The Dataroom blog

Writing about the document workflow, slowly.

Long-form on engineering, design, and how teams actually close deals. We publish twice a month, sometimes less.

May 18, 2025 8 min

How we cut viewer first-paint to 90ms (and why it mattered for retention)

Document viewers are a deceptively hard performance problem. They have to load fast, render PDFs reliably, and stay snappy on bad networks. Here's the work that took us from 480ms first paint to 90ms.

by Devon Hart

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Customer

May 14, 2025

Closing a $1.2M deal without a single printed page

How Atlas Energy ran 11 signers, 4 versions, and a procurement review across two continents, entirely inside one workspace.

6 min

Playbook

May 8, 2025

The investor update that actually gets read

We analyzed 4,200 investor updates sent on Dataroom. The ones that got replies share five things in common.

9 min

Founders

May 1, 2025

Why we charge $9.99 (and never a cent more)

Pricing pages are a tax on attention. Ours is one paragraph and one number. Here's the math behind that choice.

5 min

Design

Apr 24, 2025

Designing a viewer that doesn't feel like 2014

Document viewers have looked the same for fifteen years. Here's what we changed, and why most of it's about restraint, not features.

11 min

Playbook

Apr 16, 2025

Sequential vs. parallel signing, pick wisely

Two routing modes, ten different outcomes. A field guide for sales, legal, and ops teams.

7 min

Security

Apr 9, 2025

What's actually in your audit log (and why it matters)

We dump every action to an immutable log. Here's how to read it, audit it, and answer your security team's next question.

10 min

One email, every other Friday.

No drip, no upsell. Just the new post and what we shipped.