Iuliia Shnai: Papermark from Weekend Tweet to $4M ARR
Co-founder who, with partner Marc Seitz, turned an open-source DocSend alternative into a bootstrapped multi-million ARR data-room business.
- MRR
- ~$333K (from $4M ARR)
- ARR
- $4M
- Users
- 70,000+ companies (site claim); thousands of paying customers (founder posts)
- Founded
- 2023
- Team
- 2 full-time + freelancers
- Stack
- Next.js, Postgres, ClickHouse, Tinybird, Vercel, Stripe
How did Papermark start?
In May 2023 Marc Seitz posted a tweet announcing he would build an open-source alternative to DocSend over the weekend. The post received hundreds of likes and significant views. He shipped a working MVP within days. The product addressed a clear pain: expensive, stagnant document-sharing tools that provided limited insight into how recipients engaged with shared materials.
Iuliia Shnai, his partner and co-founder, had spent the prior years in academia completing a PhD in education technology in Finland before founding a venture-backed startup, Marble, that closed after multiple pivots. She then experimented with numerous small products, publicly documenting periods of very low hourly earnings. In one 2023 post she broke down months of income that worked out to roughly $2 per hour across several side projects. When Papermark showed early signs of product-market fit that earlier projects had lacked, the two focused on it full-time. They incorporated the company in 2024 and have run it as a two-person core team ever since.
The initial version was deliberately open source. The codebase remains public. Users can self-host. The commercial offering centers on hosted data rooms, advanced analytics, permissions, watermarking, and related features for fundraising, M&A, and due diligence. Marc has described the decision to open-source from day one as both an experiment in sustainable open-source business models and a practical trust signal in a category that handles confidential documents.
From weekend project to multi-million ARR
Early traction came from the original tweet, a Product Hunt launch in September 2023 that ranked highly, and consistent public updates. Paying customers appeared quickly. Growth was gradual at first. Marc later noted it took roughly 18 months to reach $1M ARR, another six months to reach $2M, and four more months to reach $3M.
In August 2026 both founders posted that the company had crossed $3M ARR after 28 months, fully bootstrapped, with a team of two full-time people plus freelancers. In early November 2026 Iuliia reported that October had been the biggest month to date and that they had crossed $4M ARR. Document views that month were reported at 338,863 (+42%), with strong growth in sign-ups and a data-room trial-to-paid conversion of 37.4%. These figures are self-reported by the founders on X; they have not published audited financials.
The product has expanded from simple document sharing to full data rooms. Recent launches include Data Rooms 2.0 and agent features (API, CLI, MCP server) that allow AI tools to create rooms, set permissions, and pull analytics. The site claims more than 70,000 companies use the platform. Customer stories reference specific fundraises and transactions, including a €50M fund close and larger M&A activity. Exact user or customer counts beyond the founders’ posts are not independently verified here. Marc has also mentioned tens of thousands of teams signing up and billions in deal volume flowing through the platform, again self-reported.
How they distribute and operate
Distribution has been founder-led and public. Both post regularly on X and LinkedIn about product updates, metrics, and the day-to-day reality of running the business with a spouse. Iuliia has emphasized content, partnerships, and personal customer support even at higher revenue levels. In one post she noted that small, unscalable actions still mattered at roughly $300k MRR: fast support replies, weekly content, and attention to individual customer requests.
They have tested paid channels and run ads, but the core engine appears to be product-led growth plus consistent public presence. Open source has served as both a trust signal and a distribution channel. The repository has thousands of stars. Self-hosting is available for organizations that prefer it. Early customers often discovered the product through public posts and valued the open-source aspect.
Operations stay lean. Decisions remain fast because the founders still handle support and ship frequently. Iuliia has described the lack of separation between work and personal life when building with a partner—discussing features at dinner, answering support requests from a phone while outside, shipping over weekends. They have also invested in brand, including a reported $20,000 purchase of the papermark.com domain once revenue made the cost recoverable in a short period. At the time of the domain purchase, MRR was high enough that the expense could be covered in roughly one month.
Lessons and caveats
Public building compounded. Early posts about low earnings and failed experiments created a record that later made the growth story more credible to people who had followed along. Open source reduced some trust friction in a category that handles confidential documents. The combination of technical shipping speed and transparent updates appears to have been more effective than any single channel.
Staying small preserved speed. At $4M ARR the core team is still two people. That is unusual and requires deliberate choices about what to automate, outsource, or simply not do. The founders have noted the desire to keep personal involvement in support and feature decisions. Iuliia has observed that many of the same unscalable habits that work for the first hundred customers continue to matter later.
Numbers should be read as founder-reported. ARR milestones come directly from their X posts. Third-party sites have repeated earlier figures ($900k, $2M, $3M) that lag the most recent self-reports. Conversion rates, view counts, and exact customer numbers are likewise self-reported. Independent verification of revenue is not available. The $4M ARR figure reflects the founders’ own accounting of recurring revenue; readers should treat it as a public claim rather than an audited number.
The category remains competitive. Larger players exist. Platform changes, security requirements (SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar), and the need to serve enterprise buyers introduce ongoing work that a two-person team must prioritize carefully. The founders have set a public next goal of $10M ARR.
Papermark illustrates a path available to technical founders who ship quickly, stay transparent, and solve a painful, recurring problem for businesses that already pay for the category. The timeline from weekend MVP to multi-million ARR was measured in years, not months, and the operating reality remains hands-on. Prior failures and public documentation of low early earnings did not prevent later traction; they formed part of the public record that made the later growth legible.
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