🏷️Product: Documenso is an open platform for developer first signing.
💸Investment: $1.54M
📊Business model: Freemium, free tier, teams, and advanced enterprise plans.
🛠️Tech stack: Described on GitHub.
🌐Official website: https://documenso.com/
🗨️Social pages: 🔗LinkedIn 🔗@documensoHello! Can you tell us a bit about your background and what inspired you to create Documenso?
I’ve always been a big proponent of the open internet and the tech that powers it. Readily available open source tech shaped the internet into what it is today. Yet, one of the most used technologies globally has never been open for some reason: document signing. Breaking this market open and allowing for a tech-first product to reshape the market is a huge opportunity I’m very excited about. Personally, I have always been fascinated with encryption-based technologies since they exist in an interesting place between tech and the social trust they enable. Open tech has shaped the world, and it’s time for document signing to join the list.
How does Documenso differentiate itself from other document signing solutions available today?
Documenso, while on the front of a classical SaaS, is a community-driven product. As an open source e-signature solution, we consider our users, contributors, partners, and customers part of the community. We try to enable and incorporate participating where we can, be it feedback or actual code via PR. Short-term, this will allow us to create a much better product and long-term to out-ship any single company since they can’t possibly compete with a global community. Since the product is open source, every contributor (and everyone else as well) is free to self-host it for their use. For those wanting a ready-to-use SaaS, we offer a hosted plan with the same customer success-driven culture as the rest of the community.
Can you explain the key features of Documenso that users should know about?
Documenso allows your to create very intuitive yet powerful signing workflows. You can send Documents to collect a single signature but also use a complex approval process to automate a complex signature task. Documenso also works where you need it, meaning you can integrate via API or webhook, or just embed the signing experience. You can also just link to a static template, created in the editor. The level of sophistication for your solution is up to you and you needs.
What are the main benefits of using an open-source document signing solution like Documenso compared to proprietary alternatives?
As mentioned above, being open source e-signature allows us to ship faster and more confidently due to community feedback and support. It also builds trust in the software, which is critical for a trust-driven domain like document signing. Being open source allows us to bring Documenso into places that could not use the full potential of digital signing before (e.g. regulated industries, government, highly-sensitive data) since you can self-host it under your full control.
Can you share some examples of how organizations are currently using Documenso?
Our customer base ranges from solo founders signing their SAFEs with Documenso to highly regulated, bigger companies like Vial.com (read more). While solo users are simply looking for a good UX at a reasonable price, bigger organizations like Vial are integrating more deeply, using our API, Webhooks, and Embedding to bring signing into their platforms. Documenso is increasingly becoming a platform you can integrate to bring native singing into your product or platform.
What are your future plans for Documenso in terms of new features or improvements?
We are continuously evolving the product based on feedback and learning. Notably, we have Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) coming up as new capabilities to our embedding. You can check our long-term roadmap and the short-term one here.
Are there any notable success stories or case studies involving Documenso that you can share?
Vial.com is a great example of how to shape the product collaboratively. We developed a lot of regulations with them and also kept tuning the product together as part of our ongoing customer success. You can read more about it here and also on this article.
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