When are we gonna get the vibe coded DocuSign? (Or the OpenTimeStamps version? Or the nostr version?)

Probably not as soon as you think:

Let’s say most people use Docusign 5x a year. But 1% of power users are signing documents 10x a day. Among American adults, that would be (5 x 250 million) + (10 x 365 x 2.5 million) = 10 billion signatures a year.

America is probably above average since the country is super litigious and lawyers love to lawyer. So, let’s assume the rest of the world does 25 billion signatures a year.

So, that’s 35 billion signatures a year…or 95 million a day…or 4 million an hour…or 1,000 every second.

This system has to work in 180 countries around the world, following local contract laws in each of them (that’s a lot of system administrators and lawyers).

Docusign builds a hybrid cloud system in every country that keeps all records and a ton of back-ups across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and its own data centres (that’s a lot of engineers and system administrators).

In total, Docusign serves 1.8 million paying customers (including 3,000 government agencies and most of the Fortune 500).

These paying customers are sending signature requests to over 1 billion users.

The headcount is about 5,000 employees for sales, marketing and support to serve that customer base. Another 2,000 employees for engineering, system admin and product development.

So, if you want to beat DocuSign, you might need to hire 5000 marketing and customer support staff.

If none of those numbers convince you of Docusign’s mission critical moat, allow me to share this glorious qualitative rant from the aforementioned Redditor:

what if something VERY IMPORTANT was signed, but the person who NEEDS THAT SIGNATURE RIGHT NOW forgot his password? Like really forgot? Lost access to his email?

He can prove that he was the owner of that real estate conglomerate during those years. He can pull up the proper legal paperwork. But you need a team of trained legal professionals able to sort through it and make sure he is who he says he is.

What happens when your signed documents are needed for a court case? What happens when a judge has a warrant for them? What public-facing service are you going to build and maintain for judges in... oh yeah, every country in the world, using wildly different legal structures.

And they all need access to... potentially thousands of signatures all at the same time.

Nothing. Nothing at “global standard” scale, is simple. You’re looking at the face of it. There’s a monster underneath. Always is.

Also this part from their CEO about all the things DocuSign does in the background is interesting:

We do all kinds of IP tracing and other things to validate that you are the intended…signer [and] that you are the intended recipient. That whole trail is then auditable and can be used in a court of law. So, it’s a perfect substitute for a wet signature that you might otherwise have done…We worked on a federated identity strategy to give you all kinds of identity validation at different levels of risk. We let people do knowledge-based authentication…We do biometric-based identification [eg. video]. We can link up with the Apple and Google stuff. We do risk-based assessments…We use the new digital IDs [eg. Clear or ID.me, which is the government one that the IRS uses].

And like every other thing on the internet, DocuSign is using your data:

Even if a legitimate AI-native competitor was launched, Docusign is sitting on juicy proprietary dataset: 150 million private consented agreements with 10 million being added every month (this legal data set is “orders of magnitude bigger than anybody else”).

I am reminded though of a thing making the rounds on X last week about a client uploading communications with their lawyer to a chat provider and the feds being able to subpoena those documents even though they would have remained under attorney-client privilege had the client never tried to use ChatGPT or Gemini to understand them better.