Foxit eSign (formerly known as eSign Genie) is a secure, web-based legally binding HIPAA Compliant e-signature solution for businesses. Foxit eSign makes it easier for businesses to generate documents, deliver them to signers for electronic signatures, and archive them.
Customers with multiple team members all around the world can collaborate on a single contract document using Foxit eSign's APIs. Their APIs are used by existing web, server-side, or native applications to load and save Foxit eSign information. A common use case for their APIs includes generating documents server-side and sending them automatically.
As a company that frequently sees its APIs being integrated into custom applications, Foxit eSign understands the need to ensure that developers can easily adopt their APIs with minimal effort. This is why they offer SDKs in multiple languages, including .NET, TypeScript, Ruby, and Python, to make it easier for developers to integrate their API in a wide range of environments and technology stacks.
Challenges for Foxit eSign and their customers
Jorge Euceda, Software Engineer at Foxit eSign, has been with the team since they started building SDKs. He shared how, initially, a small team created multi-language SDKs and developer guides by hand using their API specifications to guide them. However, maintaining the SDKs and guides with each API update required much of the team’s time.
“We didn’t have time to maintain the SDKs and didn’t have too many resources. We would have had to hire a bigger team and onboard them”
- Jorge Euceda, Software Engineer at Foxit eSign
The team also realized that the developer guides didn’t provide users as much value during the evaluation stage. They found customers wanted to experience their eSign APIs to understand the capabilities better and confirm they met their needs. Customers had to build a proof of concept during the evaluation stage to test the APIs - an effort only some were willing to put in.
Foxit eSign’s business driver was to help customers move quickly from evaluation to production.
They wanted to solve customers' main friction points while evaluating Foxit eSign’s APIs and provide confidence that building for production could be done with reliable and up-to-date SDKs in their preferred programming language.
Adopting APIMatic to generate SDKs and interactive API documentation
With the Foxit eSign team working on multiple projects simultaneously, it was evident that they needed to reduce the manual work of creating the documentation and SDKs. They could hire more resources and spend time getting them up to speed or go for an automated option that took away the pain altogether.
While the developers at Foxit eSign did write the sample code for use in documentation, the maintenance pain encouraged them to look into APIMatic. According to Jorge, a significant driver for this decision was that APIMatic’s developer portal with built-in try-it-out functionality, code samples, and SDKs all came from a single source.
“APIMatic has made our demos easier…it has fundamentally changed the way we demo our product”
- Jorge Euceda, Software Engineer at Foxit eSign
Faster API onboarding and better customer demos
Introducing APIMatic into Foxit eSign’s API landscape has changed how their APIs are adopted. It has drastically reduced the time to get onboarded with the API, and any prospect evaluating Foxit can quickly make a contract and call their endpoint directly through the API code playground during demos.
“Our role lies in providing clients with the appropriate guidance to streamline their development and integration timeline. With APIMatic, this time has been reduced from six months to two months.”
Moreover, providing SDKs in multiple languages gives their customers the confidence that if they have to build something custom in-house, Foxit eSign APIs have the tooling available to integrate the SDKs into their environments easily.
“Just having SDKs available [in multiple languages] for our API closes deals”
- Jorge Euceda, Software Engineer at Foxit eSign
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