DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/28/docusign-to-cut-workforce-by-9percent-as-part-of-restructuring-plan.html

by ParksNet • 4 years ago

117 105 4 years ago

tomcam5• 4 years ago

Docusign has 7,400 employees. TFA doesn’t bother to mention anything about their revenue. Gross is $622 million. Net is -$45 million. Somehow they are losing money on document signing software despite having overcome, to their credit, resistance to the concept and developing something like a monopoly.

How are they losing so much money?

karaterobot• 4 years ago

I think you said it yourself. If the gross revenue is just $84k per employee, they've probably got too many people on payroll to be profitable.

tomatotomato37• 4 years ago

It's right there in your first sentence. Docusign is a SF company; If we are take an average SF salary of 100k over 7400 employees that's a $740 million expense. And considering their net loss is less than $118 million its obvious they are paying under market rate.

baron816• 4 years ago

No way average SF salary is that low.

adamredwoods• 4 years ago

> Docusign is a SF company

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.

scarface742• 4 years ago

Why does DocuSign need 7400 employees?

gallamine• 4 years ago

I'd guess a significant portion are low(er)-wage technical support folks. When the partners at Hamlin-Hamlin-McGill can't remember their Docusign password they need someone to call.

yrgulation• 4 years ago

They probably hire two to three leet coders to get the job of one experienced developer done. And one pdf certified scrum master for each team along with two managers and product owners.

kwertyoowiyop• 4 years ago

Probably for their AI team. No, their NFT team. Uhhhh I meant their metaverse team.

adam_arthur• 4 years ago

Because they overhired like most other startups.

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

spaceman_20202• 4 years ago

Man there is some serious bloat in most tech companies. Why on earth does Docusign need 7000+ employees?

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

Internal fiefdoms could be a component.

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.

johnfonesca6• 4 years ago

I'm very curios how many developers DocuSign has.

At Bulksign https://bulksign.com, we're building a digital signatures platform which has comparable features with a tiny team.

delecti• 4 years ago

I don't know if it accounts for all 7000, but sales, legal, and support would account for quite a bit. Docusign is definitely a company that needs rock solid legal and support teams.

merb• 4 years ago

well we tried to make an integration and god.... we had to deal with so many people and are still clueless why we even needed to talk to them. it's like you have a sales person which as an isv partner will hook you up to a small presentation which does somebody else, however technical stuff can only be talked about by another team, the final contract can also only be done by somebody else, etc. heck their sales team is probably bigger than their developer team

saila• 4 years ago

I recently worked on a project that includes an in-flow step for users to sign an agreement without leaving the site. DocuSign makes this inordinately difficult. Their docs are obtuse and confusing, especially around auth, and you get a ton of annoying emails from a salesperson just for signing up for a dev account to figure out how things work.

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.

tristor2• 4 years ago

Wow, Docusign has 7400 employees on only $622M in gross revenue?

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?

ricardobayes• 4 years ago

Good question. I've seen less than 300 employees produce self-driving software (on the road today, not PoC level stuff).

lmkg• 4 years ago

Considering the verticals they're in, they probably need to deal with a whole buncha legal requirements. Different legal requirements from different jurisdictions, many of which are devolved to independent standards bodies. I'm sure that adds some body count.

stusmall• 4 years ago

I'd imagine the ratio of post sales support staff is higher than normal with them. Either technical or, as someone else mentioned, legal. Docusign only makes sense as a product if it is quick and easy to use. They need to help customers clear any hurdles fast.

lotsofpulp• 4 years ago

While Cisco is not Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, or Facebook, it consistently puts up numbers worthy of envy by most others:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CSCO/cisco/net-pro...

qq662• 4 years ago

TTM revenues are $2.3 billion with $1.2 billion sales costs and $450m Research and Development. Both figures are too high for a company whose growth has come down to the ~30% range.

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.

bushbaba• 4 years ago

The sales cost and R&D costs seem high. I could see sales cost being high to get faster adoption with tail-end profit. BUT 450M R&D... it's a document signing application. Seems like there's room to cut costs without impact to the business. For example, there's no way Box spent 450M/year in R&D to build out it's own docusign equivalent.

taldo• 4 years ago

Maybe they should've done it the other way around: keep 9% of their workforce, let go 91%

tomcam5• 4 years ago

I bet they would survive and thrive if they did that.

cheriot• 4 years ago

The McKinsey consultant turn CEO tried to launch an "Agreement Cloud" product with "AI" to assist reviewing legal documents and it went about as well you'd expect.

Also, Adobe Sign seems to have reached feature/integration parity.

01100011• 4 years ago

Software engineers are expensive.

codegeek• 4 years ago

A bit surprised. As a docusign customer, I like their simple UI/UX and would never think that they are losing money at -$45M. But then, why do they need 7400 employees is a great question.

danielmarkbruce9• 4 years ago

These numbers are wrong, the $622m is for 1 qtr.

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).

kuwoze3• 4 years ago

was sensible.

now that a 5 year bond outperforms most tech companies they are beginning to rethink their headcounts and all that sales and marketing spending

time_to_smile• 4 years ago

As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible.

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.

Waterluvian• 4 years ago

I had a friend who was aiming for medical school but was drilled into her by family that you never ever borrow money.

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.

propogandist• 4 years ago

They are losing money because they spend a fortune on sales and marketing. As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible.

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.

beefman• 4 years ago

Stock-based compensation

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DOCU/docusign/stoc...

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCU/financials?p=DOCU

https://twitter.com/FinancialFiling/status/15030635121758085...

johnfonesca6• 4 years ago

My company is developing a digital signatures platform called Bulksign https://bulksign.com

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.

xu_ituairo• 4 years ago

Some design feedback:

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.

johnfonesca6• 4 years ago

Thank you for providing constructive feedback.

pram• 4 years ago

Yeah it looks like a scam website. No offense but there’s like a billion landing page templates out there these days that look slick and are easy to implement. This is pretty lazy.

TedDoesntTalk• 4 years ago

10l of water being used to make 1 sheet of A4

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.

kingofpandora2• 4 years ago

English, Deutsch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Italian, Dutch, Polski, Hrvatski, Czech, Bosnian, Magyar, Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Chinese and Turkish

Strange how it switches between native and English for different languages.

I didn't think the landing page looks like a scam though ...

johnfonesca6• 4 years ago

Good catch, it is fixed now and everything is in English. Thank you for this.

jd_illa3• 4 years ago

What is a good alternative? Would like something that works well with scale and bulk sends (e.g. where the doc is the same but name is different for each recipient)

danielmarkbruce9• 4 years ago

Why do you need an alternative? It's a good product.

jd_illa3• 4 years ago

I don't like it for bulk sends. As a lawyer, if I need to get a lot of shareholder docs signed, DocuSign is def better than nothing, but not a great user experience. Also, always interested in alternatives even if it's just intellectual.

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.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

But a very expensive one for what it does. You pay for the monopoly, not the tech.

Using alternative breaks the monopoly.

user39393822• 4 years ago

Their pricing structure only makes sense for large corporations, it's extremely expensive. SignNow PandaDoc HelloSign etc have good offerings but lacking some features here and there.

simantel• 4 years ago

SignWell (https://signwell.com) is an indie alternative.

hcaz• 4 years ago

https://eversign.com/ and https://www.hellosign.com/ are both great alternatives. We settled on eversign in the end and it works perfectly well for us being a smaller org

user39393822• 4 years ago

I ran IT for a company of about 50 employees and paying for DocuSign was a huge line item on our fixed overhead. It's way too expensive/unreasonable for smaller companies. They setup this pricing plan to sell to Honeywell or something and then expect everyone else to pay the same.

Bluecobra• 4 years ago

Yikes, you're not kidding. Does every person need DocuSign though? Couldn't you just share a couple of generic accounts like sales@foo.com or hr@foo.com?

tomschungry• 4 years ago

I'm sure they grew quite a bit during the height of covid (like Zoom) but everyone is now scaling back with this recession looming. Sad regardless.

roody15• 4 years ago

School IT guy here.. DocuSign made multiple pitches to our district and they all fell flat. Really seemed to be cold call marketing a product … that is not as valuable as they try an protray.

We have been digitally signing document and digitally registering students .. for over a decade … Docusign did not make the process any easier. Pass.

glouwbug• 4 years ago

More like DocuResign

DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan

Related Stories