How are they losing so much money?
TTM revenue is $2.4 billion. Gross profit is $1.8 bill.
They are losing money because they spend a fortune on sales and marketing. As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible. To make an analogy, if you have 1000 oil wells with high IRRs, you get drilling. You'll lose money for a while because they cost a lot to drill, and then the money just flows in.... It's the same as acquiring large customers with a sticky enterprise software offering. The only difference is that due to accounting standards oil & gas companies categorize drilling as capex while enterprise software companies categorize it as operating expense (mostly, there are a few minor exceptions).
It's sensible only when you know you can flip a switch and turn to profit mode. This is true in the oil drilling example, but not at all guaranteed for tech companies.
So much of VC funding in the last decade has assumed (not only for enterprise software, but everything), that if you grow by some metric enough, one day you can flip a switch and *poof* profits. This same logic pervaded the "new economy" thinking right before the dotcom bust.
With the cost of many going up more and more of these large, unprofitable tech companies are going to have to start proving that they really can flip that switch and remain at the scale they are. I think a concerning amount will find they can't.
Their service is undifferentiated from the competition. When they try to make more money by increasing costs their users move to a similar, cheaper solution.
One day we sat down and did the math on earning a medical degree and ending up debt free via borrowing vs not borrowing and her eyes figuratively popped.
Money is possibly the cheapest resource of any tech startup.
now that a 5 year bond outperforms most tech companies they are beginning to rethink their headcounts and all that sales and marketing spending
For comparison, consider Cisco, a company most people think of as a bloated dinosaur... it has ~75000 employees on a gross revenue of $51.557B for FY22.
So roughly 10x the employees, but 83x the gross revenue. And this is Cisco, hardly a tech darling at this point.
What the hell do 7400 people do at Docusign?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CSCO/cisco/net-pro...
Let's Encrypt has a staff of 16. I'm not unsympathetic to sales, marketing, DevRel, etc (ongoing BAU and solid growth are both crucial to an established enterprise) but a gap of low teens to 7000 people for using emails to proof identity and store documents for retention periods? Come onnnnnnn.
At Bulksign https://bulksign.com, we're building a digital signatures platform which has comparable features with a tiny team.
HelloSign on the other hand provides a library for embedding an agreement into a flow and makes it a cinch. I didn't need to create a HelloSign account--I just `npm install`ed the library and got it working within minutes without having to look at any docs.
I'd imagine this is a big factor given that developers often have a lot of sway in influencing these kinds of decisions and get annoyed by unnecessary "enterprise" baloney when it's not really needed.
On selling it smells like attempting to sell huge, broad "solutions" that cover 20 different departments to try to get so stuck into an enterprise that they will never churn. This will cause very expensive and slow sales cycles. It can only be justified if these solutions are actually getting DocuSign in a place where they are uniquely positioned to upsell into all of these different functions down the road, taking into account that Microsoft is probably building crappier but cheaper versions of the same offerings.
On R&D it sounds like they're either 1) way too inefficient or 2) supporting a ton of integration for the huge solutions that need 500 different connectors into every legacy app ever written. Again, this could make sense, but requires them to attain a Microsoftish level of integration into company workflows that ensures that the customer is a permanent golden goose.
They started in Seattle: DocuSign Tower, 999 3rd Ave #1800, Seattle, WA 98104
>> The city where our company was founded, Seattle continues to play a deeply important role in many aspects of our culture and business with teams from many functions including Engineering, Sales & Marketing and Global Customer Support.
Also, Adobe Sign seems to have reached feature/integration parity.
No need for grandiose visions for their software, just support it with minor improvements here and there and aim for profitability rather than pushing the concept beyond what it should be.
Electronic signing as a product will likely become pretty much 100% free over time as competitors build out. Cost structure for Docusign must be lean to be viable long term
We want to encourage broader use of advanced digital signatures and we are giving the on-premise version of this platform for FREE to any NON-PROFIT organization from anywhere in the world which wants it.
With droughts and up to 10l of water being used to make 1 sheet of A4 paper, i think natural resources are better spent elsewhere and digital documents and digital signatures should become the norm.
The site doesn't feel very modern/trustworthy/premium. Things like stock photography and generic icons (that vary in style) add to that impression. Lots of font are the same size (try making the headings bigger and bolder). The logo background not matching the color of the nav bar.
Also try setting a max width for the contents so it doesn't spread out as wide on wide screens.
If this is because you're doing this yourself while also managing other things, have a look at some Bootstrap examples (I see you're importing and using it, but doing br instead of bootstrap's padding/margins and some other non-standard things is making it feel a bit messy, I think). I see a lot of <br /> and style= in the HTML.
Even easier if this is just a landing page, try something like Webflow to make a good-looking site quickly.
Strange how it switches between native and English for different languages.
I didn't think the landing page looks like a scam though ...
Right now I’m eating lunch at a restaurant that is spraying mist nonstop over its outdoor tables because it is a dry climate. In fact, the water company declared drought a couple months ago ago, and water prices increased accordingly.
Apparently no one cares.
Another thing I really don't like is how it "forces" signatures by it's labelling system. People should read contracts, not just sign them.
Using alternative breaks the monopoly.
We have been digitally signing document and digitally registering students .. for over a decade … Docusign did not make the process any easier. Pass.
