Automating student attendance with EduSign

Like many good ideas, EduSign was created after an episode of personal discomfort. The solution automates student attendance and is used by huge institutions like Harvard, Stanford, Université de Paris and more.

We talked with Elliot Boucher, co-founder of EduSign, to know more about the story of the company, the challenges they had to face and how to promote change in a traditionalistic industry like education.

When did you come up with the idea of EduSign?

Dylan and I, Elliot, were in business school where we had to sign attendance sheets. After losing a sheet twice in a day, we decided to build a solution for our courses.

Studying the subject brought up more demand and issues to fix than we thought. Therefore, we built a real SaaS to handle attendance, e-signature, surveys, alerts and more.

Your client base is very impressive, with Ivy League colleges and institutions that are respected worldwide. Do they give you feedback or leave suggestions of other improvements that can be done?

Yes, our clients are the best! They do not hesitate to give us feedback and suggestions. We work closely with them, even though everything isn’t implemented, many solutions are coming from our client’s mind.

To encourage feedback we tell our sales and customer success manager to ask for it and be very friendly. Finally, we have a public roadmap, where our clients can vote for the features they want most.

What was the biggest challenge since the creation of the company?

We had the chance to get a very high demand for Edusign with the pandemic… Since it’s way harder to sign a piece of paper via Zoom. Therefore, our biggest challenge has been to scale the product and team with the demand. We definitely made many mistakes and we would build a more robust architecture and have hired a bit faster from the start if we knew what was coming.

What integrations EduSign has? Can I work with other tools and maximize the potential of all the tech solutions?

Edusign offers a modern Rest API. Therefore, we can connect to pretty much any software. At the moment we connect with the ERP, LMS and other industry specific software of our clients. However, we also propose integration with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Make and more. Edusign can be connected in a few minutes with thousands of software now.

Do you see your solution working in other industries and contexts?

We already do ! Even though we are strongly branded for the Education sector, we have clients using Edusign for all kinds of purposes. From real estate to events or HR contracts. We may offer a product with a different marketing for other industries in the future. However, our main focus remains the Education sector at the moment. Edusign is built to have an edge with unique tools built specifically for Universities, training organizations and Education in general.

EdTech really changed an industry that is very traditionalist and stuck in its own ways sometimes. Can you give us a glimpse of what are the next steps in your view?

The education sector is definitely moving at its own rhythm, with a tendency to take the hard and long way of doing things.

Nevertheless, we are seeing a lot of movements toward EdTech and SaaS. Actors in the space are realizing that there are a lot of hidden costs to building and maintaining software by yourself. What made sense 30 years ago does not now with modern solutions available in the cloud. Therefore, I believe that in the future we will see a lot more SaaS. The next step is to help higher education institutions patch the software together. Integration and partnerships are going to be the key.

That’s why, at Edusign, we do not see other EdTech solutions as competitors but partners. Win-win-win.

What are EduSign’s plans for the next 3-5 years?

I can’t reveal everything. However, our mission remains the same. Edusign eliminates paper, saves a lot of time and brings a better experience for everyone, even the admin staff.

We started with attendance. Edusign now has powerful analytics, smart alerting systems, e-signature, surveys and powerful integrations. You can imagine what could come next.