The Story
Iuliia and Marc are the husband-and-wife co-founders of Papermark - an open-source alternative to DocSend for sharing documents and data rooms securely. They bootstrapped the company to $75K MRR (close to $900K ARR) in just 1.5 years.
As Marc explains: "Papermark started as an open-source project on the side without the idea to actually go commercial."
The entire business started with a single tweet: "I pushed out a tweet and I basically said like I'm going to build an open source alternative to DocSend and it went just like crazy. Within a couple hours it got like 40,000 views."
"So over the weekend, I actually built it, at least the first MVP, the first version that was usable and pushed out on Monday the launch tweet and it got like 100K views. And then soon after, the first customers came and were asking like, 'Can we give you money to buy the service?' And that's kind of how it kicked it off."
Key Insights
What Papermark Does
"Papermark is a document analytics and sharing platform. You kind of turn your document into the link which you later can share, protect with the password, with the watermark, and then get all the analytics so you can see exactly okay someone was on my document for 5 minutes on this slide, 1 minute here."
"Papermark is essentially alternative to DocSend and other data room providers which exist already for 10 years or more but they like don't innovate anymore. They don't produce anything new. They mostly focus on the enterprise customers. That's why the open-source kind of new solution was needed in this market."
What Open Source Means
"Open source, like the name says, the source code that's powering the project is publicly available. So anyone can look at it, anyone can contribute to it. And the cool thing is that the entire history of the project is also publicly available."
"A lot of developers these days, they want to show off their work. Maybe they can't find a job but they can do open source projects. They can contribute to open source in order to advance their own career."
4 Benefits of Building Open Source
1. Highly Defensible
"You have nothing to hide behind. You essentially give away the core product for free. There's no need for anyone else to kind of build the same project and charge anything for it because it's essentially already as low as it can get."
2. Very Scalable
"There's essentially zero barrier to entry. We have people coming to our project every day, looking at it, either contributing to it, running it for their small teams, or then seeing the open source project and converting actually to papermark.com because they don't want to deal with the self-hosting of it."
3. Community-Driven R&D
"Incumbents only have like their employees that basically maintain the software. We have the community that basically looking through the projects, monitoring it, seeing where they can contribute new features. If they find issues, they can immediately swoop in and provide a solution for it. The velocity with the community is just immense."
4. Secure and High Trust
"The code can be audited by any third party. You're not hiding behind proprietary software that we need to grant access to someone at a bank that is trying to evaluate whether it would be a great fit for the infrastructure. They can do that very easily by just auditing our open source code and seeing that nothing nefarious is going on."
Open Source Business Model
"The business model for Papermark is basically you can either self-host it for free or for many of the users that maybe not be tech-savvy that don't want to host it themselves because they don't want to deal with the overhead or the maintenance, we have a hosted version that we charge for."
"Our core software of Papermark is open source and self-hostable. And then if you need advanced features, you can acquire a license and still run it on your infrastructure as a self-hosted version, but just with our enterprise license attached to it."
Growth Strategy
"I think off the bat, being open source was the right bet for us. Building in public with open source is extremely natural because you have nothing to hide behind already. There's no downside to sharing the small progress even that you're making, even if the features are not 100% complete. Share that on Twitter, on LinkedIn, just with anyone and you'll slowly gather community around that."
"We also participated in this month-long open-source hackathon called Hacktoberfest. There's like a cycle where we build faster, more customers notice that we're building and shipping features whereas the incumbents are slow and like sleeping and then they start switching."
Open Source Opportunities in 2025
"With the era of AI, founders can target much smaller niches and smaller markets. It just makes it so easy to create a very small differentiated business off of an existing incumbent."
"The key markets that I see today that are being rebuilt is anything that has to do with like a CRM. They have become so large that the software itself is very complex... Why not build a very targeted CRM for veterinarians or office building managers that have a very specific use case?"
"Think about reducing complexity in what existing businesses are there and just build it very simple. Think to yourself: Is there an open source alternative? Does it make sense to build an open source alternative? Is the market massive?"
Business Numbers
- •Year 1: $20K MRR
- •Year 1.5: $75K MRR ("we are getting closer to our first million")
- •~30,000 users (many free)
- •~1,000 paying customers
- •60 contributors
- •7,000 GitHub stars
- •800,000 document views on platform
Tech Stack
- •Next.js with TypeScript (two projects: marketing site + open source app)
- •Cursor (AI IDE)
- •GitHub
- •Vercel (hosting)
- •PlanetScale (Postgres database)
- •Trigger (background jobs)
- •Resend (transactional emails)
- •Stripe (payments)
Cost Breakdown
- •80% on freelancers and founder salaries
- •15% on marketing/growth experiments
- •5-6% on tools
Key Advice
"Being an open-source alternative to any big incumbent isn't a surefire success. You need to reach at least feature parity with the existing tools in the market and then you need to out-ship them. You need to be better than the current offering in the market. You want to become the clear successor to the incumbents, not just be an alternative that's also there."
From Iuliia: "I didn't know how to code at all and I decided okay I'm going to build the first project. I took existing open source to build on top of and then what I build I also made open source and I feel so much push and support from the open source community and contributors... Just do it open source from the beginning. Try to be part of the community. Help people contribute and they will do the same and you will see how your project grow."
Resources
- •Papermark: https://www.papermark.io/
- •Follow Marc: https://x.com/mfts0
- •Follow Iuliia: https://x.com/IuliiaDev