Husband and wife take on ‘dinosaur’ Docusign with start-up Paperform

This Sydney tech start-up has racked up more than 10,000 paying users without taking a dollar of venture capital investment.

Paperform co-founders Dean and Diony McPherson.

Husband and wife duo Diony and Dean McPherson are taking on $15bn “dinosaur” Docusign, launching new software they hope will shake up the fast-growing global e-signature market and eventually become the next Canva.

The pair’s Sydney-based tech start-up, Paperform, has racked up more than 10,000 paying users without the help of any venture capital or external investment, and is launching new e-signature functionality the co-founders say is cheaper and easier to use than Docusign’s.

In what began as a humble online form tool, Paperform now offers a ‘‘digital Swiss Army knife’’ for small and medium-sized businesses with functionality including payments, subscriptions, scheduling, calculations and now e-signatures within one platform.

Co-founder Dean McPherson points to statistics from Deloitte showing the e-signature market will grow to over $US14bn ($20.3bn) by 2026, up from $US4bn today. He said he and Diony had ambitions for Paperform to grow into a software company on the scale of Australia-based global graphic design platform Canva.

He said the new e-signature functionality, dubbed Papersign, would help businesses save on their software budgets while automating the process of collecting signatures on company-branded documents.

“Docusign was one of those first-generation cloud businesses that have been around for nearly two decades, it was founded in 2003, and naturally what happens if you’re got a product for that long is that you just keep adding stuff and there’s all this bloat,” he said. “It’s not a terrible product, but all of a sudden you’re dealing with all these edge cases of 20 years of customer demands, and the product reflects that. We have an advantage where we can just focus on our core path.”

The executive added that while his start-up “isn’t anti-VC”, it hadn’t needed to raise venture capital, and had been profitable virtually since inception. The company now has 27 employees and is looking to expand into the enterprise market soon, having previously only targeted small and medium-sized businesses.

“Culturally probably the big difference between running Paperform as a bootstrapped business, versus your average VC-backed business, is that we get to prioritise the long game,” Mr McPherson said. “If we go ‘OK, growth for the next six months is going to be slower than if we pumped a million dollars into AdWords’, that’s OK, and a lot of businesses don’t get to make that decision.

“We like calling our own shots, and those are the types of shots that we like to call.”

The co-founders were married for nearly a decade before they started Paperform in 2016, in a bid to help a mutual friend organise forms for a children’s holiday program. Co-founder Diony McPherson said that being part of a husband and wife executive team had taught them to better communicate, both in and out of the business environment.

The pair have also made a deliberate decision to avoid what they see as a destructive ‘‘hustle culture’’ plaguing the broader start-up ecosystem.

“In order to build a company, the values really matter, because it’s the way that you communicate and the way that you function,” Ms McPherson said. “And particularly arguing well together … You have to be able to argue without getting your feelings hurt, and to assume the best in someone else when they disagree. It’s totally fine for them to disagree with you, and for you to pitch your view from a very objective angle and to do that with research.

“You learn how to do that very well when you’re married, because if it gets personal, it’s game over and it’s really hard to get back from that.”