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Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

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Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#141

Post by olyjohn »

collyw wrote: post #71
suzzer99 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been impressed by Docusign the few times I've had to use it. And I generally hate 95% of the software I come across. Everything seemed to snap into place, was perfectly intuitive. That stuff is easy to get wrong, as evidenced by all the crap out there.

It's not managed to annoy me, which is quite impressive. I never really considered Docusign anything special for usability, until your comment, but that's because it gets out of your road enough not to notice it.

And to their credit, I've been able to sign documents on Linux via Firefox without hassle. Half the time, some shitty SaaS apps will just sniff my user agent and block me.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#142

Post by hotpotamus »

alehlopeh wrote: post #135
hotpotamus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many programmers did Microsoft need for 1 million OS installs vs 1 billion? The reason software can be such a money maker is that the marginal unit costs are close to zero.

Why does Microsoft get to be evaluated in 1994? How many people are working on their OS right now?

I don't know the answer to either of those questions. But I don't think the economics of desktop OS distribution have changed all that much in the last 30 years. I'd imagine the marginal unit costs have gone from very cheap to basically nothing now that physical media is a rarity. If modern OSes take more development effort (which seems likely), I don't think that changes the economics.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#143

Post by lazyasciiart »

23B1 wrote: post #128
subsubzero wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like both sides think this, Engineer - Our company is so good word of mouth should be enough to bring in sales, if we need any more lets look to AI for a solution. Sales - We bring in the money, all engineers do is cost the company money, we could probably run the app/develop the product on a skeleton crew, can't wait for AI to make those jobs obsolete! Truth - Both engineers and sales are hugely successful to…

As a sales guy, I can assure you we value the development of good product over all else. It makes our jobs a hundred times easier.

Yea, but at most companies that doesn’t mean valuing all the devs ;)

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#145

Post by fragmede »

What to recalibrate on, is that this is what a well funded $580 million revenue per quarter org looks like. You could certainly build a leaner org, with just 50 engineers, and way fewer features, but it's not going to be the industry stronghold that DocuSign is, not without some sort of competitive advantage (like when the Internet was new and you're competing as against companies that haven't digitized yet, but even then).

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#146

Post by giantg2 »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth…

Lawyers likely make a large part of the organization too. At least compared to other similar size companies.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#147

Post by giantg2 »

conductr wrote: post #129
greggsy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget that signing is primarily a legal activity. Every jurisdiction handle it differently, and it’s important to be able to articulate what your product can and can’t do. This was particularly relevant during the dark days of COVID lockdowns and quarantined, where those laws and practices were tested to their limits. They likely outsource a lot of that regional work, and do so on an ad hoc basis, but they sti…

Isn't the user responsible for the "Docu" part and they only facilitate the "Sign" part? Point being, it's up to the users to figure out if signatures on a digital platform will be legal or not in their jurisdiction. DocuSign probably has some fine print explicitly stating they're not responsible for improper use.

It's likely they still have to deal with law suits, at least until the judge rules on the fine print.

It wouldn't surprise me if they have legal/expert support for certain cases. The last thing you want is some dumb client losing a case that creates precedent which ruins your business model.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#148

Post by leros »

Products get complicated when you're trying to be #1 in the world.

It might take you a few months to slap together your MPV with a couple of devs, but several years later you need a 10 person team to work full time on the location autocomplete function because having your location autocomplete be 10% better than a competitor makes you millions of dollars.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#149

Post by Spooky23 »

conductr wrote: post #129
greggsy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget that signing is primarily a legal activity. Every jurisdiction handle it differently, and it’s important to be able to articulate what your product can and can’t do. This was particularly relevant during the dark days of COVID lockdowns and quarantined, where those laws and practices were tested to their limits. They likely outsource a lot of that regional work, and do so on an ad hoc basis, but they sti…

Isn't the user responsible for the "Docu" part and they only facilitate the "Sign" part? Point being, it's up to the users to figure out if signatures on a digital platform will be legal or not in their jurisdiction. DocuSign probably has some fine print explicitly stating they're not responsible for improper use.

They do more than sign, they manage the process and lifecycle of agreements.

You can buy a turnkey loan solution for example from them.

Re: Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

#150

Post by Spooky23 »

lupire wrote: post #66
DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny to see how little value devs and engineers put on sales people. Enterprise software success depends highly on sales people. Startup success depends highly on marketing. At previous company, SAP flew the CEO and a few others to Monaco for the F1 race. Interesting to see we had SAP and PeopleSoft implemented at the company.

Why can't a computer program automatically buy tickets for F1 and send them to prospects?

The F1 tickets are about access. Your pal the sales dude buys you scotch and yaks about SAP.
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