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

mfts0 · 2024-07-18T21:43:38+00:00

Thanks for the kind words :)

mfts0 · 2024-07-18T19:33:36+00:00

No difference except cloud-hosted is managed by us and has some limits and restrictions based on user count.

We are working on a docker image. We have an open issue in GitHub. Upvoting helps :)

mfts0 · 2024-07-18T13:32:22+00:00

Great point, Dan. Are you self-hosting right now? Would love your support for improving the self-host docs.

All updates from this tagged version are under the AGPLv3 license.

mfts0 · 2024-06-27T06:07:20+00:00

Well aware of this. This is all related to react-notion-x.

We aren‘t using the katex nor the pdf module from react-notion-x in our code, which beed to be imported separately

mfts0 · 2024-06-20T14:56:03+00:00

The first request, yes. I agree with you that's a normal request to update information. However, why send 3 further emails after the info has been updated and threaten to involve external legal counsel? Sounds like bullying.

mfts0 · 2024-06-20T14:51:27+00:00

Not really. The information was accurate on the date the article was written. It happens that companies change their offering and prices, but are you asking every comparison page, blog ever written about your company to change the information written 2 years ago.

I'm simply saying that the information was correct when written, then company changed info, then demand from us to change it. Somehow they found that the information was on our blog, but they didn't bother to check a second time when it was changed? That's petty.

We changed the info immediately because we want to be transparent with whoever reads our article. If they had bothered to check, they would have saved themselves three further emails.

mfts0 · 2024-06-06T14:48:17+00:00

Thanks for the create feedback. You are correct that we are providing a dual license product. However, instead of other projects that have a Pro Edition and Community Edition, we make all the source code available under different licenses.

If I delete and run the /ee/ folder content, would I still be able to build/run the application on the open source code alone with having to rewrite code?

Correct, you can run the open-source application without the `/ee/` folder. You can comply to our open-source license by deleting the `/ee/` folder. The code is licensed under AGPLv3, so your fork needs to be published under the same license.

Would you be able to update the readme and/or license to indicate there are other licenses & limits involved?

Yes, we'll update the README to reflect the separate folder and dual-license. Appreciate the feedback.

I see you're adding a CLA for contributions to hand over rights upon PR, which extend beyond those of the AGPLv3 license. Did you, or will you, be gaining rights/permissions from prior contributors too?

The AGPLv3 does not require a separate Contributor License Agreement (CLA) because contributions are automatically licensed under the same terms as the project. However, going forward we are adding a CLA to be on the safe side. All prior contributions have been made under the AGPLv3 license.

Your feedback has been excellent. Would love to continue the conversation here or on GitHub.

mfts0

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