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.
Hey r/ExperiencedFounders
I’m Marc Seitz, co-founder of Papermark — the open-source alternative to DocSend. We help founders, VCs, M&A teams, and legal teams share documents and run data rooms with real permissioning, page-level analytics, watermarking, NDA gates, and self-hosting.
Quick background:
- 60,000+ companies using Papermark, $2M+ link views, 250K+ documents shared
- $17.3B+ in transaction volume powered (fundraises, M&A, investor outreach)
- 8,200+ GitHub stars; customers include Vercel, Mistral AI, DoorDash, BCG, Hopper, Brevo, DP World
- Before Papermark: CTO at AQVC (Fund of fund), co-founder/CTO at Hackerbay (NFX-backed, ran 5 years, clients included Twitter, Vodafone, Allianz)
- Building from Munich at the moment, after stints in SF, Berlin, Hong Kong, Helsinki, Toronto
Happy to go deep on:
- Open-source as a go-to-market (stars → inbound → enterprise logos), and where it breaks
- Competing head-on with a VC-backed US incumbent (DocSend/Dropbox) as an indie OSS team
- Self-hosting as a wedge into EU/regulated buyers — GDPR/HIPAA, on-prem
- Open-core pricing: what we put in OSS vs. paid, and the mistakes we made early
- Building a “boring” B2B product for non-developers (VCs, legal, IR) out of a dev-first OSS culture
- Shutting down Hackerbay after 5 years — what I carried into Papermark
What I won’t be useful on: paid-ads playbooks and performance marketing, outreach we’ve barely run any. Our initial growth has been OSS + word of mouth, so ask me about that instead.
Proof:
LinkedIn
u/mfts0 — 9 days ago