Three Years Building a Markdown Note App

MNMNOTE · June 2026

Building a markdown note app for years teaches four things: persistence beats launches, scope is the enemy, the few people who write in matter more than the many who never speak, and small ships compound. MNMNOTE is built in the open by a small group of enthusiasts. This is what the long arc taught the project.

The genre has a patron saint. In June 2019, Takuya Matsuyama posted a thread titled "I've been building a Markdown note-taking app for 3 years" ¹. It drew 533 points and 269 comments ¹. The post was not an announcement. It was a status report from year three of a project most people would have abandoned in year one. That thread is the reason this post exists, and the reason it is honest about how slow the road is.

A markdown note app is not a hard idea. A text box, a save, a render. The hard part is the part nobody can see from the outside: staying with the same small idea long enough for it to become good. The building blocks were never the bottleneck. The years were.

What years of building actually teaches

The first lesson is that building is mostly subtraction. Across a multi-year project, the work that survives is rarely the work that felt impressive to build. Features get added, used by nobody, and removed. What remains is a small, sharp core: a note opens, reads like a printed page, and saves locally on your own device.

The note app market is unforgiving to detours. Median day-30 retention across all app categories sits around 4%, and even productivity apps median only about 8% at day 30 ². Most people who open a note tool once never return. That single number reorders every priority. It means the work is not to dazzle a stranger for thirty seconds. It is to be the tool a small number of people quietly keep open for years.

Persistence beats launches

Persistence is the whole strategy. The viral launch is a myth that survives because the slow years are invisible. Matsuyama has run Inkdrop alone since its first release. In a July 2024 interview he said the app "has been live for eight years now," and that "MRR has exceeded $10k for over three years" ³. Eight years is not a launch.

The numbers behind the famous launches hide the years that preceded them. Obsidian's Show HN, posted by Erica Xu on 27 May 2020, drew 1,087 points and 477 comments ⁴. As of a 2023 report, Obsidian estimated approximately one million users, with a Discord of more than 110,000 members and a Reddit community of about 94,600 ⁵. But Obsidian's first public beta shipped on 30 March 2020, and the stable 1.0 release did not arrive until 13 October 2022 ⁵ — two and a half years of building between the first beta and the milestone. The launch is the visible tip of a long, quiet climb.

MNMNOTE's own launch was the opposite of viral. The first Hacker News attempt went nowhere. The work kept going anyway, because the project was never a bet on a launch. It was a bet on showing up. The build-in-public log now runs to more than fifty finished build phases ⁶, most of them invisible to anyone but the people who write in.

Scope is the enemy

Scope is the thing that kills small projects, and it kills them by feeling productive. Every cloud note app has sync, so an early version of MNMNOTE built sync — a real-time layer, a backend, a session model, conflict resolution. Nobody had asked for it. It shipped to no one and was removed months later. The build felt like progress.

The discipline that finally held is the discipline of constraint. Steph Ango, the chief executive of Obsidian, frames it in one sentence: "Style is a set of constraints that you stick to" ⁷. For a note app, the constraint is what it refuses to become — no plugin marketplace, no settings maze, no account wall. What is left is one editor that round-trips markdown faithfully, storing notes locally on your own device. Cross-device sync exists today, rebuilt properly after the first attempt was torn out. Everything else happens on the device in front of you.

Listening to the few who write in

The few people who write in are worth more than the analytics dashboard. Day-30 retention near 4% ² means the dashboard is mostly people leaving. The signal is in the handful of strangers who keep a note open and send a one-line email about a bug, a missing keystroke, a line that wraps wrong. Those messages reordered the roadmap.

This is where the slow road has a hidden advantage. Matsuyama built Inkdrop in public from the start, writing candid posts and treating his own use as the first requirement ³. The project that listens to its few real users ships features those users actually open. The project that listens to the market ships a sync layer nobody wanted. Three years in, the difference between those two postures is the difference between a tool and a graveyard of half-built features.

Shipping small compounds

Small ships compound the way savings do. A note app does not need one dramatic release to get better; it needs fifty quiet ones. Jason Fried put it plainly in October 2025: "New products don't need to be revolutionary, life-changing, or disruptive breakthroughs to succeed" ⁸. The sum of fifty small ships is a product.

The math of building small on a few hours a week is not new. Patrick McKenzie has been writing about it since 2010: "I snort in the general direction of anyone saying a nine-to-five job is impossible to juggle with a business because 'businesses require 100% concentration'" ⁹. He wrote that sentence sixteen years ago. The arithmetic has not changed. Small, sustained effort across years builds a real thing — slowly, which is the only speed available to a small team that refuses to raise money or rush.

What the project got wrong

The project got most early decisions wrong, in ways that compound. The sync feature it ripped out. The feature-flag system built before there were users to flag. The typography, underestimated by an order of magnitude — line length held under 90 characters, the upper bound of the 45–90-character range Matthew Butterick prescribes for comfortable reading ¹⁰, and line spacing loosened until a paragraph stopped fighting the eye — mattered more than half the features before it.

The deepest mistake was treating the project as a stack of choices rather than a single obsession held over time. For the first stretch, the question was "what should a markdown editor in a browser contain?" The better question — "what does a note feel like when there is no friction between the thought and the file?" — took a year of building the wrong thing to find. The corpus around that decision lives in an earlier builder note, I'm Building a Note App Nobody Asked For. The product changed in a week once the question was right. The week was cheap. The year that bought it was not.

What is next

What is next is more of the same, which is the point. One improvement is in flight: faster shared-note loading. One format is in alpha: an embedded drawing canvas. The list of things the project is not doing — raise money, hire, chase a launch — is longer than the list of things it is. That ratio is the strategy.

The shape of the next years is visible because other people drew it first. Matsuyama's eight years ³. Obsidian's two and a half years from beta to 1.0 ⁵. A hundred quieter projects on Indie Hackers and Hacker News that took the long road and did not say so loudly. MNMNOTE is one more attempt at the same slow shape: a note app that has to work offline, on your own device, in a browser tab you already have open, for years.

Frequently asked questions

These are the questions readers send most often from r/SideProject, Indie Hackers, and the rare Hacker News commenter. The answers below are the honest version. None of them is a pitch.

What does building a note app for years actually teach?

Four things, in order of how hard they were to learn: persistence beats launches, scope is the enemy, the few people who write in matter more than the many who never speak, and small ships compound. Most lessons only arrived because the project stayed with one small idea long enough to be wrong, repeatedly, and correct course.

How long has MNMNOTE been built?

It is a multi-year build-in-public project, run by a small group of enthusiasts. The build log now holds more than fifty finished phases, almost all of them invisible from the outside — a bug closed, a keystroke added, a line that stopped wrapping wrong. The visible app is small on purpose; the years went into making it small.

Is a markdown note app even worth building given low retention?

Median day-30 app retention sits near 4%, and productivity apps median about 8%. Those numbers say most people who open a note tool once never return. The realistic goal is not mass retention. It is being the tool a small number of people keep open for years — which a slow, local-first app can be.

Why not just launch big and grow fast?

Because the big-launch story hides the slow years that preceded it. Obsidian took two and a half years from beta to its 1.0 release. Inkdrop crossed its revenue milestone only after years of solo building. A small note app grows by shipping fifty quiet improvements, not one disruptive breakthrough, and it survives by refusing to rush.

What do I need to start using MNMNOTE?

A browser tab. There is no install, no account, and no setup step — your notes are stored on your own device in open Markdown, they work offline, and any note you choose to send can be shared end-to-end encrypted.

How is MNMNOTE different from Obsidian?

Obsidian is a desktop application with an outstanding plugin ecosystem and, on a 2023 estimate, approximately one million users. MNMNOTE is a browser tab with no plugin ecosystem and a small user base. The shared ground is markdown and wiki-links. The difference is install friction: MNMNOTE opens in a tab with no install and no account. If Obsidian works for you, keep it.

What is the hardest part of building in public for years?

Not the code. The hardest part is staying interested in one small idea long enough for it to become good, while the dashboard says most people leave. The countermeasure is to build the tool you yourself keep open, and to treat the few strangers who write in as the real users — because they are.

A small declaration

The slow road is the only road, and after years on it the project is no longer embarrassed to point at what it built. Persistence, scope, listening, shipping small — none of it is clever, and all of it took years to learn.

If you want to see where it goes next, mnmnote.com lives in your browser — no account, no install.

References

Grouped by tier per blog-writing-guide §7. Inline citations: ¹–¹⁰.

Tier 2 — Mainstream press / verifiable journalism

Tier 3 — Industry blog / vendor research

Tier 4 — Personal site / editorial voice (primary-source verified)

Tier 5 — Community / viral precedents

Internal — project build log

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