YourNote is my first attempt at becoming a developer who writes their own checks. It's a note-taking app that allows extreme user control of the data. For example, with YourNote you can be sure that no one is looking into your data, and that no one can take that data away from you.

Yes, this is easily possible by just storing your data offline but if you want to access your data (here, notes) on many devices, you will have to store it online and that's where YourNote comes in. With YourNote, you can be sure that the note you take in 2018 stays accessible in 2028, no matter what.

In fact, I wrote a whole article on why I was doing this project. If you are interested, please read it by clicking below.

I made a video about that too, just because I felt like it and if reading isn't your thing, you can watch the video.

Now back to the highlights, I launched it on HN and PH recently and got decent results.

With HN, I managed to trend on the Show HN page for 3 days and it should be more as today is the 3rd day. I also got a lot of feedback and comments but most of the people were just confused about the tech I was using (Blockstack). So, note to myself - Always make your landing page clear with FAQs if you are using some exotic tech.

Another thing that people pointed out was slow loading times of the website. And I get the reason for that, my landing page was the same app which serves YourNote so it basically had all these other libraries like MomentJS, MarkedJS and what not. The landing page should have been a simple static page. So another note to myself would be - always optimize the landing page since that's what most people actually see.

PH launch was quite plain, not a lot of comments and a decent number of upvotes but I could have improved that with better presentation. But that's okay, PH upvote count doesn't mean anything. It's more important if people use the app and we will only know that by tracking the metrics without introducing any artificial boost (i.e. launches) so let's stay silent for a few days. Till then, you can have a look at my PH submission.

I also live-streamed launching on PH and even though I was very scared of doing that, it worked out quite well. I even had some massive fuck-ups during the launch like don't hunt me being installed on YourNote after the launch and that the launch images I made was way out of proportion.

But even after those issues, this was a good experience. Making something people want and will pay for is hard, and I think the only way to get better at it is by actually experiencing it, from every angle. You learn a lot in the process which is just not possible by going through a course or watching a video.

With YourNote, I plan to stay slow and steady for a few days and watch consumer feedbacks on it. I know a few people that are already using it regularly and that's a good sign but effects of launch are yet to be seen. Also, the holiday season is coming so it makes sense to take a rest.

Till next time,
Cheers! 🎅🏻