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Open source interviews #26 - Lucas Smith, co-founder of Documenso.com

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00:00 Welcome, everyone, to the Open Source Founder Podcast.

00:03 Joining me today is Lucas, co-founder and CTO of Documento,

00:07 the open source document signing platform.

00:09 Lucas, thank you so much for joining.

00:11 Super excited to do this.

00:13 And let's kick it off with some information about your background

00:16 and how you met Timur and how you guys started Documento.

00:20 Yeah, no worries.

00:21 So I'm Lucas, co-founder of Documento, unfortunately.

00:23 Yeah, no worries. So I'm Lucas, co-founder of Documentor, unfortunately.

00:31 So I've been a developer for a little while, at least track.

00:39 I've been coding for a very long time now, since I was like 13, with PHP and all that junk.

00:48 I've worked across government, telecoms, startups uh e-commerce and basically everywhere else in between i have like a side project where i do a complete restaurant system for my wife

00:55 um i just love code and during that time i've worked extensively with pdfs unfortunately

01:01 so when timmer found me and reached out and said hey would you

01:05 like to work on document signing which involves even more pdf work i was like oh yeah sign me up

01:11 you know perfect thank you so code base just as a little

01:32 twitter growth hack or whatever you might call it um and also just out of my own interest

01:38 and then after that i found it to be such a fun experience i was like all right maybe i'll

01:44 make myself available

01:45 for people to book code roastings

01:47 where I'll walk through their code base

01:48 and I'll let them know what I find.

01:52 And so I posted it and nothing happened

01:55 because realistically, who wants someone to go through their code base

01:58 and tell them everything they don't like?

02:00 But then Tim reached out and ended up booking one.

02:04 So I did that uh we got talking

02:07 after it i started as a contributor for a little bit just um helping out where i can

02:14 before we moved on to a co-foundership um where i helped us launch our 0.9 version adding billing

02:22 and a few other fun little features.

02:27 And then we went straight into raising.

02:32 And then right after that, I was like, all right, let's do ourselves a rewrite because,

02:34 you know, that's never gone wrong.

02:38 That's something up nicely.

02:40 in person, right?

02:40 And you guys still haven't met in person, right?

02:42 No, no. We hopefully will this year.

02:44 No, no. We hopefully will this year. 2024

02:45 will be the year of in-person

02:48 globally distributed remote.

02:52 But no, Timur and I just

02:54 meet up every Monday

02:55 in the evening my time and we have

02:58 a one-hour chat and then everything else is done

03:00 over text.

03:02 I mean, that works.

03:04 With Zaf, we also kind of do it the same,

03:06 although right now we managed to get in person.

03:09 Quick hello from Zaf.

03:11 Very quick hello.

03:12 Hey, Lucas.

03:13 Nice to see you.

03:16 And so how's the team been expanding, you know,

03:21 ever since you raised funding and you've been running at it?

03:24 Yeah, so expanding

03:26 the team has been pretty fun and interesting actually so after we raised our funding we're

03:32 able to hire our first um part-time developer duncan he was a long-time contributor even

03:38 predating myself um so being able to turn him into an actual employee and reward him for all the work he's put in was super, super awesome, to be honest.

03:49 And he's only part time because he has university right now.

03:53 He's studying mining engineering.

03:58 We're super excited for him.

04:00 And he's just super excited to be doing development instead of mining engineering.

04:05 But it's very important to us that he also finishes his degree and has the right amount of work to balance the two.

04:14 After that, we were able to hire one of my friends from Australia who was looking to jump into a new role anyway.

04:24 And the reason for picking him is simply because I did need someone in my time zone before it became too European.

04:31 As well as my baby that was due a couple months later, I needed someone that I knew could hold down the fort while I was sort of out of office.

04:41 From there, we were able to into uh hiring a lot more globally we expanded our team with

04:48 catalan who's been a super great addition all of his experience with dev rail plus his uh

04:54 developer skills have been absolutely amazing and then we've been able to hire adithya another

04:59 contributor and uh gutham our leading designer so yeah the team's coming along nicely we probably

05:06 might add on one or two more roles in 2024 depending on how the year goes but certainly

05:13 not in the immediate future because the hardest thing about having our globally distributed team

05:19 across all the time zones is me being the bottleneck, particularly on the development side, getting things into play

05:27 where they can be worked on by the team, reviewing stuff before it goes out. It all requires me time.

05:36 And it's been pretty painful, actually. I'm working on getting better at it. So

05:41 until then, we can't really slap another developer at the problem.

05:48 I'm sorry you're exaggerating here, but no, that sounds phenomenal.

05:52 Excellent.

05:52 Thank you so much for sharing.

05:54 And always great hearing stories of contributors who become hires.

05:59 And it makes the most sense.

06:00 You know them already.

06:01 They know you.

06:01 They're onboarded to the code base.

06:03 They're productive from day one.

06:04 So that is excellent.

06:07 And the community of Documents, as well as the traction of the product in the market,

06:12 if you'd like to discuss this.

06:15 Yeah.

06:16 So I think the coolest part is obviously how much the community has grown.

06:22 We now have quite a few active contributors, which is what I really love

06:26 to see. When I see, you know, another person raising their fourth, fifth, sixth PR, it's a

06:33 really nice thing. The hard part about open source, and I guess commercial open source,

06:38 it can all be very aspirational. So you'll typically see someone open their first pull

06:43 request to solve an immediate problem that they have, and then they'll go off.

06:48 So seeing return contributors and seeing them growing over time, I think we've got maybe six to eight now, which is phenomenal.

06:58 With well over 40 contributors in general, I believe.

07:03 Don't check the numbers.

07:04 I might be lying.

07:06 Awesome. That might be lying. Awesome.

07:07 That's really good.

07:09 And wishing you more growth in the community and, of course, in the market too.

07:13 In terms of the conversations you're having with people who are using the product in the

07:19 free version, maybe contemplating a license, like a paid version, and then the go-to market.

07:26 If there's anything we can say about the motions you go through there and the distribution

07:30 of the product.

07:33 Yeah.

07:33 So since launching our paid products, we've had some pretty decent uptake.

07:39 We're not talking rolling end users, but, you know, we've got quite a few active subscribers.

07:48 We have lots and lots of free users that are actually using the platform, which is our most important thing.

07:54 And we have some power users already, which is really nice to see where they're sending hundreds of documents and whatnot.

08:04 Unfortunately, we are still a bit early in this space.

08:07 We have a lot of things rolling out over the next couple weeks to months

08:12 that will bring us up to par with, you know,

08:16 the baseline of features that you need to consider us over a different

08:19 competitor.

08:20 While we are also going through like the general enterprise leads where we have

08:25 lots of qualified inbounds that we just need to work on actioning.

08:32 Major thing for us will be doing our 21 CFR compliance,

08:38 which will let us break into a lot of med tech industries who are desperately

08:42 seeking a DocuSign alternative because when you see the bills for like these companies,

08:50 they're paying for X envelopes.

08:53 And then they have like a whole laundry list of extra features where it'll be

08:56 like support during 6.

08:57 AM to 6.

08:58 PM and then 6.

08:59 PM to 6.

08:59 AM.

09:00 And then they have certain compliance levels on each envelope.

09:04 And that's an additional line item.

09:06 We just want to create a full-featured product

09:10 that has less of this billing confusion.

09:14 You pay a certain price that we determine

09:17 as we do our enterprise lead with you

09:19 and then that's it.

09:21 You don't really have to think about it until it's renewal time.

09:24 There's no additional add-on and add-on and add-on and add-on.

09:29 Totally, totally. Good luck exploring this market. Actually sounds really, really exciting.

09:34 And then for the health tech folks, I'm guessing they would also really want to embed Documento in their own applications. And probably with the existing options, that's kind of like a pain you would need to get

09:46 under the contract and like, you know, probably never get support and like pretty clunky and

09:51 lack of APIs.

09:53 And so that's also, I guess, an avenue where people are going to benefit a lot with Documento.

09:59 So from the experience so far, is there any, I hopefully there's a lot, but any piece of advice or maybe a mistake to avoid that you would like to share with other founders or maintainers that are thinking about going down the commercial route?

10:16 Yeah, look, it's obviously hard.

10:20 You're going to constantly be asked, why would I pay for this?

10:23 I can self-host it.

10:29 Which is always a very valid question, particularly if you want to make your product compelling for self-hosters. It's very easy to be open source, but everything's behind a feature

10:35 flag. We have to have a specific license for it. Whereas we try to avoid that offering as much as we can, uh, outside of billing,

10:47 uh, in our self-hosted version.

10:49 So the real thing you get with us is reliability, um, potentially early access to features and,

10:57 um, all the compliance levels that we've been working our way through.

11:03 Um, and then outside of that, that yeah like growing a team is always

11:06 difficult hiring is always interesting as well um particularly when you are hiring from a global

11:14 talent pool you have to take in consideration like cultural uh backgrounds and such as well

11:21 when you interact with people um and all those other norms.

11:26 Like what might seem very weird for me as an Australian can be quite normal

11:30 for a European or someone located in India.

11:33 And so you have to take all that in and put on like a smiling face

11:36 as you try to understand them.

11:40 Absolutely.

11:41 You know, definitely a nuance there and not something you would immediately think about, but it looks like you're conscious of it and accommodating it. So that's super nice.

12:06 and then also utilizing social media and Twitter, for example, or X.com.

12:10 Any piece of advice there for people who want to build in public more and grow their presence?

12:13 Yeah.

12:14 So this is something that we're still actively working on.

12:17 I'd say Documents follows a bumpy road between where we're really active

12:23 on our socials and then we go really

12:25 inactive and it will usually depend on if we're in like marketing mode or development mode like

12:30 recently we've been in development mode so you'll notice that like most of us haven't posted much

12:36 apart from say catalan who's just very excellent at all the social stuff i've been trying to

12:41 learn from him as best as i can so we can be a lot more public

12:45 with what we're doing um but i mean honestly posting on you know x or linkedin or wherever

12:53 and just being consistent with it with actual insights rather than just filler content

12:58 uh it's super important like some of our best growth metrics have come from when we've really put in the effort to post and be helpful rather than like straight marketing we're like look at this look at that

13:10 instead we write more about the why the how and the what and you can see the correlation when we

13:18 look at our like site analytics and whatnot it really does draw people in particularly for like an early stage uh commercial open source

13:25 project uh being active and letting people you know who you are even if you are shouting it into

13:34 the void is like the best thing you can do like on the day that we launched our 0.9 version 9 version uh steven from dub previously verse l picked us up and created a amazing signing video

13:49 using our home page for the demo and it went to like a quarter of a million views and everything

13:56 just went skyrocketing from there on the day it was amazing um so yeah really just shouting out

14:00 because you never know who's going to see it um And even if no one does see it, if you get into the habit of doing it,

14:07 it's just like any other muscle, eventually you'll make your own luck.

14:12 I love it. Thank you so much for sharing this.

14:15 Super helpful for me to hear and everyone else, all the other creators.

14:20 And a related note about streaming, if there's, again,

14:24 any piece of advice here in terms of what you've seen work best or maybe something to avoid.

14:31 Yeah.

14:32 Look, for streaming, it's much the same.

14:35 I think when I was streaming, now that I have the child, it's very hard to find the time at the moment.

14:40 I'm really hoping to get back into it this year because i i liked it both for the um

14:46 what do we call the word oh my goodness

14:49 uh accountability i liked it for the accountability where even if no one was watching me knowing that

14:58 someone could jump on and watch me meant that i was more likely to remain focused for longer which

15:03 sounds both good and terrible,

15:05 depending on how you think about it. But it's also just good for general transparency too.

15:11 We constantly have contributors asking what the working process is that documents so,

15:17 or how we do things. And being able to just say, look, here's my workday or here's me streaming for like three hours. Here's how I look

15:26 at things and here's how I tackle it. Um, will be super beneficial. We have done a little bit of it,

15:33 but it's something to expand, but I don't think we have to get too formal with what you should do,

15:39 apart from maybe try and be less Australian. So what's your language while you code?

15:43 try and be less Australian. So watch your language while you code.

15:52 But yeah, and we are expanding on this too. Like one of my recent thoughts that I'm trying to execute on is when I do a PR review, which is basically where I spend most of my day.

15:58 I'm trying to start recording some of them on YouTube and then sending them to contributors to let them know what

16:06 I've actually done because if I find a PR that's in the 90% point I'll usually do the last 10%

16:12 that way I'm not coming back to them with like eight different things that are very minor

16:16 that's a phenomenal idea and uh yeah publishing all these videos on YouTube and as a matter of

16:24 fact even the

16:25 contributors some of them uploading videos you know because oftentimes they put a video recording

16:30 on the pr with loom or what have you so them going through that motion and building that muscle and

16:35 sharing the thinking process and their implementation i could also be beneficial for

16:39 them but doing it but yeah it's a great idea excellent idea so i'll try to hold you accountable

16:44 to that or like then hey when's the first one coming?

16:47 So that is excellent.

16:50 And I guess related to the discussion so far

16:54 in terms of also the transparency

16:56 that comes from building in public

16:58 and sharing what the work is like

17:01 outside of just sharing the code

17:03 is the fact that you guys are an open

17:06 startup. Documentation is an open startup. So a quick note about this.

17:12 Yeah. So being an open startup was sort of a no brainer for us. I think the real trick is like,

17:18 we are open source. Like we shouldn't theoretically have that much to hide, I guess.

17:24 Being founders, we aren't taking like massive salaries or anything.

17:28 We have a goal to be not the highest paid person on the team.

17:32 We always want that to be our developers and designers and so on and so forth.

17:38 And then, yeah, having the open startup lets us track ourselves without needing to build

17:43 internal dashboards that customers can never see see as well as like provide insight to other people as to how we're doing

17:49 um so they can see you know our general metrics whether we're growing flatlining and so on and

17:56 um even like customers appreciate it too because they can see you know i'm not the only person

18:02 using this and it doesn't just say trusted by like you know

18:05 14 000 companies and that might have just come from the template or whatever um it's like real

18:11 time more you know frequently updated metrics uh on every page load um so yeah and i mean i've

18:19 previously like i said worked in government and such where everything is under lock and key like

18:24 we had certain clearance levels and that meant that everything had to be sent with certain levels of confidentiality.

18:29 And it's just painful.

18:30 Like if you know something, you should share it.

18:33 And, you know, provided that, well, I guess we at Documento, we don't really have much that we can't share.

18:41 Obviously, like our upcoming enterprise clients and such would be a secret.

18:46 But everything else, we want to be

18:48 as transparent about as possible.

18:52 Absolutely. And it does

18:54 build trust, I believe,

18:55 having that transparency. So

18:57 it's great to have you as an example of this.

19:01 As a good

19:02 example to follow, I think.

19:04 We're trying in our own team

19:05 to make steps in that direction.

19:08 I wanted to use the opportunity

19:10 to also ask you about your experience with Algorra,

19:13 the open source Bounties platform.

19:16 What was your...

19:17 Why did you decide to try it in the first place?

19:20 And then you've been...

19:21 Documentation has been one of the most active projects

19:23 on the platform.

19:24 So how's the experience been so far yeah um so i got into elgora through cal so as always they lead the

19:33 way um when i was doing my little curry base review for them i picked up a random pr it had

19:39 a bounty attached to it um a week later i ended ended up getting paid. It was pretty cool because, you know,

19:45 instead of doing, well, not necessarily work for free, but the work that I was going to do anyway,

19:51 I was able to get paid. And it gives you that really nice feeling like, you know, that you feel

19:57 rewarded, you know, that you feel appreciated. And it's something very specific to, say, commercial open source as well for the bountying side.

20:09 But no, it was a super amazing experience.

20:11 So the moment we had funding and everything else, I said, you know, if we're going to take open source contributors, we should consider how we're going to do bounties and more specifically tips.

20:21 Through our experimentation, we found that bounties are amazing for getting things done

20:27 quickly. But tipping is probably more sustainable for us personally, because we want to work on a

20:34 culture where people can take things, work on them, and then come back to us rather than having

20:39 people race towards something. So if we fire a bounty, we still try and do first come first served which can lead to

20:45 a little bit of um contention or resentment i guess uh if someone just instantly pings an issue

20:53 so instead we try to focus more on tipping so if the work comes in it's nice we appreciate it

20:59 let's you know give you a certain monetary reward and say, hey, we see this.

21:05 We appreciate it.

21:07 And here you go.

21:08 We want to make this sustainable.

21:10 We appreciate you contributing.

21:12 We are a commercial company, so you don't have to contribute for free per se.

21:17 But we obviously aren't tipping every single contribution.

21:22 Great.

21:24 Absolutely.

21:26 That's a great note.

21:27 Thank you so much.

21:27 And I took note of that.

21:29 It makes a lot of sense how you approach it.

21:31 And thank you so much for partnering.

21:35 And, you know, it's been a privilege serving you,

21:37 and I hope we continue on the same path.

21:40 Thank you.

21:41 Thank you so much.

21:43 What can we expect, if we can touch on it briefly with next releases of documents or potentially when they might be coming?

21:52 If there's any teaser you could give.

21:54 Yeah. So we have a full fledged team system coming along with all the bells and whistles.

22:02 You know, you'll have team members with roles. They'll be able to be transferred.

22:07 You'll have team emails for sending and receiving documents,

22:10 team inboxes.

22:12 It's going to be amazing.

22:14 On top of that, we have Catalan working on our API right now.

22:18 It's had an open PR for a while,

22:19 just pending me doing a few rounds of reviews,

22:22 and that'll be our little V1 beta.

22:25 And then people will be able to programmatically send documents,

22:28 create documents and do all the good stuff that everyone's been begging for,

22:32 which we hope will empower a lot of people to start trialing documents.

22:37 So particularly because the API will be available even with a free account.

22:45 And then, yeah, outside of that, we have launched templates recently.

22:50 We are staying a little bit quiet on some of the things that we've shipped

22:53 because we hope to do yet another launch week

22:56 in maybe the start of February, end of January,

23:01 where we go over all these features that we have released

23:04 and how you

23:06 can use them and what else

23:08 you can do with them.

23:11 Awesome.

23:12 Sounds like a great plan. Thank you so much

23:13 for sharing. And it sounds like

23:15 the API Big PR Review might

23:17 be one of the first opportunities to do a video

23:20 doing the PR.

23:21 Yeah.

23:24 So, excellent. Very much

23:25 looking forward to that. And absolutely

23:27 we'll expand the number of people who can easily

23:30 take the comments for a spin

23:32 and also provide feedback.

23:34 So, very, very exciting.

23:36 Best of luck. We will be following.

23:38 And

23:39 unless you have

23:41 some final notes that you might

23:44 like to share, I was also hoping to ask you for a quick demo of the Cumensum.

23:49 Yeah, I mean, just before we jump into the demo, I do want to reiterate that we honestly love Elgora.

23:55 And even outside of like from a company perspective, on a personal note, I think seeing this change in sustainable open source is like it's a massive thing and it goes both ways so

24:07 we as you know commercial products that are open source we can tip our contributors and create

24:15 sustainability that way which helps develop a more thriving community and for us you know

24:21 community is the most important path to adoption because we need to build trust.

24:26 And what better way to do that than to reward the developers that might go back and then promote us to their companies.

24:31 But also for like larger open source projects like Nuxt and such, if they have like a feature that they need to do, people can tip it or bounty it as well.

24:43 And the maintainers can pick that up and it helps them

24:46 avoid like a whole bunch of them like annoying creating a statement of work going and approaching

24:52 whatever large client that actually wants it and then doing it to their meat instead they can start

24:57 crowdfunding it all through bounties for specific features which lets you avoid github sponsors

25:04 where some people will leave

25:05 it on it'll be like five dollars and it might be a bit but they'll usually churn after a couple

25:10 months instead there's you know a hundred two hundred five hundred dollars attached to a

25:16 specific piece of work that you can get done someone else might come in and add to it with

25:20 the most recent uh prettier thing where i think 25 000 went through

25:27 to the winner so yeah seeing that instead of like people having to go and solicit contributions from

25:35 like you know larger companies is really amazing we are absolutely fans of elgor we can't wait to

25:42 see what comes in the next year as well.

25:45 That's very grateful. Thank you so

25:48 much. Thank you so much for this. And of course

25:50 it's the community, the maintainers, the founders

25:52 and the contributors that make up the

25:54 platform and what it is. And we're

25:56 just very lucky to

25:57 assist everyone

26:00 in this process. Thank you so much for your kind

26:02 words. Couldn't have said it better myself.

26:04 And we'll continue working to improve

26:06 the experience for everyone.

26:08 And with that, I guess, I'm very eager to check out the demo.

26:14 Awesome.

26:15 So I'll just share my screen and here's

26:20 a web page I prepared earlier once it comes through.

26:27 If it comes through. If it comes through.

26:28 It's coming in hot.

26:29 Give it a second.

26:30 Of course, this would work before the recording and then during the recording.

26:38 We did do a quick test, so let's see if it works.

26:42 All right, there you go.

26:44 All right. So yeah, there you go. All right.

26:46 So, yeah, we have this.

26:48 We're not going to sign in with my personal email.

26:54 Instead, we're going to click sign in with Google on a completely fresh account called Demo User here.

27:00 I created it just before we started recording this in Google Workspace, so it's never signed in before.

27:06 And so, yeah, our intention with Documents, though, is to be, be like the most painless and slick signing experience you can have so the idea being that you as a completely new user can

27:13 go to you know the landing page you can be like hey i like this you can do single player mode for

27:20 free if you need to self-sign but if you you do need to send a document, you can sign in, go with Google, sign in as your

27:30 brand new user using SSO.

27:34 And then ideally, the email would have been verified from the beginning.

27:40 So we might actually have a bug there if someone wants to PR that.

27:46 So we might actually have a bug there if someone wants to PR that. So if I go here and I refresh, maybe not, I'll click the verify button.

27:59 We will be getting rid of this for SSO, by the way, guys.

28:02 We do want this to be a very painless experience, and this is painful for me. So now that we've verified, if we click back, the app will

28:09 automatically recognize that. We can upload a document, such as this little receipt that I

28:15 used for signing. And for those looking at this and wondering about the latency, it's because we host everything in Europe due to GDPR, and I am in Australia, so speed of light is really painful for me.

28:33 So yeah, as you can see, I've probably signed this a few too many times. just call it good old document PDF

28:47 attach another scribble to it

28:49 we can toss in Lucas at documento

28:52 and we'll put our signature over here

28:57 and we might add our name underneath

28:59 we can customize our signing message

29:04 using templating as well as the subject that gets

29:08 sent in the email.

29:10 And then we're done.

29:12 Documents been sent and then we can just track it.

29:16 So if I went to my email, I'd find it there, but I'm a bit lazy today.

29:19 So I'm just going to click this and get my signing link and then pop it open.

29:26 So now as a person receiving a document, all I have to do is click.

29:31 If I was signed in and I had an account, my signature that's attached to my profile

29:35 would appear here.

29:36 But because I don't, I can go here and slap on a little scribble, get our confirmation, and now we're all signed.

29:50 And with that, you can go from zero to send in minutes and hopefully start making deals

29:57 or signing NDAs or whatever you might want to do with documents there.

30:02 Absolutely.

30:03 And the second person didn't even need to sign up.

30:05 They just landed on that page and they can sign up and then you get your fun little um hovering card you can share

30:15 it on twitter if you want to please do um and then if we jump back we can see that the document's

30:22 been completed in our account we can download it we can duplicate it. We can also share it as an owner. Please do.

30:47 hope to do that with our free plan letting people send five documents per month that way it's completely painless for the beginnings of you know an early stage company or a freelancer or anyone

30:54 and then we want to grow with you phenomenal phenomenal love it wow this was very seamless

31:01 um excellent i'm very excited to make a clip out of this and show everyone how easy this was very seamless. Excellent. I'm very excited to make a clip out of this

31:06 and show everyone how easy this was.

31:09 Amazing.

31:10 Thank you so much for the demo.

31:12 It's a privilege getting it from you.

31:14 And this was a really good interview

31:17 and it looks like we're a little bit early

31:19 from the top of our slot.

31:23 So perhaps any final notes that you might like to add

31:27 before we prompt people to go check out the Qman show

31:31 and the repository in GitHub and contribute, of course.

31:35 Yeah, no, I think 2024 is going to be a really big year for us.

31:39 I have very high hopes.