Markdown Note-taking App Can Now Cover Half of Rent — Inkdrop
I’ve written an article about Inkdrop has reached $1,000 sales in April. I would like to report recent status of Inkdrop business. This app…
I’ve written an article about Inkdrop has reached $1,000 sales in April. I would like to report recent status of Inkdrop business. This app is closed-source but I would be glad to share the knowledge learned from this project. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment or mention to me on Twitter.
TL;DR
- Cancellation rate of subscription is significantly low
- Don’t be a yes-man to minorities
- Blogging works greater than ads
- “One developer’s life supported by 1,000 users”
Inkdrop is a note-taking app for Markdown lovers
Please skip if you already know about Inkdrop.
It is a multi-platform note-taking app running on macOS, Windows, Ubuntu, iPhone and Android. It is developed by TAKUYA(me) while he works as a freelance.
You can write task logs, meeting logs, code snippets, blog drafts, and all about your daily hacking life with the Markdown editor with syntax highlighting support, which is designed to be the most convenient and natural way to make notes.
Why I made it is that I found no apps which I could love to use. Existing apps had problems such as: Dropbox-based sync is sluggish, web services like Wiki are not usable in offline and are often hard to find from many browser tabs, the design is not so cool, no multi-platform support…I would like to solve these personal problems by making the app, which is simple and beautiful with GFM support, fast sync and offline support.
The pricing is $4.99 per month or $49.90 per year. 60-day free trial is available. Learn more about the pricing here if you are interested in.
Cancellation rate of subscription is significantly low
Paid users are getting increased little by little. That finally made about 360 USD last month (Jun) which equals to a half of rent of my apartment in Tokyo, Japan. It helps my budget a lot! Thank you!
As you can see above the highest sales of the month was December 2016. That month was just two months later since Inkdrop was officially launched, and users registered during beta testing have become paid members at once. After that, the sales dropped down once but now it overtook.
As of April, the number of active subscriptions was 30 but now 45. It’s 1.5x. There are only two people who have canceled so far. It’s surprisingly few. 20 people are subscribing annual plan in total which is great. Let’s take a closer look.
Don’t be a yes-man to minorities
What kind of user was the two people who charged once, but then canceled? There were clear commonality between them, that is, they were very enthusiastic to give me feedbacks.
It’s grateful for having a lot of opinions on the service whereas it suggests that you are not satisfied with the current functionality of the app. It seems that they have many thoughts on it something like “It would be great if…” and “Why is it like this?” But I want to keep the app simple, so I did decline or put off most their suggestions. Namely, the reason for cancelling was the difference with the author in terms of features.
I would only add features which I truly felt it’s necessary. DHH from Basecamp clearly stated about this:
You should only consider features if they’re willing to stand on the porch for three days waiting to be let in. — David Heinemeier Hansson
If you don’t think the feature request like so, you shouldn’t hesitate to say “no”. I found there are people who understand my policy. I got an e-mail from a user to whom I answered it’s not time to add the requested feature yet:
It makes sense to put your efforts where it will have the most impact on the user, in terms of features. If I’m going to be the only one using the change history feature, then I agree, it’s probably not worth the trouble. :) I do hope that someday this feature would be implemented, but if not it’s totally fine as your app is awesome as it is now! — Inkdrop user
Do not play up to users, just pursue your ideal image. Then you will get followers who have the same vision.
Blogging works greater than ads
Blog is an important content marketing tool. I will never use channels that make me unhappy like advertising and spamming. On the other hand, blog can be helpful for someone even if you are not interested in the product itself. I’ve recently started a blog in Japanese and that successfully works to gain the traction.
The active users in Japan overtook US users last month. In addition, an article I posted yesterday got over 700 social bookmarks on Hatena bookmark which produced over 20K page views and a lot of new users:
So blogging works even if you are an unknown person. Start off by creating a blog that not only touts your product but offers helpful advice, tips, tricks, links, etc. That will make the traction for sure.
“One developer’s life supported by 1,000 users”
Inkdrop is supported by a few heavy users. It is going on good direction towards my vision that 1,000 users support 1 creator’s life.
Thanks to the large diversity of IT industry, consumers have a lot of choices. As a result, the law of “Winner Takes All” is not always a trouble. For example, when it comes to photo sharing service, there’re many choices other than Flickr. There is a relationship where zebras eat grasses on the ground and giraffes eat leaves of trees.
In order to survive among them as a personal developer, the niche market is your field and you should respect your value and find people who sympathize with you. Fortunately, the subscription model is becoming popular for not only SaaS but also stand-alone softwares like mobile app without servers. That indicates a possibility that you can run your business sustainably without getting a large number of users by force. The internet allowed you to obtain influence without depending on advertising, now that getting 1,000 fans is hard but not impossible.
I anticipate that “one creator’s life supported by 1,000 people” will be a role model in the near future. I would like to prove it’s possible for not only artists and bloggers but also developers. I appreciate all your support!
