HolyFax!

We’re well into the 21st century, the internet is ubiquitous, everyone has a smartphone and I still need a landline, a fax machine and paper to send an important document? Ridiculous.

That’s where HolyFax! comes in. A pet project turned startup idea that my good engineering bud and I cooked up in our free time.

The service lets you send a fax over the web from any modern computing device. Snap pics of your docs with a cameraphone or choose files to upload from your computer, enter a fax number and hit send.

Voilà! They’ll be miraculously printed out of the receiver’s fax machine on the other end, all for the simple rate of one dollar per page.

I loved this idea because despite their antiquity, offensively beige appearance and distaste for trees, faxes are still important for one key reason: they’re more secure than email.

Our goal was to take the ugly duckling called faxing and turn it into the slick, communications-age swan we knew it could be. A faster, easier experience than finding a physical fax machine or using other online faxing services.

Taking bad user experiences and turning them on their head is beyond satisfying, and when the bar is this low, it’s a layup.

The project had good potential as existing players in the online faxing space required subscriptions, creation of an account, adding and saving a payment method or purchasing ‘blocks of pages to fax’ just to get started. They also suffered from clunky workflows and incredibly dated UIs none of which were mobile friendly.

We saw an opportunity to put ease of use and our customers first by foregoing all of those dark servicing patterns in exchange for a modern, breezy solution for those who just needed to send a single, quick fax with no strings attached.

HolyFax! was also fun to work on because, as its co-founder, I was able to have complete creative control over every aspect of the brand and marketing, coining the name, designing the logo, crafting the value prop and writing all of the content myself.

I also got the chance to do all of the front end work, writing the markup, CSS and even the jQuery for the document upload UI. Plus, since we’ve built it, I’ve never had to use another fax machine, which is the best part of all.

Want to see more? Check out the live site.