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.
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 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.”
I'd rather pick insert an image in a document and keep a log of it as a weekend project.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't agree that DocuSign's continued success is because of the maturity of the product.
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.
