Dirk Sahlmer

Acquiring SaaS companies @ saas.group | saas.wtf Newsletter

Engineer turned M&A professional. After 20+ transactions on the buy-side, I'm now helping tech founders run a structured exit process.

Posting regularly here on LI and in my saas.wtf newsletter on SaaS and  M&A topics.

Head of Origination

Building in public | Postli ✍️| Papermark🔗| Other tools for fun🤩

Self taught developer, moved from academia to startups. Building in public Postli- LinkedIn content creation software, and Papermark - Open Source Docsend alternative, for sharing documents and creating data rooms.
Launching other micro projects and other products, interested in marketing growth and PLG and Product onboarding catalyst.

iuliia shnai

Things I've stopped doing since bootstrapping Papermark:

❌ Attending conferences "for networking"
❌ Taking investor coffee chats "just in case"
❌ Building features because competitors have them
❌ Pretending I need a 10-person team

✅ Shipping
✅ Talking to customers
✅ Automating and improving processes

Boring works.

Iuliia Shnai

Co-Founder Papermark | Building in public | Marketing with code

No alternative text description for this image

twitter/x vs Linkedin

57k impressions to 3k impressions. some things just never change 😂

This was February for papermark.com

💸 8.9% MRR growth 
🔺 181,248 links viewed
📄 34,408 documents added
🔗 8,300 links created
👤 4,489 users signed in
✨ 2,261 new sign ups

What we shipped:
1. SAML SSO + SCIM provisioning
2. Document versioning via webhooks
3. Folder icons and colors
4. DOCX upload support
5. Slack private channel notifications
6. AI dataroom structure generation
7. Link expiration indicators
8. Bulk downloads with progress tracking

58 PRs merged. 

Core observations:
1. Growth rate slowing with relation to churn 
There are better and worser months of course, the goal is to add 10% MRR growh MOM (it means minus churn already). But it is harder and harder of course

2. Demand for advance Data Room features increase
SSO was one of most requested feature. Now it's live.

3. 2,261 new users
Organic growth still working. Word of mouth + content


Goals for March:
1. Clean up all our SEO 
2. Make first exploration for outbound
3. Ship more data room features
4. Answer the only question I have: How can you stand out in the time where everything became 10x easier to replicate. 

Continue building Papermark  - #1 Secure Data Room provider and Docsend alternative and getting to our next milestone $2M ARR.

When we crossed $10k MRR, I thought:
“$100k is a total freedom”

Short answer no, it is not.

The only thing I’ve learned: the hustle never ends.

You make $0 → you hustle to make it work
You make $1k MRR→ you hustle to cover all costs
You make $10k MRR → you hustle to reach full stability
You make $100k MRR → now you have 100 times more responsibilities to keep all running.

We compete with companies that have 1000 employees and 100k followers

• Dropbox DocSend: 6K followers, 51-200 employees
• Ideals VDR: 34K followers, 501-1K employees
• SS&C Intralinks: 106K followers, 1K-5K employees
• Datasite: 76K followers, 1K-5K employees

These competitors have thousands of employees, and bloated Linkedin followers and millions in marketing budget.

But we have advantages they don't:

1. Founder customer support
Marc Seitz and me chat with customers every day. Their product decisions go through 5 layers of management.

2. Direct contact with us
People know our names, see our faces, read our struggles here . They are a corporate entity.

3. Speed
We ship features in days, they ship in quarters. Yesterday we build big quality of live improvement in side bar, in 1 day.

4. Community
Our open source repo has developers contributing. They can't compete with that level of transparency and trust we have there. Anyone see the code.

Being small forced us to be creative. 

We build in public because we have limited marketing budget. Our product is good enough that people share it themselves. We compete on authenticity and speed.

Small teams with AI tools can now build what required 100s people before.

I need to create customer survey, but I am lazy 
Any AI survey tools which I can use?
 
Requirements: 
- I can share link to existing survey and it build it from it
- it creates questions in the builder from my detailed request
- it can regenerate it 
- I can edit it
- 500+ planned forms filled and growing, so not super expensive

Checked Tally, Formbricks, Typeform, and seems like everywhere I need to type questions and answers myself

This is too much for person who spends 90% of time chatting with bots.

Most founders think SEO = blog articles

but there over 10 different content types  all of them do different type of job:

1. Blog posts (how-to, lists, general topics)
2. News articles (latest updates in our space)
3. Help articles (product documentation)
4. Changelog (feature updates)
5. Customer stories (case studies)
6. Landing pages (specific use cases)
7. Content hubs (topic clusters)
8. Micro tools (calculators, generators)
9. Use cases (industries using data rooms)
10. Comparison pages (vs competitors, alternatives)

When we only had blogs, we got 2k organic visitors. Now with all 10 types, we get 10k organic visitors.

- Help articles and changelogs rank help users understand we constantly improving and developing product. 
- Customer stories bring traffic for "[industry] + data room" searches. 
- CTA  pages convert like crazy for specific use cases.
- Comparison pages are gold, and they should be really done on latest info about product

Micro tools can engage people more with the brand. Our price calculator constantly get a lot of usage.

Everything you create can rank and convert.  So here, stop separating product work from marketing work, but merge them.

The main problem when selling as a 2-person bootstrapped company is trust.

What used to signal trust:
→ VC funding
→ Hundreds of employees
→ Fancy office
→ Big name investors
→ 5 people included in the call 
→ "YC" in your bio

Now?

Small is becoming the new trust signal. And it can not not make me happy.

Lean teams. Fast decisions. No bureaucracy.

Jack Dorsey is proving that bigger isn't better.

The rules are changing. Finally.

Jack Dorsey just cut Block from 10,000 to 6,000 people.

His quote: "A smaller company gives us the space to grow the right way, on our own terms."

The best fundraising strategy is having revenue.

taplio

The Battle

Dirk Sahlmer

iuliia shnai

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taplio

The Battle

Dirk Sahlmer

iuliia shnai

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}iuliia shnai's LinkedIn Performance

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