Why we held Bloom back.

01The market is crowded with legacy players

Indian e-signing is already served by companies that are licensed, funded and years ahead. Leegality, Digio and SignDesk all started around 2016, sell to hundreds or thousands of regulated institutions, and have spent close to a decade on integrations, compliance and trust.

On top of them sit free, government-backed options such as DigiLocker and the National Academic Depository. Any institution we approached would be comparing a new, unproven product against vendors it already knows and, in some cases, against something that costs nothing.

Our bet was that none of the incumbents owns a consumer-facing, daily-use app. That is true today, but a gap in the market is not the same as demand for what fills it.

02For most people, this isn't a big enough problem

We ran a discovery survey with people in corporate, higher education, real estate and legal work. All four still used paper in some form, so the old way is real. But the pain was uneven, and it was not mostly about signing.

• Two of the four finished their last documents in under two hours; one of those took under 10 minutes.
• The two that took days were stuck in approval chains, not waiting on a signature.
• Cost estimates ranged from ₹50 to ₹300 per document, which is annoying, not urgent.
• The respondent who already used a web-based eSign link had a working answer.

People tolerate this friction because it works well enough. A product asking them to change habits has to remove something painful, and we could not show that this was painful enough to switch for.

03The main USP depended on someone else

The pitch was provable authenticity: anyone could check a document with no account. But the part that makes a signature legally valid, the Aadhaar-based signing, had to come from a licensed Electronic Signature Provider. We never planned to be one.

That means our core promise rested on a partner's licence, pricing and terms. The alternative, becoming a licensed provider ourselves, was a build we estimated at around ₹15 crore (our own unverified estimate) before it could pay off. For a small team, that is not a realistic path.

04It is very easy to copy

Everything we would have built sits on top of what signing providers already offer: a content hash, an audit trail, a verification page, a clean inbox. A provider with an existing licence and customers could add a consumer-facing app on its own backend faster than we could get licensed and integrated from scratch.

Our only defence would have been speed and relationships with one institution at a time. That is a thin moat, and it gets thinner the moment the idea works.

05We couldn't validate it

What we had was a clickable prototype with mocked signing and mocked payments, plus a four-person survey. What we did not have:

• A pilot institution willing to sign a letter of intent
• A written price from a signing provider
• A single institution that said it would pay
• Enough survey responses to treat any finding as more than a hint

Every revenue figure we modelled rested on assumptions, not customers. We would rather say that plainly than launch on numbers we could not defend.

06We weren't confident in the market's growth

Third-party reports put India's digital signature market at roughly $163 million in 2024 and growing fast. We do not trust those numbers enough to build on them. They mostly describe institutional and API-based signing, the segment the incumbents already serve, not the consumer-facing layer we were betting on.

The barriers those same reports mention, such as low awareness outside big cities, resistance to leaving paper and weak links to legacy systems, are exactly the ones a new entrant would face. Without evidence that our segment was growing, the optimistic projections were not a reason to proceed.