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

Post by staticassertion » Sat, Nov 27, 2021, 11:58 PM UTC

rvnx wrote: post #93

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Post by mcintyre1994 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

crummy wrote: post #37

dsizzle wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Post by mistrial9 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

kingcharles wrote: post #95

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…

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-d…

Post by klipt » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

crummy wrote: post #37

dsizzle wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Post by IshKebab » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #78

jjirsa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.