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From Tweet to Launch — My Open Source Journey

·#papermark #open-source #nextjs #showdev

Are you intrigued about taking your idea from a mere tweet to launching it as an open-source project? In this article, I'll walk through my journey of building Papermark, where I'll share the importance of community engagement, lessons learned, and the tools and technologies I used to bring this project to life.

Papermark — the open-source DocSend alternative

Before we begin, let me introduce you to Papermark. It's the open-source DocSend alternative that helps you manage secure document sharing, including real-time analytics and custom domains. It's all open-source.

If you find this useful and want to support the project, drop a star on GitHub — it genuinely helps.

The tweet

On May 23, 2023, I bet my wife that a tweet would get 50 likes so I could work on an open-source project idea.

The tweet received 265 likes.

That was all the green light I needed.

The MVP

I knew it was possible to build out the MVP in a weekend because of the incredibly powerful tech stack I chose:

  • framework: Next.js
  • styling: Tailwind CSS
  • database: Vercel Postgres
  • file storage: Vercel Blob
  • database ORM: Prisma
  • authentication: NextAuth

And right on time it was done. The launch tweet received 450 likes and over 95,000 views. I was onto something.

Building the product

I spent the next couple of weekends to build more features and polish the UI — and I took the time to document how I built it open-source, out in the public:

  1. Building an Open Source DocSend alternative with Next.js, Vercel Blob and Postgres
  2. Building a Beautiful Product Onboarding with Next.js, Framer Motion, and Tailwind CSS
  3. How to send a warm welcome email with Resend, NextAuth and React-Email
  4. Building a Real-Time Analytics Dashboard with Next.js, Tinybird, and Tremor
  5. Building a Document Viewer with react-pdf
  6. Build an Expandable / Collapsible Data Table with 2 shadcn/ui Components

Each post was a forcing function: ship something small, write it up, get feedback, repeat.

The launch

On September 4, 2023, we launched on Product Hunt.

A few things I'd recommend if you're prepping a launch like this:

  • Build in public for weeks before, not days. The launch is the harvest, not the seed.
  • Have a working self-hosted path day one — open source without easy self-hosting is a brochure.
  • Reply to every comment. It compounds.

What I learned

  • Pick a tech stack that lets you ship in a weekend. Momentum is a feature.
  • Tweet the idea before you build it. Public commitment makes you finish.
  • Documenting the build is marketing. Six dev.to posts moved the project further than any single launch tweet.
  • Open source is a trust accelerator. People share, fork, and contribute when they can read the code.

Conclusion

From a tweet to a launch, building Papermark has been a rewarding journey. Along the way, I learned the importance of community engagement and the role of choosing the right tools and technologies in building a successful open-source project.

I'm Marc, an open-source advocate and the creator of the open-source project behind papermark.com — the open-source DocSend alternative. Remember, the journey of coding is a continuous process of learning and discovery. So, keep coding, my friends.

Originally published on dev.to.