use digital signatures?
Radim Studzinski
It's probably about some of their priorities. You've got a lot of tasks at work that have some priority, and if you've been signing those documents somehow for 30 years in the company, it's probably not going to go away if you're still signing on paper for another year. Of course we see that it's a huge time saver, money saver, but those customers don't know that. If we translate this into some numbers, especially companies that have several branches in several places in the Czech Republic and send the documents by mail and then have to store them somewhere, the price for the signatures is a thousand times higher than if they do it through DigiSign.
Martin Hurych
I sign 3-5 papers when I go to the garage on the way in and sign another 3-5 papers on the way out and no one has ever told me why that is. When I see companies digitizing for example the circulation of documents in the company, the signature is never there. It's always that we have digitized, in the final we print, sign and scan again and store it somewhere.
Radim Studzinski
I wouldn't exactly call it digital. A printed document that is signed, then scanned, then sent back, is not a legally enforceable document. It's better than nothing, but it carries exactly the same weight as if you emailed the person back, yes, I agree with the price, get to work. Even a contract can be done verbally, it can be done in writing by email, but it should have all the elements in there, so that document should be covered by those certificates to get it right.
You mentioned the car shows, of course that was one of the verticals we went into right from the beginning. I've reached out to over 100 dealerships straight away and I think we've got just purely units of clients using DigiSign there. When those people are sitting there at that dealership, they have some business hours there, and that central printer is churning out those papers for one crown, I don't think those owners quite see the savings.
Martin Hurych
Every service technician I go to gets annoyed by this question, because he objectively drives dozens of kilometres and at least half of them are to the printer. When I researched further, the archive is the size of a tire warehouse, which means if you threw it away, you'd have double the business. Don't tell me those people don't see savings there, there must be something else where the dog is buried. What do you think the perceived most critical places are, why do you think people are rejecting it?
Radim Studzinski
That's why I'm also here, to let them know that it's not just about the signature alone. Even if the printing on the printer costs you a penny, there's still the storing of those documents. I, if I want to track down a contract going back historically 2 years, I have to go to some warehouse, some file cabinet, and I have to be in a specific location. Those people don't realize that they can have that document stored somewhere in the cloud in some high availability and right from a mobile app. I can full-text search it by name, contract number, birth number, whatever.
Time is the most expensive commodity and we can tell these people three times, but they have to figure it out for themselves. Either it's my priority or it's not, and if I have this auto repair shop and my value-add is fixing cars, that documentation may be somewhere in the middle. I already mentioned the quantity of those inbound leads, we're talking to the ones that have that interest, we're getting 20 registrations a day, we know who's on our site. You've had a few people here directly from Imperium, so tools like Merk, Leads we use routinely and there's nothing easier than if someone's already been on our site in the pricing, product section, to call there and ask right away if we can help with that. Car dealerships aren't there yet unfortunately, but maybe they will come.
Which companies are driving change?
Martin Hurych
So what are the types of companies that come to you? Let's go to the bigger ones that are more interesting to you, because I understand that in the small ones there may be enthusiasts like me or companies of 5 or 10 people. What medium-sized firms are driving this change today?
Radim Studzinski
We target SME and above, of course we also like bigger corporations like banks, insurance companies, leasing companies, we have them in our portfolio. Of course, I find it best to deal a company where there is a single owner or a single management that knows exactly what it wants and can make decisions very quickly. A corporation is a little bit more specific, there it's also a question of having to go through a security check, through compliance and a lot of departments that can have a say in it. It's a lot easier for those non-corporate clients. You just send them some references, you just send them a statement from a reputable law firm, I send them our ISO certifications, which we invest millions of crowns in, and that's enough for those companies. Because when you see the references there, when you see the big firm types already using it, there's no reason not to trust it.
What is the adoption by corporations and the state?
Martin Hurych
I would like to discuss here one or two typical examples where this can be deployed. Because I find that the moment I don't know that I don't know, I don't actually know what I can afford, so we'll definitely come back to that. What do you think is the adoption of digital signatures by really big companies, let alone the state? Because I feel like they actually have to show us that it exists. The moment all companies and banks switched to Bank ID, it was no problem to start using Bank ID on a lot of different services. When is this going to come in with digital signatures?
Radim Studzinski
I've gotten into state government x number of times, so one more client and I'll have my first one, not quite counting those smaller municipalities where they were using it for those citizens, but for the state then it has to be a priority. For state employees, you've got some departments, there's x FTEs that have some agenda, they can print it out and they have to decide for themselves that they want to deploy it. You've probably got a lot of business owners here, but you should also invite just people from state government to ask them what makes them not have it. The business owner will tell you unequivocally that it's a savings and they can quantify it, they're a data-driven company, but the state is not.
Why is a digital signature more provable than a manual signature?
Martin Hurych
It's true that if you've paid for someone's MS Office training, you need them to use it now and go to that printer to print. So let's go to those specific cases. I guess we're not going to talk about not having to worry about any legal hassles. I even heard somewhere now, and I don't know if it's true, that a digital signature is more provable in court than a hand-signed thing.
Radim Studzinski
If we take the signature in the documentary form, then the court is usually a literary expert. He will say that 20% of the document was signed by Martin Hurych, 20% was not signed by Martin Hurych, and the other 60% he will say that you can't tell if you signed a little differently. With the electronic , it depends on the particular type, whether it is qualified, guaranteed, plain, all the information about the signer is already there, whether his identity is given or not. Even with very ordinary plain electronic signature, where you just need a two-step verification, email, phone, it is proven that you signed from that email and you verified yourself with that phone number. Your identity is not given, but if this case went to court, you could defend yourself by saying only that you didn't sign because someone hacked your phone or your email at the same time within those 5 minutes.
But the likelihood of that is very small, and if that judge sees that you made the phone call before and after and the email is obviously yours, then it's impossible to lose and it's basically 100%.
But when we have clients like leasing companies that finance cars worth CZK 2 million, a simple electronic signature is not enough. At the very least, they will use authentication through the bank identity, where when I log into online banking, my identity is already clearly stated. The bank sends exactly the data that I click in DigiSign and I have the exact process and workflow from A to Z defined and then the identity of the signer is there. So it always depends, and we advise those clients as well, what that particular document is worth to them. If it's a handover protocol, if I'm handing over a phone, a laptop to an employee, I can just scratch that somewhere biometrically on an iPad. But some leasing companies don't just finance cars, they finance farm machinery or jets for completely different money, they know the client, it's remote, so they'll use that qualified certificate or that authentication at least through that bank identity.
Are we going to sign biometrically?
Martin Hurych
You said biometric, meaning by hand on the device in question. Does it have any biometric validity really like Face ID and stuff like that?
Radim Studzinski
If it was biometrics as biometrics, it would cost a whole different money to be able to measure the speed of the pencil and the inclination of the pen. In my opinion, and in the experience of those clients, it's pretty much abandoned, because usually with that type of signature on that tablet you're really signing documents that aren't important. Usually it's a manufacturing company somewhere on the shop floor, there are workers who don't even have a smartphone, they have button phones. If there is one tablet and someone is operating it, then when I hand that worker a workwear for CZK 1,500, he only has somewhere in his subconscious that he has accepted it and that he has signed it. Such an under-limit claim will never be litigated, but then it depends more on the other documents, where I can really lose much more than the CZK 1,500.
Martin Hurych
I did learn in preparation for this podcast that they've been experimenting with biometric stuff out there. Is that something that maybe you're mentally heading towards as well?
Radim Studzinski
So far, we're keeping it as user-friendly as possible, so I just need to click on that signature box and then verify in some what the client is requesting. With the biometrics stuff, it's also a lot more complicated than that and we've got usage on the order of an order of . The most common one is the simple electronic , where those clients just need that two-step verification, also because 5% of economically active people still have that qualified signature. The vast majority of employees do not have it because they do not need it. With biometrics, I don't think I would go into that completely, and we're not even in that We don't want to specialize because we believe in the simplicity of that signature just by clicking that button. Then that person can authenticate themselves using 100+1 authentication, whether it's via SMS code or I can upload personal documents there.
Martin Hurych
There, just abroad, they give, for example, a fingerprint of the phone, that you don't have to give a code, but you just use is already in the phone and it is considered to be already verified by someone else that it is of sufficient quality.
Radim Studzinski
I think it's still going to shift. Nowadays, if somebody has a qualified , they had to go to a branch of some authority like the Czech Post, and they verified it once, and that's enough. One day it would be great if I could identify myself once based on whatever my personal document is through some authority that would be worldwide based on some pupil, and then everything else would be tapped on some Touch ID, Face ID. But honestly I'm only presenting to clients the stuff that we have in production because the roadmap is relatively full. I'm not quite the visionary that Ondra is, I'm comfortable in that company that he's setting some direction, here are some numbers, this is what we need to deliver, we're moving here and we're going somewhere.
Where specifically does the bank use digital signatures?
Martin Hurych
Knowing him, I'm sure he's got it in there somewhere. We're being listened to by a bubble of owners and CEOs of small, medium and large companies in the engineering or technology sector. Pick something from what you have in your own hands where you can show us what a masterpiece it is. Where it can not only be deployed on one, two, three contracts a quarter, but where I can realistically harness DigiSign to completely digitize my documents and so on?
Radim Studzinski
It was originally developed that way so that the product, as it is one of the youngest platforms, would be as configurable and variable as possible. Within an envelope, which is a set of documents that any number of signers sign, I can completely set up the workflow, who sees what, who doesn't see what, who signs what, who doesn't sign what. I can set up who verifies which way and what type of signature signs the document. It's very simple, but it's more about taking it in terms of even some workflow and that automation. Typically, it can save 2, 3 FTEs a month for those companies because what those people used to do the old-fashioned way on paper, DigiSign can do automatically and then those people can do something else.
Raiffeisenbank now needs to re-sign almost 2 000 contracts with employees. I'll talk about exactly how it works, the specific functionality, the bulk mailing. They can upload some CSV, some Excel into that DigiSign, they unstick those documents for signature and now you just see it coming back from those employees from different parts of the country. That process used to take hours and days and nowadays the bank has it back in relatively a week or two. When they pilot tested it, they sent out 50 envelopes, and they had those 50 envelopes signed that very day, and then we got calls from the people at the bank saying that was absolutely great and they were thrilled about it. What I love about it is the excitement of those people, I'm interested in the technology of course, but then I love the interaction when I show someone something they've never seen before in their life and they're excited about it. To have it built like most marketers purely on the numbers and to have a target here and make a bambillion or two, that's not quite it for me, but that feeling of happiness comes from that feedback from those customers.
Then for another client, for example, for Rohlik, together with HAVEL & PARTNERS we created such a product in a product, we call it AutoSign. Then the person doesn't even have to click on the signature, on the signature box, because the signature is still a manifestation of will, I have to at least click on the signature box when I want to sign something. But when the legal person, in this case Rohlik, uploads their qualified electronic seal into our DigiSign, the document is covered not by our seal, but by their seal. This means that one of the statutory bodies actually came to a branch of the Czech Post or they usually came to them and obtained this seal. So the qualified electronic seal is for legal entities and qualified signature as a certificate is for natural persons. These things are always evolving and shifting and that HR manager doesn't have to click a hundred times a day when recruiting couriers when they have a peak at Christmas because everything is done completely automatically. Even the courier is basically able to generate the contract in some portal when they enter their details and the contract comes up on the button.
Martin Hurych
That means he has to verify, but the company believes it's processed so that I never have to click again.
Radim Studzinski
It's right. It's all about the counterparty's signature when I agree to the contract. That's how they do it at Czechitas, which was one of our first reference clients, where they work with a lot of freelancers and trainers, and a lot of times you don't even know who's going to be training that day. The trainer through some self-service portal has some login details, some email, some password and he can generate and sign the contract automatically himself. It's already been perfected there again, that then through the API they configure the process so that when the document is signed, they send those documents through that API to the specific software. It doesn't have to be downloaded and taken care of .
How does a digital signature save months in the store?
Martin Hurych
Since we're both salespeople, I can think of two nice examples of how to let a new client confirm the terms and conditions without having to touch them. For Bulk Mailing, I also thought of letting them confirm new price lists when things get more expensive, or re-negotiating the whole thing. What you're saying is de facto that merchants can do business and not have to become postmen who go around the country for 3 months getting contracts signed.
Radim Studzinski
That's right. Primarily still the Bulk mailing has a great use in HR, where the companies can sign the pink slips. You can set that process up so that even the employee fills in some text field there that you don't know about them, I fill in the kids' birth numbers and I get 2,000 employees back. It doesn't have to be dealt with and now I'll just be happy for the listeners to do the math on the time that it costs them to do these regular mailings, whether you mentioned the business process, changing those price lists and it's true that the salespeople don't even want to hear about the paperwork. It's tedious paperwork and it even bothers me just to send that contract to the client with that DigiSign, although I'll send a link to some shared Google Doc and let those lawyers do whatever they want there. We just accept it relatively quickly, turn it into a PDF and send it to them for signature. I can't even imagine doing it any other way these days, and frankly I don't even have a pencil anymore. When I've been somewhere for our oldest son's class meetings, I've had to sign off on some participation in the mountains and had to borrow a pencil because I don't have one, I don't need one.
What other examples are they proud of?
Martin Hurych
I'm the same way. One thought that keeps coming back to me that someone said here in the Zagazhen is that if you want to get your CRM right, don't let the salesperson write into it. This is a classic moment, I pretty much manage the sales process myself. What else you got in there? Can you think of anything else where we could use digital signatures as owners and directors of mid-sized businesses?
Radim Studzinski
There are a lot of these use cases, but we like to help with setting up the process, setting up the workflow so that the client can see the savings. If there's a company that needs to sign 5 documents a month, I don't think it matters if they sign with DigiSign or some foreign American platform. We feel very strong about the automation and setting up that whole process. That's really the value-add of even the Digital Solutions folks that involved in that, because they'll help those business owners set it up so that there's a definite savings.
Martin Hurych
What I'm seeing is that the people who are signing digitally are going to do something in Word, drag and drop it somewhere, somehow wrap it in those envelopes and send it somewhere. You guys are strong on automation. So how does that work?
Radim Studzinski
I'll tell you another case with a leasing company. The owner of the company usually has some kind of qualified signature, has to open the document in Acrobat, put the signature in and then email it to someone. It's terribly convoluted, terribly complicated, but if you think of a leasing company where there's a client, a leasing company, a dealer, and a guarantor, and there are, say, 10 documents in that envelope, it's configured exactly who signs in what order and how it's verified. So even with a qualified signature it is possible to sign the document directly in DigiSign. It seems to me as the third in line, I don't have to watch anything at all, I get some notification via SMS, e-mail and we have a mobile app. These are the moments where if I have to sign 10, 20 documents somewhere as a business owner, I'm not going to be manually tracking it down in an email somewhere. I log into DigiSign and the mobile app, I see that I have 10 documents to sign here, I have some sort of pre-approval process there, if some B-1 manager approves it, I basically don't even have to read it anymore. Some types of documents I can read, some I can sign right away. That's the expediting, that's the workflow, and that's the automation. That combination of setting up the order, the types of signatures, the authentication method in conjunction with the mobile app is totally then a gig for the people who actually use it.
Martin Hurych
I assume that the documents can be sent to DigiSign from the outside also automatically.
Radim Studzinski
The question is how the document is created. It must have some parameters, it is usually signed PDF, other attachments may have some other extension. When we are integrated in some software, CRM, DMS, there on the I can just select which documents I want to sign, even if its for example with a WOR extension, it can be converted to PDF and sent for signature. If I click on a specific two signers in CRM, Raynet, I already have the information, email, phone, and I don't have to manually click on it within the web application.
Martin Hurych
I was just going to mention that this is a beautiful example of how it can be done automated from start to finish. What else are you in, so that maybe people who are already using you and don't know it's you, from now on are more proud to sign with a Pardubice company?
Radim Studzinski
I how you say Pardubice company, it's those guys and girls from Pardubice and from nothing now slowly grows a relatively very good product. I stand behind the team and the product. I'll mention HR
tools, such as Pinya, which manages x amount of employee documentation, from employment contracts to various pink slips. With the native integration into these types of software, there is no more manual work, and I know that if I want to re-sign some types of documents with an employee, I already have templates created in advance and again, at the click of a button, it goes out for signature.
After the document is signed by all parties, it's sealed, encrypted, sent back to Pinya or Raynet via webhook, copied to x other people, as the client sets it up.
Imagine the HR director, the CEO, he signs the employment contract with the employee who is second in line. He can throw some attachments in there, so logically when I start I'll put in some highest educational attainment, high school diploma, university diploma, attach a medical report. If I have a company car, I'll throw in a copy of my driver's license, and that's all the prospective employees will do before they start. That person comes to work on the first day and there's no more of that hour-long ceremony where somebody in those companies always takes you in, here's the contract, here's two copies. That's an hour gone x2 and now the number of employees is 1,800x and now you can multiply that and you can easily get to that number, what's the savings there. Working with attachments, working with different text fields, form elements, where that employee checks some checkboxes, what they agree with, what they don't agree with, is now commonplace.
Martin Hurych
Does the mare go barefoot? Does HR in Digital Solutions use all these features? The standard thing is, that the ones do it usually get it wrong.
Radim Studzinski
Of course, I can't imagine it being any other way. So we have a couple of clients, really big corporations, joint stock companies, who sent us the contract in the mail and then said they hadn't seen process yet, they didn't know how to handle it. So we have about 2 or 3 contracts hanging in a file cabinet somewhere, but because the client wanted it and because they're big and they're paying, we figured we'd go ahead and do it.
Where do we stand on digital signatures vis-à-vis foreign countries?
Martin Hurych
You've opened up potentially another revenue line here, so if you're interested in this and you have software development and you'd like to have this feature directly in the software, then contact Radim. We're slowly coming to the end. I'm wondering where you think we stand with digital signatures relative to other European or even non-European countries.
Radim Studzinski
With the emergence of banking identity, this has shifted a lot. We also work in partnership with them, we have some very intensive regular business meetings, we deal with joint usage times and I think that the bank identity has also helped to push these things to the general public. As they promoted it, for example, on a prime time show on Czech TV, people have already realised that it's absolutely normal.
Signature and identity are two things that are linked, but we are still in a situation where I think 99% of people don't use the digital signature. It's still the number that we have half a million companies in the Czech Republic, companies limited by shares, joint stock companies, and commercially the process is a little bit more complicated because we have to answer to those clients to make sure that it's really OK. There's a lot of technical and legal issues and whether we're talking to a particular decision maker or a user, everybody's interested in something completely different. Once those clients have those answered, they're not afraid to deploy that DigiSign. That's maybe the brake, if we were 150 people in the company and we had a 100-person sales team, it would be able to grow a lot faster, but as that conversation comes out, we'll be a little bit bigger again and I believe that sales team will grow now.
Martin Hurych
So do you have any information about what it looks like in neighbouring countries or in the States?
Radim Studzinski
We're definitely not somewhere like Estonia, but honestly I'm fully focused on DigiSign right now, being with my family, with my kids, running and maybe studying some sales methodologies.
But I'm honestly not that interested in those other countries personally, so we're starting primarily in the Czech Republic and we have a few clients in Slovakia.
Martin Hurych
I wasn't referring to your expansion. I've seen again in the last few days how incredibly ahead of the curve we are in some areas of the digitalisation of life. Buying something, getting it the next day, trying it out, returning it in one click, incredible, which is why I keep wondering why, for example, adoption isn't exactly in that digital signature.
Radim Studzinski
Ordering something and having it in a box by the next day is fine because it's a B2C business. But we're doing it B2B, so we can't universally target everybody with some kind of advertising. That's why even though these types of services are more prevalent within an e-commerce store or any other similar business, s where the power is.
Martin Hurych
You think it's just a marketing thing? Because I think that adoption is often driven by ease of use and my personal motivation to do it. There's no question about ease of use,
because I sign those 3 contracts per quarter with DigiSign and it's easy. But I'm interested in the motivation or lack of motivation of a bunch of companies to deploy it. How do you interpret that?
Radim Studzinski
I can't explain it. It's simpler, it's not an expense, it's an investment, I don't get it. I personally like to test some new apps I install, if they don't suit me I delete them, but I like to try new things. If something works for me and helps my business and makes my life easier, then why not use it, plus it's not about money at all. Of course, when we're in some tenders, the price plays a big role there, but I don't think it's very good when you compare the different products. Just yesterday I was on a call with a client where they were testing 3 platforms, he said our DigiSign is great, Mercedes, but they decided to go with Skoda because then he said the price and we won't go there because it doesn't make sense. If that client really cares about that price, I'd be happy to wish them good luck and explain that if in a year or two something goes wrong, let them come, our offer will still be valid. But you have to see the savings there, and I guess I would compare it to software development. If you need to develop a website or if you need to develop some software, that's a different company altogether. A garage company of two students will do something twenty times cheaper than the big players, who in turn are suitable for, say, banks. Garage companies are suitable when we need to make some simple website that is static, not that many people go there and if it crashes, nothing happens.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If I'm the owner or director of the company we've been talking about, and now we've got him so excited that he's thrown his pen and pens off his desk and forbidden himself to print anything for his anymore, what should he stick to, what should be the process to get started?
Radim Studzinski
It is ideal to start with a pilot on a specific use time. As a business owner, you have 30, 50 types of documents that are circulating somehow on a regular basis, I'll pick one type of document, create template for it and start using it. Once that proves itself, which it does very quickly, I'll add a second document type. For example, we can start with merchant contracts. It's already expanding itself in those companies after that. When the salespeople see that they've signed a document in some in HR, even if the primary inquiry is from HR, the salesperson will already say they're not going to sign the contract manually, they want that too. But it has to make sense. So that those people don't drown in it, we do these mini workshops for them where we train the users calmly how to use it, even though we think it's very intuitive, so don't be afraid to start. It's about, when we present it to those clients, to create a task for them within a week, within 14 days, create an account, send 5, 10 envelopes, and then we'll get a call to see how they liked it. To present something to somebody without some follow-up, then if you call there in 14 days and nothing happens, that wasn't the priority. So we have to take them through that route with the onboarding as well, so they find that it's as challenging as sending an email.
Martin Hurych
I think don't be afraid to start is the god end of this podcast. Thank you, Radim, for being here and for sharing with us the current state of not only you, but digital signature as a whole in the Czech Republic. Thanks for that.
Radim Studzinski
Thanks so much for having me, Martin.
Martin Hurych
If we have motivated you to throw out the signatures now and forbid yourself and perhaps your immediate team of collaborators from signing any more documents by hand, we have done our job well with Radim. At that point, I'll ask you a favor, if you liked us, give us a like or subscribe and consider sending this episode to a friend, friend's friend, or anyone who could possibly use it. I'll reiterate my invitation to subscribe to the newsletter, which at this point already has over 1,400 people like yourself. I have no choice but to keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thank you.
