I’ve built up a 7% position since the beginning of June at prices ranging from $147 to $209 per share. The world really needs a dedicated high-quality agreement lifecycle management platform. Having the whole process in one trusted place shouldn’t be underestimated.
This is anecdotal but our family is going through a property sale and purchase. This combines roughly 4 major agreements: 2 transfers of ownership and 2 mortgages; some people go through even more when there is a bridge loan, for example. There can be even more loose documents to deal with depending on spousal situations and such. I’m working with some very high quality people at sizable companies and not once did we use digital collaboration! We had dozens of points of contact, some in person with our friend/agent who we interact with anyway so distancing wasn’t a concern, but many was the old print → sign → scan → send pattern. I use GoogleDrive to organize everything so at least we had a central file-share among all 4 parties (us, RE agent, legal, mortgage broker).
It wasn’t until the very end that our Mortgage broker recommended we try the “Adobe Fill & Sign” app. This was an amazing experience after the above pain.
- My wife and I each downloaded the app.
- I signed and initialed on paper and used the app’s photo option to capture these, which it digitized. My wife simply signed and initialed directly on the touch-screen and was happy.
- I used the GoogleDrive app to pull the PDF to my phone and open it in Adobe Fill & Sign.
- I signed and dated a dozen times, initialing every page, in minutes. Today’s date auto-completed so I didn’t have to type that out. In one spot the date had a box for each digit and the app detected and put the typed date right in the boxes.
- When done I simply air-dropped the document to my wife who repeated the process on her phone!
- We then uploaded the final PDF to GoogleDrive and let our Mortgage Broker know via WhatsApp that it was done.
- He found something missing. Now if we did it the old way that would mean printing a 25 page document, fixing it, scanning each page by hand. Instead I just whipped out the app with the doc, added a signature, airdropped to my wife for her signature and uploaded it again. it took about 2 minutes to turn around the fix!
Note in this process we used:
- GoogleDrive
- Apple AirDrop
- Adobe Fill & Sign
…We got it done, and it was a HUGE improvement over the paper way, BUT, I’m sure this wasn’t a very secure workflow and I really needed to know how each thing worked to make it happen, which is specialized knowledge and would be annoying to train a client let alone multiple professionals at different companies. It is dumb luck each was willing to share my Google Drive folder in the first place! Imagine if this was all in one TRUSTED platform! A place that would deliver notifications about the doc, allow for temporary markup, chat, video notary, etc, etc, etc.
Yes I know I used a competitor’s app here, but this is where the anecdotal part of this matters. It is the process we experienced here. I happen to use a competitor this one time but I’m not going to make an investment decision because of this one isolated experience. Instead I am taking what I learned in general and applying it to my thinking about Docusign as a small datapoint.
The Bottom Line
I no longer invest in stories or turnarounds or anything else that focuses on potential and future, yet I own shares of DOCU. This is because the business is doing well RIGHT NOW even without the contribution of the Agreement Cloud. I own the current business but the potential is also massive in my opinion. If they just keep doing what they are doing and also add best-in-breed collaborative tooling that, instead of 1 minute touch-points for a quick signature, captures multiple weeks of customer engagement, well that has to be a great thing!