I'm Building a Note App Nobody Asked For

MNMNOTE · May 2026

MNMNOTE is a browser-based, local-first markdown note app, built in the open by a small group of enthusiasts. It started as a note app nobody had asked for. This is what the project learned in its first year — what it tried, what it got wrong, and why it kept going.

The origin was one stubborn afternoon. A blocked install on a locked-down work laptop. A note that needed writing and no tool that would open. A browser tab that, by elimination, was the only place left to work. The question that became the whole project: could a note app exist with the browser as the entire computer?

A few months later there was a real app at mnmnote.com. It lives in a browser tab, stores notes locally on your own device, and opens without an account. Hacker News did not notice. Search Console reported four impressions in March 2026. The work kept going.

The problem

The problem was install friction, and it was universal. A work laptop that refused to install anything. Obsidian blocked by corporate policy. Notion gated behind an account nobody wanted to create. Apple Notes tied to an iCloud nobody trusted with what mattered. The browser was the only thing left that worked without asking permission.

The corporate laptop is the most common piece of computing hardware in a working life, and it is also the least cooperative. A note app you cannot open in a tab is an app you cannot use during the parts of the day when there is actually time to write — the commute, the long lunch, the half-hour between meetings. The browser, by elimination, becomes the only place you can depend on.

The constraint was logistical, not poetic. Steph Ango of Obsidian put the stakes in one sentence: "In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last." ¹ If the file matters, the friction to write the file should not.

What we tried first

We tried the obvious things first. A markdown file in a Google Doc, which is not actually a markdown file. A folder of .md files in Dropbox, which broke wiki-links. A self-hosted Joplin instance, which required a server somebody had to maintain. None of them were one tab away. Every one was a project.

Joplin was the most serious attempt. A weekend of server setup, a small paid VPS, the desktop client on every device. It worked — until the work laptop refused to install the client, and the VPS bill arrived. Every solution required the user to become the system administrator. None of them met the test the local-first paper by Martin Kleppmann and the Ink & Switch team called "no spinners: your work at your fingertips." ² Local-first software, in that paper's wording, is software where the device holds the authoritative copy of the data and the network is optional. In 2026, that is a feasible claim — because the browser is now a real operating system.

Why we built MNMNOTE

MNMNOTE began as the smallest possible answer to a single question — whether a note app could exist with the browser as the entire computer. No install. No account. No server. Notes that simply save to your browser. Markdown in, markdown out. The first version, in March 2025, was a single page with a text box and a save button.

The product was built on the smallest footprint imaginable. Because notes live on your own device rather than on a server, the part of the system that has to keep running is deliberately small: a domain and a modest backend sitting behind end-to-end encrypted sharing. Everything that makes MNMNOTE useful on one machine works without any of it.

This was not a Show HN moment yet. The work happened quietly, the way Patrick McKenzie has been writing about for fifteen years: "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'." ³ He wrote that in 2010. The math has not changed.

The result, after a few weeks, was a single browser tab that could open a note, render it as a clean magazine page, and save it locally without phoning any server. Everything the editor does on a single device, it does locally — no account, no network, no server holding the authoritative copy. Cross-device sync, when it shipped, was the one part that needed real infrastructure behind it.

What we learned building it

The browser is a more serious operating system than most builders give it credit for. Notes stored locally have no size cliff worth worrying about. The editor gives every note a clean markdown round-trip. The interesting problems were never the storage.

The interesting problems were the ones nobody anticipated. Saving notes locally in a browser is not the same as saving a file — the rules for when a write actually commits are subtle, and the project got them wrong the first three times before settling on a pattern that holds.

The writing surface taught a second lesson. A live markdown editor treats the document as something rebuilt on every keystroke, which is exactly the right architecture for real-time collaboration and exactly the wrong mental model if you assume the text is sitting in a variable somewhere. It is not. Two months of early code were the wrong answer to the wrong question.

The third lesson was typography. The browser's defaults are barely adequate, and the gap between "barely adequate" and "pleasant to write in" is measured in dozens of small choices. Line length under 90 characters. Line-height around 1.65. A serif heading family that does not fight the body. Matthew Butterick puts the line-length rule in one sentence: "Aim for an average line length of 45–90 characters, including spaces." ⁴ That sentence is doing more work than every UI library the project evaluated.

What we got wrong

We got most of the early decisions wrong, in the small ways that compound. We shipped a sync feature in month three that nobody used and had to rip out in month eight. We spent a week on a feature flag system before there were any users to flag. We underestimated how much typography matters.

The sync feature was the worst of these. Nobody had asked for it. It got built because every cloud note app has sync, so the project assumed it should too — a real-time sync layer, a backend, a session model, conflict resolution. None of it shipped to anyone. The build phase where that apparatus came together was where the team finally admitted the feature did not belong yet. Sahil Lavingia, after the Gumroad layoffs, wrote: "Without a fundraising goal coming up, we're simply focused on building the best product we can for our customers." ⁵ The project did not have customers yet. It had assumptions. (Live cross-device sync exists today, rebuilt properly — as a layer on top of a local-first core that still works entirely without it.)

We had ability and determination. We were building the wrong topic.

The deeper mistake was harder to see. For the first eight months the project was treated as a stack — choose the right pieces, the right patterns, and a product will emerge. It does not work that way. Paul Graham, writing about how great work happens, says it cleaner: "Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic." ⁶ Not "a markdown editor in a browser" but "what does a note feel like when there is no friction between the thought and the file." Eight months in, the team wrote that down. The product changed in a week.

MNMNOTE also went up on Hacker News too soon, and it went nowhere. The Show HN guidelines say it plainly: "Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with." ⁷ The early version was a thing people could play with for thirty seconds, then close. The reaction was correct.

Why we won't stop

We won't stop because the alternative is to leave a thing half-built. The product has forty-eight development phases finished, around thirty thousand lines of production code (about sixty thousand including tests) ⁸, and a small number of strangers who write in from places the team has never been. That is more than enough reason. The note app we needed exists now.

The deeper reason is structural. A browser-based, local-first note app is a feasible small-team project in 2026 in a way it was not in 2016. The building blocks are mature and on steady release cadences ^{9 10}. What is missing is the editorial taste to assemble them into a thing that feels like a magazine page rather than a configuration screen. That part is, mostly, what the last fourteen months have been.

There are precedents for this exact arc. Takuya Matsuyama has run Inkdrop as a one-person project from Japan since 2016. His 2019 announcement: "I am a freelance developer based in Japan, running this project for 3 years alone." ¹¹ It drew 533 points and 269 comments on Hacker News ¹². Obsidian's Show HN, posted by Erica Xu on May 27, 2020, drew 1,087 points ¹³; Obsidian now estimates approximately one million users, with a Discord server of more than 110,000 members and a Reddit community of about 94,600 ¹⁴. Both apps are run by very small teams. The shape of the path is visible. The shape is slow, and the shape is real.

Constraint is the point, not the apology. Steph Ango, in another essay: "Style is a set of constraints that you stick to." ¹⁵ If MNMNOTE has a style, it is the constraint of building a note app that has to work without anyone's real-time presence — offline, on your own device, in a browser tab you already have open.

What's next

What's next is the boring part — the part where products either survive or do not. 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 is longer than the list of things it is.

Jason Fried, the Basecamp co-founder, posted in October 2025: "New products don't need to be revolutionary, life-changing, or disruptive breakthroughs to succeed." ¹⁶ He has been writing some version of that sentence for twenty years. The path of a small-team note app in 2026 is one several other people have already walked — Matsuyama, McKenzie, Lavingia. The only thing this project can contribute is one more honest data point.

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.

How many users does MNMNOTE have?

Honestly, not many. Anonymous-by-design means the project does not track individual users. Analytics show low-thousands of monthly unique visitors as of May 2026; a small minority return; an even smaller minority opens a note. The product is early. The data is what the data is. "Small and honest" beats "large and made up."

Where are my notes stored?

On your own device, inside your browser — not on a server. MNMNOTE keeps the authoritative copy locally, which is why it opens with no account and keeps working with the network off. Notes are plain Markdown and export as ordinary .md files, so nothing is trapped in the app.

Do I need an account to use MNMNOTE?

No. MNMNOTE opens in a browser tab and works immediately — no sign-up, no email, no install, no extension. Notes stay on the device you wrote them on. End-to-end encrypted sharing is there when you want to hand a note to someone else, and cross-device sync is a separate layer on top of a core that runs fine without it.

Why not raise venture capital?

Because the product does not require it. A small, browser-based, local-first app can be viable at user counts that would be unworkable for a venture-backed company. Sahil Lavingia, after Gumroad's layoffs, wrote that his only metric of success had been "building a billion-dollar company" and that he had come to see it as "a terrible goal." ⁵ The project read that and believed him.

How is MNMNOTE different from Obsidian?

Obsidian is a desktop application with an outstanding plugin ecosystem and approximately one million users ¹⁴. MNMNOTE is a browser tab with no plugin ecosystem and a tiny user base. The overlap 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 using it — MNMNOTE exists for the cases Obsidian cannot reach. More detail at mnmnote.com/blog.

A small declaration

The note app we needed exists now. It lives in a browser tab, keeps its notes on your own device, and after fourteen months the project is no longer embarrassed to point at it. If you are curious, mnmnote.com lives in your browser — no install, no account.

References

Tier 1 — Academic / primary research

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

Tier 6 — Standards / official docs / library sources

Internal — verifiable repo receipt

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