First about the comparison with DocSend. Papermark is
1. Open source-first: Papermark is 100% open-source and open to contributions. Host it yourself, fork it, modify it to your desire! Document infrastructure as never been so open and accessible!
2. Fully customizable: you can use custom domains to share a pitch deck or documents and custom branding.
3. Real-time analytics: we use Tinybird's Clickhouse under the hood to enable real-time analytics. We will also add more advanced analytics like heatmaps.
4. AI-driven: this is very much in experimentation, but we aim to add create specific usecases like creating summaries, memos, asking the document questions to Papermark.
To your second question, we are working on a clean REST API that developers can use to access the full suite of Papermark programmatically. This will enable new usecases and integrate much better with existing applications and tools. We are still looking for design partners before we launch it.
There are many millions of documents being created and shared on any given day. However, the moment you share a document you have no idea if the recipient, whether a client, investor or colleague has actually viewed the document or engaged with the document in any way. You are completely left in the dark.
Papermark is providing you actionable insights for your files. Just like you have Mixpanel or Datadog for your application, there is Papermark for your files.
The vision for the v1 is spot on. There were some attempts to turn the open source ecosystem into a creator economy - they are so similar but…
The big BUT is that software needs to be maintained whereas a video once uploaded on YouTube doesn‘t need to be edited again.
I have a feeling that Birk and the Polar team have the right insights to build the right tools to serve the specific needs of open-source software maintainers.
Hey, Birk here (founder of Polar). Thank you so much @patrick91 for sharing our post here and thank you @mfts0 for the kind words.
Completely agree. I believe open source – as one of the largest and most important ecosystems in the world – is deserving of having a thriving "creator economy". Combined with it being a win-win for the users (businesses and individuals).
But such a platform needs to be bespoke for open source and its nuances vs. focused on content creation. It can't be a silver bullet solution either. All projects are different. So with Polar, we aim to build out a suite of all the possible value-add offerings, but allow maintainers to experiment, tweak and adapt to make it fit their initiatives and communities.
We have our work cut out for us. It's going to be insanely hard and fixing funding is the holy grail, but it's an important mission to pursue and I'm convinced a creator economy will form since current models are not beneficial to anyone. Just a matter of who & how. That's why I think it's crucial we're building it open source ourselves to truly build in public and serve maintainers through quick iterations and based on their needs, what's working etc. Fun times :-)
Hey tea team here. Building tea/gui was really to enable developers and non-developers to do more with open source software than a command-line interface allows us to do.
tea/gui is fully open source and available on GitHub.
We will be adding more capabilities like actions (turn postgres into a service), scripts store and more.
