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Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#71

Post by thesausageking »

Enterprise customers are very sticky. Once a large company has standardized on a tool like Docusign, it's very hard to get them to change because it involves changing the behavior of thousands of people. No CIO wants to deal with that. It's not worth risking the new tool won't have a feature a group depends on, the CEO doesn't using it, or, after switching, it has an outage. At this point, Docusign has reach the "No one got fired for using Docusign" threshold, so it will be around a long time.

And now that they have a huge user base, they're going to use that push out whatever new products and features they can. And because document signing is used by basically every department in every industry, there's a lot of things they can add:

https://www.docusign.com/products

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#73

Post by [deleted] »

neilyio wrote: post #65
ryanSrich wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good reminder that HN is a horrible place for investment advice. Rarely, very very rarely, does the tech being differentiated ever matter. At Docusign’s level, it’s much more about sales and marketing. They’ve been the market leader for years, and even if they slip to 2nd or 3rd place, they’re still a massive multibillion dollar company. I think engineers and technical people often have a hard time truly gr…

Curious… what helped you cross this conceptual gap?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#74

Post by throwawaysea »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My 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…

Why would they be the only one ‘accepted’ in courts? For instance, when you buy a house you often have to use an escrow service to hold the down payment while the exchange of ownership takes place. Often, these escrow companies are just small local outfits. They are nevertheless trusted with a certain degree of authority and accepted as a neutral facilitator of these transactions by our legal system. In the US many (all?) states license escrow agents to make this work. There should be a similar system for licensing electronic signatures either at the state or federal level. Otherwise the acceptance of one private party over the other amounts to a government-granted monopoly, which goes against how a free society should work.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#75

Post by TimTheTinker »

codingdave wrote: post #10

> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF. IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptanc…

IANAL either, but this is correct as far as I know. Even verbal acceptance is legally binding. In fact, technically, everything you say is legally binding in some way or another.

But it's not about whether something is legally binding, it's how much deniability you might have in court, and what sort of evidence is admissible in the first place.

These legal hurdles make it easier to establish that someone accepted a contract based on a signature than based on spoken words. That's why a notary public or at least a witness is usually involved when you sign papers involving potentially large liabilities against yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#76

Post by ajhurliman »

jjirsa wrote: post #61
adventured wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tec…

The “extraordinarily difficult to do very well” part gets ignored here by most people DocuSign’s feature list is huge. It’s not just overlaying a signature on a doc. It’s a massive and complex app that most people will ignore or trivialize, but that shit just works. Mark all the signature locations? Multi-user? Chained dependencies? Recording and redownloading later? SSO Audit / identification Salesforce integration?…

I just went through the trouble of researching eSignature companies, and many of them have roughly similar feature sets. We ended up going with HelloSign because their API is a lot more robust.

I wouldn't agree that DocuSign's continued success is because of the maturity of the product.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#78

Post by Aeolun »

jjirsa wrote: post #61
adventured wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tec…

The “extraordinarily difficult to do very well” part gets ignored here by most people DocuSign’s feature list is huge. It’s not just overlaying a signature on a doc. It’s a massive and complex app that most people will ignore or trivialize, but that shit just works. Mark all the signature locations? Multi-user? Chained dependencies? Recording and redownloading later? SSO Audit / identification Salesforce integration?…

In terms of features, all the things you listed aren’t technically very impressive.

While I recognize their value, a potential competitor could replicate them within a reasonable timeframe. What they couldn’t replicate is the brand name.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#79

Post by blaze33 »

jlund-molfese wrote: post #64
blaze33 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember an HN post of a program doing exactly this: adding your signature to a pdf and altering the document so that it looked liked a scanned one. Could have been handy a while later but I never managed to find this post again... It was an open source program hosted on Github FWIW.

I remember a post like that too! Was it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408

Looks quite similar, thanks for sharing ! Appears I most probably remembered this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653 about Falsiscan!

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#80

Post by cowpig »

mtlynch wrote: post #5

I haven't found free, open-source solutions, but HelloSign[0] is a decent solution if you only need to sign documents a few times per year. Their free tier supports three documents per month. They make it look like they only have paid plans, but you can sign up without a credit card for a free tier. [0] https://www.hellosign.com/

I use hellosign in my business, it works fine.
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