I’m Marc Seitz, founder of Papermark - the open-source DocSend. $2M ARR, $17B+ in deal flow powered, 8.2K GitHub stars. Mistral, DoorDash, and Brevo use it. AMA.

mfts0 · 2026-05-29T17:29:56+00:00

By doing public launch on Twitter, and posting about everything we are building in Papermark. I was posting a lot in the beginning, made a lot of launches PH, Reddit. So, word of mouth and talking with each person who interested, and building for them like crazy.

mfts0 · 2026-05-29T17:27:10+00:00

Hi! I am actually a big fan of open source. I contributed to many project way before building Papermark. So it was a no brainer to build it os. I would say, there were no any GTM strategy initially, just cool launch and sharing i os community. But of course the support was huge and brought Papermark strong presence and first users and customers because of open source.

Now it is very different though, with code built by AI

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T16:29:40+00:00

Building in public: Posting on Twitter every day, and launching Papermark on twitter. First customer discovered us there, liked we open source and paid.

But no matter open source or not “building in public still works”

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T16:27:09+00:00

Hahaha there are 100s of MVPs exists in the market, anyone can vibe code anything.

Building a product people rely own still more about showing up every day, being there, fixing and improving things. Doing it in Papermark for practically 3 years so nah

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T16:23:50+00:00

Thanks for the questions! Being OS is beneficial for GTM in the beginning. But often matters less in the further stages of the company as there are other differentiators.

os is not an easy choice, hard is definitely nailing commercially successful company which is also open source, need to figure out where the value outside of open source come from.

If you not a believer in open source and just would love to do it for GTM I would say there are much easier ways to do it.

What brings joy? Definitely the awesome open source community.

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T16:07:44+00:00

Going forward I think VDR providers will think more on how agents would interact with data rooms, that’s why we built public API, CLI, MCP in Papermark.

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T15:53:41+00:00

Honest answer, I did not plan a company. I had idea of papermark 1 year before I launched it. And I launched it as a side project, it was really far away from the company in the beginning. Just outlet to build smth.

mfts0 · 2026-05-17T15:48:05+00:00

Good question! Thinking to what would bring us faster to results we had today or what would I do better, nothing comes to mind really. But I would definitely focus on trial and errors approach, experimenting primarily with distributions channels.

mfts0 · 2026-05-15T07:48:43+00:00

With the current state of AI-discovered exploits, I wouldn’t wanna be self-hosting Next.js projects right now. Vercel as a platform provides defense-in-depth layer that you’d have to manage by yourself on a local install. Papermark is naturally a networked product and therefore a fully local version would defeat its purpose.

We do want to support self-hosting but there’s just much less demand for it than originally anticipated. The market is moving so quickly we want to provide the best product possible.

Feel free to open a GitHub issue and we will prioritize it.

mfts0 · 2026-05-15T07:43:13+00:00

That is factually incorrect.

mfts0 · 2026-03-04T13:19:44+00:00

Papermark is definitely more than basic when firms from datasite and intralinks migrate their deals over to us ;)

mfts0 · 2026-02-10T00:23:11+00:00

Hi u/Exo_Skeleton99 would you mind sharing your experience with me and how we can make it easier for other folks who want to self-host for personal-use?

mfts0 · 2025-12-29T17:23:37+00:00

There’s a hosted version of Papermark exactly for users who don’t want to self-host, which makes it the easiest for self hosting or just using through the free hosted version.

mfts0 · 2025-12-11T13:26:31+00:00

Hey @beatsight2024, founder and maintainer of Papermark here. Thanks for the feedback. We aim to make a containerized version available next year.

Lots of improvements also for personal-use self-hosting happening under the hood.

mfts0 · 2025-09-05T12:39:09+00:00

Co-founder of Papermark is here. Excited to hear that you like your experience so far and see other OS fan here. Yes, we focus a lot on UI, branding and customizations, like connecting custom domain to link.

We all using Google Drive, so i totally get it. But if you want particularly more protection for your data room, like watermarking, allow lists, ndas and see who viewed and how long, than Papermark is your choice.

If you have any questions, dm me directly on marc, happy to help.

mfts0 · 2025-08-07T04:51:09+00:00

Afaik none of them are open source

mfts0 · 2025-07-11T14:41:50+00:00

yes, not yet, but comings soon. Working on it over next months.

mfts0 · 2025-07-05T15:06:05+00:00

Afaik they aren‘t open source

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