Dean McPherson

Dean McPherson is a Sydney-based self-taught developer best known as the co-founder of Paperform, the bootstrapped online form builder he started in 2016 with his wife, Diony McPherson. Paperform combines forms, payments, bookings, surveys and e-signatures in a document-style editor, and in 2025 the couple launched Stepper, an AI-native workflow automation tool.

McPherson studied music and philosophy at the University of Sydney, where his studies included formal logic. After graduating he taught himself to code, landed a junior developer job and worked as a mobile and full-stack developer, digitizing paper processes such as tree-inspection forms for local councils. In 2013, building a registration form for a friend's school trip, he spotted the gap that became Paperform.

He built the first version by getting up an hour early before his day job, and launched in 2016 through an AppSumo lifetime deal. About 3,000 lifetime customers signed up, and Paperform reached number two on Product Hunt. Soon after, Dean and Diony quit their jobs to work on it full time, Dean on product and engineering, Diony as COO.

They ran Paperform as a lifestyle business at first, then pushed for growth from late 2018 without outside investment. It passed a $2 million annual run rate with more than 20 staff by 2022, and Dean has said he grew it to about $3.5M ARR in seven years while raising a large family. In October 2025 Paperform launched Stepper, a free AI workflow builder sold as a standalone product and inside Paperform.

McPherson writes about building B2B SaaS on Substack and is often cited as an example of a family-run, profitable, bootstrapped software company.