AI Summary
5 min readThey built a $900K/year open-source app | Starter Story
In just a year and a half, a weekend project turned into a $75,000 monthly recurring revenue business. The founders of Papermark, an open-source document sharing platform, joined Starter Story to explain how they turned a side project into a near-million-dollar company by betting on open source from day one.
Why open source was the right bet
The founders were clear from the beginning that being open source was not an afterthought—it was the core strategy. "I think off the bat being open source was the right bet for us," one of them said. Their reasoning was practical: they saw a gap in the market where large, expensive SaaS products like DocSend were charging premium prices for document sharing and analytics, but there was no credible open-source alternative. By building in public and making the code freely available, they could attract developers and technical users who wanted control over their data and the ability to self-host.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:37) **Introducing Papermark & the Founders** - Marc and Julien introduce themselves and their open-source document sharing platform, Papermark, which has reached $75K MRR in 18 months.
- 2 (02:00) **Why Open Source is a "Genius Business Model"** - The founders argue that open source provides a massive distribution and trust advantage over traditional SaaS competitors.
- 3 (03:20) **Identifying Companies Ready to be Open Sourced** - The founders share their framework for spotting SaaS products that are "just waiting" to be open-sourced.
- 4 (04:36) **The First Weekend: Building Papermark as a Side Project** - Marc and Julien recount how they built the first version of Papermark in a single weekend as a fix for their own frustration with existing tools.
- 5 (05:50) **Hacker News Launch: The First 1,000 Users** - The founders describe their initial launch on Hacker News, which brought in their first wave of users and critical feedback.
- 6 (07:10) **The Open Source Flywheel: Community Contributions** - Marc explains how open source created a self-sustaining growth loop where users became contributors.
- 7 (08:45) **Monetization Strategy: Cloud vs. Self-Hosted** - The founders break down how they actually make money from an open-source product.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
they built a $900K/year open-source appSharing ideas that make money! --- Keywords: business podcast, entrepreneur stories, app marketing, startup success
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