HelloSign. Great product, every bit as good, if not better than DocuSign. Every bit as valid and accepted. Very inexpensive. Their support, however, is literally the worst support experience I've ever had.
Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
91–100 of 348 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#92Oh 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…
What scam companies are worth trillions?
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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#93My 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…
That's not true. A court will accept emails and documents attached to them. scanned, name typed, or signed with ms-paint - all valid.
I had the case where one person was signing PDF using the annotate / drawing feature. Didn't work in court, the court claimed the contract was invalid (it was the situation of a founder of a company that was raising on a convertible debt).
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#94> 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 c…
> Even verbal acceptance is legally binding
...for some contracts. A large number of jurisdictions require written contracts with signatures for contracts that meet various criteria. These rules are often based on or descended from the Statute of Frauds [1], so that gives a good idea of the general kind of contracts that usually have writing and signature requirements.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#95My 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…
All the court filings I've ever made electronically I've used the (stupidest fucking) system, which is called Conformed Signatures. You basically just type your name and put "s/" in front of it. That's supposed to tell the court you've got an original signed in pen and ink stashed in a drawer somewhere, but the reality is that no lawyer I know of actually has such a thing.
https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...
I've never actually seen a proper esignature in a court document. Most court record systems are so outdated that it's honestly an enormous win if they allow you to view, upload or download documents over the web at all.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#96My 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…
Maybe the wrapping is glorified. But the contents of the document is the most important IMHO
The value DocuSign offers isn’t the display of the original document. It’s the claim that someone “signed” it (by ticking a checkbox) and that somehow this is being accepted by the courts.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Docusign effectively does this with all of its integrations. If you run on Salesforce, it's really well integrated. And if not, they have a great API. You can programmatically generate an https link and send that to your customers as part of your existing workflow. You email them a link or even just open up a new tab / overlay a browser. They can log in with various SSOs, they sign the form, then come back to the nex…
And there we go - why DocuSign is a 50b business. Sounds like OP doesn’t understand the complexity.
Can you replicate DocuSign if you were given 50B USD ?
Well, then you know if it's overvaluated or not :o)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#98Earlier 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?…
Some of these may have been difficult when DocuSign was founded, but I'm not sure anything you've mentioned is technically hard today.
FWIW I sign a lot of documents (CEO of a company) and I use HelloSign/ Docusign interchangeably. Honestly, there's 0 meaningful difference, except I found HelloSign a bit easier to onboard, and I'd rather support them since I think the entire market of "sign a fake piece of paper" is the dumbest fucking thing ever and I hate that there's a company making shitloads off of it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
He thinks Tesla is a complete scam for one thing... Probably not a good idea to spend time on any of his comments.
Hm ok, well while I don't think Tesla can really be called a scam I definitely think it's overvalued
Can we talk about Dogecoin and similar ?
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
> Even verbal acceptance is legally binding ...for some contracts. A large number of jurisdictions require written contracts with signatures for contracts that meet various criteria. These rules are often based on or descended from the Statute of Frauds [1], so that gives a good idea of the general kind of contracts that usually have writing and signature requirements. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_fra…
Thanks! Good to know.