Papermark
NewsPapermark reaches $1M ARR

Papermark reaches $1M ARR

Iuliia Shnai

We made it: Papermark has reached $1M ARR.

It took us 18 months, two founders and no outside funding. In January we set ourselves a public challenge to reach $1M ARR in 2025. We got there in September.

We wrote the goal down so we could not hide from it. Every month we shared the numbers, the experiments and what did not work. Today we can share the one we were waiting for.

1. The road to $1M

Behind those dates: thousands of commits, more than 50 growth experiments, and hours spent speaking with users every week.

2. What we shipped between $500k and $1M

The second half of the way was about making Papermark a secure, modern data room that serious deal teams can rely on.

  • Control: file-level granular permissions, default permissions for new documents, NDA agreement management, disable printing and a block list for links.
  • Insight: detailed data room analytics, visitor location and device analytics, and search inside the data room viewer.
  • Compliance: multi-region storage, so teams can keep documents in the US, EU or APAC.
  • Deal workflow: file requests, publishable Q&A, automatic index numbering and tags for links.

All of it is in our changelog.

3. The same months, release by release

Here is what shipped from April to September, in order, and what each release does for a deal team.

April

  • File requests in data rooms: visitors can upload documents straight into your room, so a buyer's or counsel's files land in the right folder.
  • Block list for links: stop specific email domains, such as a competitor, from opening your documents.
  • Expanded link presets: save expiration, notifications and every other link setting, then reuse them.
  • Tags for links: keep track of links by deal, investor or stage.

May

June

July and August

September

  • Automatic index numbering: every folder and file gets a number like 1.1 or 2.1, so everyone in a deal can refer to the same document on a call or in an email.

4. What customers use it for

Thank you to every customer who trusts Papermark with their fundraise, their M&A process and their due diligence.

Founders use Papermark to run the data room for their round. Advisors and deal teams use it for sell-side and buy-side processes, with separate permissions for every party. Lawyers and accountants use it during due diligence, where every view needs to be on record. You can read some of their stories on our customers page.

5. What we learned

  • Talk to users every week. Most of our best features started as one support email. We still answer every request ourselves.
  • Search brings the right people. Comparison and guide pages reach people who already need a data room. Marc talked about this on the Confessions of a B2B Entrepreneur podcast in July: open source, SEO against established competitors and product-led growth.
  • Run many experiments. Not every one of our 50+ experiments worked, but each one taught us something.
  • Stay small on purpose. Two founders means short feedback loops and fast decisions.

6. How we turn a support email into a feature, step by step

Most of the releases above started as a message from a customer. This is how that works for us.

  1. A founder reads it. Every support request is answered by Iuliia or Marc.
  2. It goes on the list. Requests from support are the main input to what we build next.
  3. We ship a first version. Small and useful beats big and late, and we ship improvements every week.
  4. We write it in the changelog. Every release gets a note in our changelog, and many get a help article.
  5. We improve it later. Q&A shipped in April, and publishable Q&A followed in August. Group permissions shipped in September 2024, and file-level granular permissions followed this June.

This is also why we stay small. With two founders, the person who reads the request is the person who decides what to build next.

7. Our story on Starter Story

A few weeks before we crossed $1M ARR, Starter Story interviewed us about how we built Papermark as an open-source SaaS with two founders and no outside funding.

8. How to set up a data room today

If you are about to run a deal, this is how the features above fit together.

  1. Create a data room from the welcome screen. See how to create a data room.
  2. Choose where your data lives. Pick US, EU or APAC storage. See multi-region storage.
  3. Add folders and files, then turn on index numbering so every document has a clear reference.
  4. Create groups and set permissions for buyers, investors and advisors. See granular file permissions.
  5. Protect access with email verification, an NDA and a dynamic watermark. Disable printing where it matters.
  6. Open the room to the other side with file requests and Q&A.
  7. Share the link and follow every view in the data room analytics.

9. What's next

We are just getting started. The next step is to make the data room even faster to set up and even easier to run for large deals, without losing the speed that brought customers here.

If you are preparing a deal, see our plans and pricing, read how we protect your documents on our security page, or create a room now.

Launch your data room in under 60 seconds.

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