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Comment by jjirsa | Hacker News Reader

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?

Contract generation?

Orange site minimizing huge successful company because they care about one feature seems super on brand.

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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.

Technically hard isn't the only kind of hard. This is one of those spaces where a lot of people have a lot of complicated processes, and they will be pissed if you don't support their particular approaches. Writing the code wouldn't scare me off this market, but the work to discover the full extent of the domain and the user needs would sure give me pause.

Seems a bit of a moot point, though, as I'd expect most customers here see this as something they want to just work without problems, so they'll be heavily biased toward known major brands. It's sort of like the space for cloud computing in that way. Usually, my most important criterion for a cloud vendor is that their shit will stay up forever, because my whole goal is to not think about a bunch of things.

> Technically hard isn't the only kind of hard Yup that just about sums it up. The reason FAANG are so big is mainly legality, as well as PR, and having a big pocket to wait out the competitions. Nothing is really on technical merit in the real world.

Even if we grant this as true, a $50 billion valuation implies that they'll return 3-5 billion in profit at some point. Their revenue right now is an annualized ~2 billion. So they've got to at least 2-3x their revenue while increasing their operating income from slightly negative to 50% of revenue.

As for the features, of course it's not whip it up in a weekend. But MS/Google/Apple are all in a position to put out a competitor that integrates into their platforms. It probably won't put DocuSign out of business but would cut into their margins.

When the fed is printing money, valuations don’t matter. Just for reference, Rivian is a $100B company with no revenue and potential orders for 50000 cars that they only plan to make until the end of 2024.

In most cases , investors only care about growth. As long as they continue to see double digit growth, the stock will continue to grow . E.g TSLA. It is only when the growth stops that the stocks starts to crash - e.g. Peloton and Zoom .

Imagine being able to generate docs like these using the office suite , google docs or libreoffice. Bye docusign.

You can already digitally sign documents in LibreOffice (including "qualified electronic signatures" issued by European countries). I would be surprised if you can't do it in Microsoft Office too.

However, qualified electronic signatures are harder to manage than what eIDAS simply calls "electronic signatures" (i.e. anything you put your name on): DocuSign value-add is a third-party to record an audit trail (time and date, IP address, assurance signatory has access to a particular email address...), basically, someone with no interest in misrepresenting facts about signatories to a document.

There's a lot of legislation around this too, and that can be costly.

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.

Lots of technically quite simple things are enough work that people will happily pay a company you do it. Did nobody here learn from the famous Dropbox comment?

The real lesson from Dropbox is that things that seem technically easy to implement are in fact bedeviled by all sorts of hidden little gremlins, and finding and killing those gremlins is valuable.

Lots of services can sync files and folders. Having used many alternatives (One Drive, Google Drive, iCloud Sync, even scripted rsync), it turns out I still pay for Dropbox. It’s the most reliable for my use cases, and is not too expensive.

There is a huge difference between “I can conceive of how to implement this feature” and “this feature works for years on end at large scale with adequate reliability and usability and low enough cost.”

This is a different point. We’re already talking about a company trying to build the same feature set, not an individual doing it themselves using existing technology.

Storing and moving TBs of data doesn't sound that easy.

I'd rather pick insert an image in a document and keep a log of it as a weekend project.

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.

That's not 50B tech.

A self driving car is hard, a web app to edit a document with a few integration is not hard.

The value is not in how technically great they are, it's in their market position.

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