Sending, reviewing, and signing documents is something every business needs to do and is difficult to get right according to all the laws in every region served and all the workflow requirements that companies and users want.

These needs may be "unsexy" compared to another social media app but they drive major value in the corporate world while building strong sustainable businesses.

When these services first came out there were lots of technical hurdles to overcome re: web based PDF signing, but it's pretty straightforward to do nowadays.

I had our co-op built an open-source esignature API, that produces audit logs and has a similar user flow to electronic signature provides like Docusign, Hellosign, Adobe sign, etc.... It took him a little over 2 months to get everything working. Only real difficulty he ran into was scaling and stamping signatures on the PDF, as there wasn't a singly Python PDF library that had all the necessary features.

In the end he got it figured out though - for anyone interested / looking to implement eSignatures in their app, see https://github.com/this-is-ari/libresign - it's MIT licensed.

There are a few big benefits to eSignature software

• Your contracts are all in one place • It's easy to make new ones / send them out • You can see if the other person has opened it etc. • It's easier for them to sign

As an individual it's hard to see the benefit of a lot of this software in your own life, just like it's hard to see the benefit of a lot of corporate IT tools to manage two computers at home. But if you have 100 contracts as a company (which is not very many), having an centralised storage function, an easy way to create new ones (say for bringing on a new customer or employee), and analytics that mean you're not asking "what happened to the ACME contract last week."

A lot of enterprise SaaS tools make it easy to organize things that are simple at a small scale, but become very difficult when you increase things by 10-1000x.

I designed software for the AEC industry in the past. You wouldn't believe how engrained are signatures in their mental model for doing things. So much, that we once ended up builiding a functionality that required a scribble that would get attached to a finalized inspection.

Not like that was different from simply pressing a button and acknowledging some message. No cryptography, no standards about legally binding e-signaturees, nothing. They just wanted the scribble of the inspector attached to the form.

Signatures are basically a way of signaling approval, ackowledging something or declaring intent. I designed that feature and always thought about it more as a intentional friction to make someone think briefly before closing or approving an inspection.

My small business accountant worked this way. You can upload docs to their portal and e-sign the required contract or pay extra to have a face to face where you hand it all off and sign in person.

You have no idea what kind of computer or technical expertise is on the other end of situations like this. The value add by e-signature SaaS providers is minimizing the amount of time the accountant employees have to deal with helping people sign docs.

because printing a document, signing it with a pen, taking a photo of it, and emailing it back is a thing rich investors keep having to do.