If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeements.
Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
41–50 of 348 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#42My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…
> DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat
It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tech monsters.
The market loves these types of stories, right up until the growth inevitably declines to/near single digits and then they get a boring eBay valuation (circa ~2003-2019).
The short of it is, a lot of the future returns have been pulled forward.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#43Oh it's a long story...where to begin? It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy. Fast forward: Subprime crisis Bernanke says "subprime is contained" Subprime was not contained Wheels come off in 2008 Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions Bernanke propose…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign. Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
This is my favourite lifehack. I don't own a scanner and signing docs can be a pain without it. A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.
If you own a smartphone Adobe's free document scanner is quicker and easier to use than a normal scanner. And it's totally fine for legal documents like contracts (having just used it for that)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#45Enterprises generally don’t want or care about open source software.
Unless it pertains in some way to their core business, which for the most part will only be the tech driven ones.
And something like documents signatures is so inherently based on trust that unless it was built by a large company and made open source.
Instead, the pathway to trust was decades of slow growth and bootstrapping (of trust) from a small startup DocuTouch, acquisition, investment in legal analysis and lobbying, a few key early partners, etc... And then you find yourself as the defacto trusted vendor.
Note that I'm putting aside questions of security etc. Assuming no wide-scale high-profile breach or fraud, actual security in this space is secondary. Legal acceptability is more important, especially since any moderately complex contract is going to have other stages and processes that ensure the correct parties are the ones signing the contract. Or at least be no worse than similar risks IRL.
Legally binding, court-accepted levels of trust are simply orthogonal to the goals of open source software. However, we're now at a point in the acceptance of digital signatures that a startup that happens to open source its code could still disrupt the market. The most around any such business would be the expensive legal expertise and legal bills required to defend their products in court when they are inevitably questioned in contract disputes or possible frauds.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#46My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…
Because slow governments didn’t manage to set an open standard for what they require so that every little court can verify if the verification approach is valid, so once again there’s a need to trust a brand name, rather than having fair competition.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign. Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
This is my favourite lifehack. I don't own a scanner and signing docs can be a pain without it. A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.
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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#48Working on an open source alternative, email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com if you want to try the beta. We're the team behind https://forwardemail.net Everything 100% transparent, open-source, privacy-focused, with fair pricing
While I personally have no direct use for it, forwardemail looks like an amazing service.
I'm just wondering about the commitment that you will never increase prices - that seems kind of unsustainable? Even if cost goes down over time, inflation tends to move pretty fast these days, quickly eroding your real earnings.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#49Unrelated to open source, but DocuSign is literally one of the examples i list when explaining why the tech sector is over bought. They've tripled their market cap since the beginning of the pandemic, and while there is some merit to work from home, their moat is laughable. There are plenty of alternatives to DocuSign that should make share holders terrified... Adobe Sign, Panda Docs, HelloSign - i wouldn't even bet…
A better business would be to sell an API that is legally sound for signing documents. Then everyone could implement the functionality in their own tools as a feature.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign. Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
This is my favourite lifehack. I don't own a scanner and signing docs can be a pain without it. A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.
Print-to-pdf usually does the trick. (The issue is that the signature is done on a second layer, not any issue about noise.)