Bootstr Season 2 Episode 12 with Connor from SuperNotes

Welcome all to the 12th episode of Bootster FM already and this time is a special one because usually I am with my co host Dominic, but unfortunately Dominic is having some, some difficulties of his own. I got a message a couple of hours ago that Dom is trying to find a hotel because Airbnb canceled on him in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. While Dom is looking for a hotel and a place to sleep. Very hopeful that he will, but it's not. Rio de Janeiro is not necessarily the best place to have that happen to you. I will be hosting this episode by myself, but luckily we do have Connor as our guest. Connor, would you like to introduce yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. Hello everybody. Good for you to join us. I am Connor. I am one currently one half of the Supernotes team, which is Supernotes is a note taking and knowledge management platform is how we refer to it. So yeah, I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with the platform, but yeah, I work on it with my co founder Tobias, who also can't join us today. He was maybe thinking he could, but he is currently skiing in the Alps so very similar situation to Dominic. Hard life sounds terrible. And yeah, so he won't be her. But yeah, he's the other half. You know, he does a lot of the, the design work and a lot of the business stuff, but also does some of the development and I do mostly most of the development so we make a pretty effective team. But yes, if you've been on our website or seen the product and you thought it looked very pretty, that is mostly thanks to, to my co founder. So yeah, cool.

I'm very glad that you can join me for this episode. As I said in my announcement post, I. Well, Connor and I have been knowing each other for quite a few years at this point. But very truthfully, when I said Supernotes may be the most polished app, most polished product I've ever come across, that's definitely true. So if you are wondering why I'm saying this, as you're listening to this, I would say just try and sign up, see how they've built everything. I would definitely say it's one of the most polished, polished apps products out there. I definitely have some questions about that.

We appreciate that. Well, it's actually funny I was talking about this with somebody the other day about. Well, because you know, we've been working on Supernotes effectively for like five years at this point. And while yes, I would agree with you, I will toot our own horn and say I think Supernotes is pretty polished. Obviously it's taken a lot of work to get there. So I think like an interesting discussion that not a lot of people have is, is efficiency. And I would say to some extent, to get to the level of polish that we have, I would say we probably haven't been the most efficient about it, which is, yeah, something we can talk more about later maybe, but just something to think about.

Yeah, for sure. It's. It's a whole topic on its own, for sure. So for those that just joined in, I will be talking with Connor and asking him a couple of questions about supernotes and about himself, of course. And then afterwards we will also have some opportunity for questions from the audience. You will be able to request to speak or drop the questions in the chat. That's possible too. There's a small chat bubble icon on the bottom right of the Twitter spaces widget. I just realized I haven't introduced myself. Well, I guess everyone already kind of knows, but I'm Irvin, running Booster FM and also having my own startup called Tilskan and another one soon to be announced. I couldn't say anything. Maybe that's something to announce in the next season, I suppose. Connor Erwin I know about supernotes and I think, you know, when we first met, I think Supernotes was already in its first, maybe second year roughly, but. But I don't know a whole lot about where it all began and if you had any other ventures before starting Supernotes, or if there's anything that led up to supernotes coming into existence. Can you tell us something about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I would say, honestly, our startup adventure pretty much started with supernuts to some extent. My co founder again, Tobias and I met in university and when we were studying together, we. We kind of felt like we had complimentary skill sets. He was a bit more of a go getter and liked designing physical products while I had more of the software experience. But I hadn't tried hard enough to actually sell what I'd built. Well, okay, that's not exactly true. I would say the more accurate version of that is that the things that I had built weren't exactly marketable. I'm not entirely sure I want to talk about some of those things in a recorded setting, but yeah, just, you know, not very. Not great business ideas to some extent, let's say. So anyway. So, yeah, so after uni, you know, we talked about while we were both studying, we were like, oh, we should build something, but we didn't really know what to build. And then we both had Some pain points related to software that we used while we were studying. And that's kind of what led to us starting Super Notes, basically.

Cool. And so there was no product prior to supernotes that kind of led up to it. It was just out of your. Your personal pain points?

Yeah, pretty much. Well, sort of. Okay. So Tobias, actually, while we were in uni, he built a website for his own personal notes. So he would take notes in class and then he would kind of collate them and organize them a little bit better. And then he would actually make them look pretty and then publish them on a. I think it was Jekyll originally. It was just like a Jekyll blog thing that he sort of made into just a place to publish his notes, I think, to some extent, to, you know, just to make sure that he was doing better. And I kind of went in the opposite. It was kind of. He was taking his learning to some extent and making it more public, and I kind of did the opposite. So we had a learning management system that was based on Moodle. I don't know if anybody here is familiar with it, but, um, it's not great. None of the learning management systems are very great. And yeah, so I was very annoyed because mostly it was just like an upload download portal. Like you would download lecture notes or lecture slides or whatever else, coursework details, and basically you just ended up having to download PDFs all the time. So I made some software that automatically downloaded all the PDFs and kept them up to date on my personal computer so that I basically never had to actually log into our terrible online portal. So kind of the original ideas about supernotes were. Supernotes was actually originally supposed to be a learning management system, a better learning management system. And so that's kind of where it came from. Because to be this was like, oh, I've. I found a good way to format notes. And I was like, I have been interacting with this, you know, with our learning management system. So I was familiar with some of the internals and everything else. So we came together and we said, hey, we could build, like a much better version of this so that people in universities or high school or whatever don't have to deal with terrible learning management software. And that was kind of the beginning.

Cool.

That.

Yeah, that actually is like the perfect bridge to the next question that I had. So the positioning was initially, for you guys, was already kind of clear, like where you wanted to target university students that would be running into the same problem. How did you validate your approach initially?

With them with the learning management system.

Yeah. Like how did you just invite a bunch of, you know, your university friends over or, or how did you take those initial steps to kind of like validate that it wasn't just you guys with the problem?

So it's kind of two things. Well, one thing we, Tobias. I'd kind of already moved on, I guess you could say from university at this point. But Tobias got us onto this sort of an accelerator that we had at our university which was basically anybody that was at our university was able to apply with an idea for a startup and could get on to that program. So if anybody listening is like in that age range or whatever is like still studying, I would definitely recommend looking for resources like that. I think that was very helpful. Mostly Tobias was the one doing that because I was. Well for a decent portion of that I was already living in New York as well. But so I didn't exactly get to do all the accelerator stuff. But I think it was. Overall it was a very good experience experience for us because we were able to, you know, talk with like minded people and everything which is something you get to do which I think is also a really nice thing about like Bootster and other communities like it. Right. I think to some extent, especially after the pandemic we've managed to digitize some of these, which is really good because it means it's no longer tied to the university and all that stuff or a physical location. But anyway, so we were on this accelerator and we had this idea to build a better learning management system. So we did, we, we built like a very bare bones version of it, of what we thought a better LMS could be and actually yeah, put it in front of some students and teachers in the hopes that they would enjoy interacting with that. And as part of that we built, you know, one of our main thesis for why we thought learning management system sucked was they don't. People don't interact with them enough. The interaction is very shallow. You're basically just upload, as I said before, you're uploading and downloading things and, and nobody really enjoys interacting on the platform. So our idea was hey, can we make it so that people actually want to use it, actually want to spend time on it, an appreciable amount of time on the platform. And one of our ideas was oh, we can build a note taking system that's really nice to use directly into the learning management system. Right. We could make an actual. Yeah, basically just a noting system and all sorts of stuff like that. We Were like, how can we integrate this? But then make sure that it actually works nicely and people enjoy using it. So we did that. So we put it in front of people and most people were pretty. We got a pretty lukewarm response about the LMS mvp. You know, people were like, oh yeah, this is nice, but it's whatever, you know, it's. I would probably use this. Yeah, it's good. But then the note taking system that we built as part of this, people actually really loved it. Seemed to resonate with a lot of people because instead of doing just sort of long form document type note taking like you're used to from Evernote and all that, we built it around these short form note cards. And people thought that that was really cool. And at the same time we were realizing that selling to universities was probably not something we wanted to do in our early 20s. Because yeah, like the lead time for selling to major institutions seemed to be two to three years and interacting with that own university that we were kind of part of and everything was already a massive hassle and headache. So anyway, so we decided to pivot so people like the note taking stuff. We weren't super excited about selling to like a really big enterprise basically to universities. So we decided to pivot and go full speed ahead with the note card format and sell that B2C. So that's kind of how, how it started. And yeah, since then we haven't really strayed too much from that final fundamental goal of just building a really nice note taking experience around these note cards. But obviously over time we've seen more and more people use it for different things and that's been actually really, really great to see.

So.

Yeah.

Wow. So this is quite interesting where you built something, you found out that it wasn't necessarily the market you wanted to enter and you also didn't get the right response. But there was a part of it that made you basically made you zoom into a problem much more that you build a solution around. And then that turned out to be the core, the actual core of the product eventually.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, as time has gone on to some extent, I'm not sure like B2C is really the right, the right tact. Obviously, like various things have happened and, and whatever and we've learned a lot since then. So like, honestly, looking back on it, maybe building that a better LMS still would have been like the better business decision. But what you can't put a value on is how much I've enjoyed building the B2C app right the note taking version of this app, I think I've enjoyed building way more than I would have enjoyed building a business around a better lms. So that's kind of where we're coming from, I guess. I think we were to some extent prioritizing our own enjoyment of the building.

Right. And still managed to build a quite successful and profitable startup out of it. So I mean, hey, life goals, right? Like exactly in your early 20s. Happiness is also something to chase for. Sure. Yeah. Cool. When you talk about it evolving mostly around notes, note taking is something that is. It's being built a lot by quite a few people, right. Like, you know, once you get into programming, there's a couple of things that people tend to build or try to build and I think, you know, to do apps is like something that people just, I don't know, naturally gravitate towards. So I'm not entirely sure why, to be honest, but it does kind of beg the question how over the years have you done differentiation with supernotes? Because it's such a competitive space. Like how do you maneuver that and how do you like hollow out your own specific, you know, niche and focus and differentiation? Yeah, great question.

I think to some extent we're still trying to figure that out ourselves, to be honest. As you say, it's a very, it's a very competitive space. It's to some extent a very, a very commoditized space. Right. Generally, I would say good business advice to everybody out there. You don't want to be a commodity, right. You don't want to be competing on price. And to some extent that's you. The note taking space kind of tries to force you into that. Mostly because we have a lot of competitors whose price is literally free. Right. Like Microsoft, Google, Apple, all those others. They're all providing sort of loss leading platform plays, note taking solutions that it's very hard to, well, impossible to compete with on price because yes, they are free. So instead, to some extent, yeah, we were trying to differentiate ourselves by not really being a commodity, by not thinking about it in terms of what our competitors do, but purely trying to deliver value and capture a portion of that value. That's kind of our central thesis about what a good business is, right. If you can deliver value and then capture just a fraction of that, whether it's half, 20%, 75% doesn't really matter to, to some extent as long as you are kind of delivering more value than you're actually capturing. Right. I think that's a, a good, healthy business that is Nice to, Nice to have in the world, but yeah, for sure.

So it's. Well, the, the pricing part is actually also an interesting one. Right. Because it does tie into differentiation quite a bit in most businesses. Right. You know, it's hard to come up with an example, I suppose right off the bat, but you know, you can always differentiate by simply having a different pricing and like different focus. Say you focus more on enterprise, you focus more on smaller business, etc. But for note taking, as you said, it's mostly, you know, B2C. Yeah. The differentiation in price is something you can't really do given the nature of the product, so. Exactly.

So like. Yeah, so we're differentiating ourselves. I mean, there's a lot of things obviously that we're trying to do to some extent. We just throw things at the wall to see what sticks. Right. Which is great. You know, I think iteration and everything is very important. Just like seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work. But you know, we have a big focus on design, on simplicity to some extent. You know, we try to make a product that is easy to use but can be powerful when we need it to be. But at the same time, I think, you know, at a fundamental level, it's purely because there's all these other competitors that are free and everything. The only way we can really compete, the only way we can really differentiate ourselves in this particular market is by providing a product that just at a somewhat fundamental level, jives with people's brains, if I can say that, in a different way than other apps. So back to the note card format, right? That's what we've kind of built the whole thing around. We built our collaboration system and everything with the fact that we're using this, these short form note cards in mind. And you know, we try to have good design, we try to have very fast speed, good uptime of our servers, all that stuff. But at a fundamental level, if you pull all of our users, which also something I highly recommend, when people upgrade to supernotes Unlimited, our, our subscription plan, we, we send them out a survey to ask, you know, why did you upgrade, where are you coming from, all these things. Trying to keep it simple but still trying to get at the really meaty points. And yeah, and from like the vast majority of our users that upgrade to unlimited, if you read those surveys, they say, you know, just the note card format just fundamentally jives better with the way that they think and it just works better than documents or folders or whatever else the competitors are offering. Outliners, you Know, there's still so many different ways to take notes and everything, pen and paper even. But yeah, people just say, I really like, you know, it really just resonates with me. And I think that's very important. And why, you know, a lot of the time people say you just need to talk to customers because that's how you build features that actually resonate with people. Right?

Yeah, for sure. So the pricing strategy that you've been having for supernotes, that's something that I, I wanted to also ask, like, already answered this. It's not. It simply can't be competitive, competitor based, but it is something that I've been. As a matter of fact, I'm asking this because I'm kind of struggling with this myself, you know, to some degree. How did you guys do the pricing strategy? Like, I'm assuming it's value based, but how'd you come up with like the specific amounts or like when to upgrade or what kind of, you know, tiers to offer? How'd you come up with that?

Yeah, well, kind of as I was touching on before. Right. I think this is generally much easier with B2B, which is why I recommend if people are just starting out as an indie hacker, slash bootstrapper, slash solopreneur, whatever you want to call it, I always kind of suggest that people try to build a B2B product because it's just much easier to communicate that fundamental value you're providing and then therefore suggest a price. Right. If I sell you a business product that makes your salespeople 10% more efficient, and your salespeople are netting you, let's say, $500,000 a year, I can reasonably sell you software for like 25k a year. Right? Because if I'm making your salespeople 500k, if I'm making them 10% more efficient, that's an extra 50k for you. I'm charging you 25. We both get, get away with, you know, we both end up 25k richer. Everybody wins, right? In B2C, like our space. And to some extent your space, though, I guess you're a little bit more B to D, B to B to.

C. I always say, yeah, B to.

B to C. Yeah. But like, that's, it's much harder to, to make that calculation. Right. Because, yeah, a lot of the times with B2C apps, the value you're providing is a lot less clear. So. Because, yeah, if you tried to pin it down, the fundamental goal of Supernotes is to make you like a better person, not Morally or whatever, but just to be more productive, more organized, more thoughtful, you know, all these things that realistically a good note taking slash personal knowledge management app should do. But those are ideas that are very, very, very difficult to quantify. So I would say basically instead, what we did, instead of trying to do that, we basically just said what makes a sustainable business? And I think that's a pretty good way to go about it. I think when we were first trying to figure out pricing for Supernotes, we sat down and we said, you know, how many customers could the two of us, if we didn't grow the team at all, didn't hire anybody, how many customers could the two of us do? We think we could reasonably support, right, you know, maintaining the infrastructure, doing the customer support, all that stuff. And at the time I think we said like, oh, we could probably do a thousand people, right, for a B2C app, note taking, probably a lot of those people won't need too much support. It should just work the product so we can probably support like a thousand people. And then we asked ourselves, okay, based on what money we think we need to survive. You know, the classic how much money do we need to get to ramen profitability? And I don't remember, yeah, we talked about this before and obviously we lived in London where cost of living is a bit higher and stuff, but I think we said, you know, ramen profit. Profitability for us at the time was going to be about £6,000 all in, right? Both for paying ourselves, paying all, all the bills, all that stuff, like £6,000 we'd be, that would be more than enough for, for us hopefully. And then we basically just divided those two numbers, right, so, so £6,000 divided by a thousand customers. Six pounds a customer per month, right? And that's pretty much, that's pretty much the math we did because the goal was, okay, we can't really communicate, hey, we're providing you $100 in value, we're going to charge you 50, whatever. We couldn't do that. So we're just like, fundamentally we want to be a sustainable business. What will it take to get there, what's reasonable? And so, yeah, so we said about six pounds a month, which I think if you look, obviously it's fluctuated a bit and we've added and removed some plans and we've tweaked things and we have a student discount of 50% if you're a student and all this stuff like that, which obviously makes things a lot more variable. But I think if you Track our, our average revenue per month per customer. Right now, it is still hovering somewhere around six pounds a month. And yeah, and so that's kind of, I think, which is what we settled on. And obviously, you know, if you're so low, you need much less because you're only paying one salary instead of two. But again, that's also why I think, just like, if you can, if you're looking at a B2B idea versus a B2C idea, I think definitely you should, as a solo indie hacker type of person, you should definitely bootstrapper, you should definitely pick B2B. Right? Because reasonably in the B2B space, you can charge, you know, for certain products, you can charge $100 a month. Right. And at that point, if you're saying, okay, I need three to $4,000 or whatever it is, profitable, that's three, that's 30 to 40 customers. Right. We were like, oh, we need a thousand customers. We need to be able to maintain a thousand customers in order to be reasonably, a little bit, you know, above ramen profitable, but like, you know, the base comfortable. And you need significantly fewer than that when you can charge, you know, 10 times that per customer at least. I know indie hackers that are charging like $600 a month for some of their customers. Right. So that's literally a hundred times more than what we are charging our average single customer. So it's just way, way easier to do it that way. So, yeah, so that's kind of like how we figured out the pricing. But yeah, at a fundamental level, I would say just for B2C, it's very difficult and you just have to kind of try different things, see what works, offer some discounts and things like that and just try to iterate through it.

And also, I suppose it's a good question, besides the student discount, did you ever try deals or, you know, like, say yearly, but then get a couple of months free or lifetime? Or did you experiment also in that way instead of just changing the price to see what, what sticks more?

Yeah, yeah, we've done that a bit. We're actually doing a Chinese New Year promotion this year, which still has a little bit of code needed to make everything work together, which will be fun. Yeah, that's just going to be like offering a bit of discount to everybody. But anyway. But yeah, so we're doing that. We did, I think this last year we did a Black Friday deal, which is the first time we've done a deal like that. We were a bit scared about it, right, because. Or I think previously we'd done a deal and the reason we were a bit hesitant to do like a Black Friday deal was because in the past we had some issues where, you know, we made the prices cheaper or whatever and then immediately people were like, oh, but I just paid for it. I want, I want it too. And it was just, you know, and obviously we're happy to give that to them. But mostly it was just a customer support headache, which for two people is never something you want to have. Right. You want to avoid situations where you're creating customer support headaches for yourself. So yeah, I think you need to be pretty delicate about how you do deals sometimes like that because it can be a pretty big support burden and tech burden to figure everything out. But yeah, so we've done some stuff like that. I think our Black Friday deal actually worked really well and nobody really complained because we did it kind of for an extended period of time and the way we priced it made it so that if you were already on one of our kind of long term plans, it wasn't any better than that. So people didn't feel like they were left out. Yeah, we also had a long time plan in the beginning. I'm not sure if I would recommend those or not. Obviously it's really nice having people support you like that, you know, like believing in the product to the extent that they're like, oh yeah, I'm willing to pay know much more money than the monthly subscription or the yearly subscription in order to have access to this for my life, for a lifetime. I'm always a little bit on the fence about lifetime deals because I think obviously from a user perspective, the ideal is like, I want a product, I'm buying a lifetime subscription. I want this to last, last my entire lifetime. And from the business perspective, what you're selling is like, oh, it's the lifetime of the business. Right. So there's kind of a little bit of a conflict there there because technically any business could go out of business within the next three months and you've just bought a lifetime deal and obviously the terms of service are always going to say it's the lifetime of the company, not your lifetime, because obviously you can't really guarantee that. Actually, I think one of our competitors, I think Evernote kind of tried to do that to some extent and that didn't go well because they've now been purchased and whatever. So yeah, so I'm a little bit conflicted, especially in our space, like the note taking space. Notes are very personal. People want to have their content. They want to feel safe and secure knowing that their content will be accessible basically forever. So there's a lot of appeal there. But to some extent it's just kind of hard. I think it can be hard to square that. So yeah, so now I will provide an alternate thing instead of lifetime deal. So recently we added a long term. Well, we're not calling it a subscription because it's not a subscription because stripe won't actually allow us to set up billing cycles longer than a year. I don't know if you knew that, but that is a thing.

Oh really?

Yeah. The longest billing cycle you can set is a year. So anyway, so we, for a while we had just a monthly and a yearly plan and we're like, oh, it would be cool if we had a longer plan for the people that like have been with us for a while and know that they want to use supernotes for long term. So we said we settled on adding a four year plan. But yeah, it's not a subscription because you can't set a four year billing cycle. We call it a license. A four year license. And yeah, and you can buy four years and it's cheaper and it basically works pretty well. I think it's actually really nice because I think having the three tiers actually makes things work a little bit better for us because when you have that kind of high end plan, you have the people that actually care a lot that have either been with you for a while or are really excited about the platform and they're willing to buy that. And then, I mean, I don't really want to say it anchors people, but I think one issue we've had, especially with our monthly subscribers is that with a product like ours it can kind of take a little bit of time for the user to get accommodated to the platform, to how it all works, to how they can organize their notes in different ways on supernotes. So that whole process takes a little bit of time and I think honestly for that reason the monthly plan doesn't. Isn't really a win for anyone. Obviously it's not really a win for us because the churn rates can be high and things like that and we have less consistency of revenue and everything as a business. But also I just don't think it's very great for our customers because it just takes a little bit of time to get stuck into the platform and it's a bit better I think when people can kind of really dedicating yourself to like a slightly longer term plan makes you, I Think psychologically, it just makes people take things more seriously. And then that, that just makes everybody win, right? Because we obviously, when you use our product, we want you to be a happy customer, right? We want you to enjoy using it. We want you to get value out of it. And it's much easier to achieve that when you know, you have a little bit of buy in, right? You have a little bit of skin in the game. If you have any issues, you know, if you're a subscriber for a year, if you have a year subscription, a yearly subscription, we can spend the time to get to know you, get to know your pain points. You can report bugs to us, we will, to the best of our ability, get those fixed. And you can see that improvement over time, right? Where if you're a monthly subscriber, you might just get frustrated. There's one bug, we haven't fixed it yet because it's only been a month and you unsubscribe, you know, and we can't make that better for everybody. So I think actually having the three plans has made a good difference and making people sort of take it a little bit more seriously and our people become a little bit more thoughtful about their buying decisions.

I would say that makes a lot of sense. I think that, yeah, you could almost. Not quite, but I suppose you can almost call it accountability on both sides, both for you, you know, some dedication to customers that are longer term and it's easier to give them some more attention when they buy something for four years at the same time, I guess accountability. I can draw the parallel for myself. I think I paid three years of password manager and before that I always had password Manager, but I never really saved things in there. It was too much hassle. But once I dropped, I don't know how much it was $150 or something. For three years worth of password Manager, I was like, you know what? Now I'm actually going to really, really, really use this. And now it's such an integral part of me that I would be very, very frustrated if, for me specifically lost pets, if I wouldn't be able to use it anymore and they go out of business. I have that strong of a relationship with. And I suppose, yeah, note taking is probably the same thing, right? It's quite intimate.

Very similar.

Yeah.

And public. A service announcement for anyone listening that is not currently using a Password Manager. Please, please, please use a password manager. We actually had to. This is actually kind of funny. We. I actually had to reach out to one of our customers. The Other day, throwback to me also suggesting that you should do surveys with your users, with your customers. You know, we have that survey where when people upgrade, they fill it in and we ask what their use case is and everything. And a user in the survey form literally said, I want to use supernotes to store my notes and to do lists and my passwords. And I screamed when I read this email that had the survey results. And I immediately sent a email to this user saying, hey, great to have you on the platform. We're really excited that you're excited about supernotes. Please, for the love of God, do not use supernotes to store your password. That's not what we've built it for. We, unlike actual password managers, we, we have not been audited to expressly do that thing. Obviously, I care a lot about security and I try to make sure your notes are very secure and everything, but the place that you should be storing your passwords is in a password manager, probably nowhere else. So. Yes. So please don't do that. If you are using a note taking app or if you're using supernotes, please do not store your passwords there. Anyway. Yeah, so there is some overlap. Yeah, there's definitely some similarity, but between password managers and note taking apps. But I don't want people to take that too far.

Yeah, understandable. Wow. I can only imagine your initial response when you saw that email. I would probably jump from my seat for a second there as well. Yeah, I know there's something else that you did that you launched. What is it? A couple of, say, a week ago, I think, or something completely different topic, but really something I wanted to ask you and you talk about. You launched a font.

Yes, we did. Can you SM Pro?

Right. This is something that you don't really hear anyone say.

Yeah, I think we're the first indie hackers or whatever you want to call us. Fun strapped. What's the word you use for?

I say Fun strapped.

Yeah, we've, for the listeners, we've raised a little bit of angel investment a few years back, but did not, you know, you know, run with that too much. So it didn't end up raising VC or anything like that afterwards. But anyway, yes, making a, A font is an interesting choice, but. But yeah, absolutely. We've had, we've had a lot of fun with it over the last, over the, the last few months. So it's called SN Pro. It's our, our new font that we developed specifically for supernotes. But yeah, actually the beginning of this is a little bit Similar to that password story I just told where, you know, I have to give credit for the idea for the font to again, my co founder, Tobias. It's definitely his brainchild. But when he first suggested it to me, I was like, are you fucking kidding me? You know, we have a laundry list of things we need to do. I don't think a, a font is the best way to spend our time. Yeah, but, yeah, but there's a nice ending to this. So. Yeah, so I was like, are you serious? But then he talked me into it. Basically. He made some very good arguments. You know, if you think about it, we've always had some growing pains with fonts. At Supernotes as a text heavy app, right? People spend 90%, 95% of their time either writing or reading text on Supernotes. And over that time we've had to, over the years we've had to make like all sorts of little CSS tweaks in order for everything to look just right, you know, to make your list look right and have everything look good in both the editor and when you're actually like rendering it as a complete note and all that stuff. And nothing was exactly perfect. Again, for also anyone not super familiar with supernotes, we, we built the, the platform around Markdown, which I'm a huge fan of. Have been a huge fan for a long time. But yeah, there's not really. We looked around but didn't really find a font that we felt was properly optimized for using with Markdown, you know, Cause there's the various characters and everything that are important in Markdown, like hashtags and asterisks and all this stuff in the brackets and in normal English text or whatever, they're a little bit, some of those characters are a little bit less common. So the font designers haven't really thought about it. But anyway, but we are built around Markdown and we do care a lot about making everything look pretty good. So, yeah, so we built our own font that's optimized for Markdown. Additionally, the font we were using before was. It was a licensed font, right? We paid for a license which gave us a license to use it everywhere. But there are some sort of legal questionable things around. Does that license extend to your users? So, like if our, you know, on Supernotes you can print out a list of your notes and obviously when we print out those notes, they're in the font that we were using before the license font. And there's sort of some legal questions about, okay, can that user print that out and Then use that as promotional material. Like they can. They print out a supernotes card on a piece of paper and then like hand that out to people. We actually did have a customer ask, ask us that one time. I, I'm surprised that they were that thoughtful about it. But anyway, so. And we were like, we don't know, like that's a, a good question. We have the license to use the font, but blah, blah, blah. So anyway, so we're like, okay, it would be great if we had our own font if it was open source, if it was optimized for markdown. So we did that. Yeah, so we. The cool thing about a lot of these fonts is like the open source fonts, you know, you can basically modify them as much as you want, as long as the font that you end up releasing, the font that you end up finishing is open source as well. So it's like the OFL license, the open font license. And we were very happy to, when we were finished with SM Pro. Well, it's not finished, but as we built SM Pro, we're obviously very happy with it being open source because again, we want our users, our members, our customers to be able to use font anywhere they want. So yeah, so anyway, we base it on Nunito, which is a great font by Vernon Adams. And yeah, we basically just tweaked everything, changed all the characters around to make them better suited to our platform, to make them better suited to Markdown. It's actually, yeah, it was a really fun, a really fun project. There's a, there's an app for messing with fonts called Glyphs 3, which we bought. It's a little expensive, but we bought it and it made the whole process of like sort of designing our own font and making all those little characters and making the ligatures and all the weird nerdy font stuff like that. It made the whole process actually pretty fun. So, yeah, still maybe not 100% the best use of our time. Uh, but definitely something I would like look into. If you have a very text heavy app like we do and you know you're already using an open source font anyway, like one of these Google fonts, most of which are, are licensed under the ofl, I think you can actually, it's, it's pretty fun and honestly, if you just need to make a couple tweaks to the font, it's not that difficult. We made, we ended up making a lot, but it's really not hard to just do a little bit of modifying if you feel like you want your Font to just be a little bit different here, a little bit different there. You know, you want the A to just look just ever so slightly different. It's actually a pretty fun process. So I would recommend. But yeah, when Tobias first suggested it, I was not a believer, but he converted me for sure.

I mean, I'm glad that he did because I think it looks amazing. I have used Nonito in the past myself, not for myself, but when freelancing, so I was familiar with that and looking at modifications you guys made and, you know, the specific tweaks and stuff, it's really cool. It's massively interesting. I. I really just wanted to ask you about it a bit and, and mention it because, honestly, let's be honest there, it's such, again, uncommon thing to hear. Right. We made a font, so I really hope that it catches on for marketing for you guys as well.

Well, there you go. That's actually back to your original question or your second question or whatever. This is how we are differentiating ourselves by releasing our own fonts.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely does set you apart. That's 100% true. So talking about, you know, dedicating your time to something, and you just mentioned maybe making a phone wasn't the best thing to dedicate time to. Raises the question for me. How do you decide? Especially because you're B2C, right? And so there's. You have much more users, you focus really on usability and performance, etc. So you, especially now that the product is more mature, you have to make decisions on what to build. Like, for example, I'm still kind of in the phase of starting out. I do listen to every customer, and in 95% of the cases, I say, sure, I'll build that, whatever. But as time progresses for you, how do you decide to build features and which ones you build and which ones you don't?

How do you. Gotta listen to your heart, Irwin. Gotta listen to your heart. No, I mean, but joking, but also, seriously, that is kind of what we do because. Yeah, because as I said earlier, like, our laundry list of features that we could build, you know, we've been building Supernotes for almost five years now, and we've added a lot of new features, we've made a lot of improvements, but there's still a huge, huge backlog that we have of all the possible features that we could build. We have loads of competitors who have features, so we very frequently get users saying, hey, you know, X and Y app has this. You should add it, or the more rude Version X and Y app has this. If you don't add it, I'm not using your product, which is always fun to hear. But, yeah, I think so. Mostly we just kind of follow our own vision. Obviously, part of that includes, you know, our vision is making a good product for our users. So if loads of our customers say, hey, I really want this feature, then that's definitely going to bump up the priority of it. We used to have a very sort of complex ocd, whatever you want to call it, like, table of, like, features where we had, like a ranking where we were, like, contributing. We wrote down our individual score for how important we thought the feature was. We had a ranking for customer sentiment and all this sort of stuff. Really trying to, like, get a ranked. A ranked table, a ranked spreadsheet of like, oh, which feature should we do next? I think to some extent, yeah, that kind of forgets the fact that, like, building features is part of an overall vision and overall development process. And you can't always just like, you don't always just want to do this feature and then this feature and then this feature. Sometimes you have a bunch of features that go together and make sense to sort of all build in tandem. So sometimes you have something that's, you know, it's not super, super high priority, but it's dead easy. So you're just like, I'm just going to do this because I feel like doing something easy today. So, yeah, so it's very hard to pick and choose what we want to build. I'd say the only thing that we try to be very consistent about is if sort of our rule at Supernotes is if a user reports a bug, we almost always will try to make a very serious effort to fix that bug in the next version, whatever that version is, whether it's a minor version or a major version or whatever. We want to kind of have every bug that gets reported to us fixed. And sometimes, you know, sometimes we don't live up to that. Sometimes it's very hard, you know, it's hard to collect enough data to make, to actually reproduce a bug that another. That one of your, you know, users is having because it's on a different platform that's hard to test for or whatever else it is. But yeah, but that's like our main goal is features. We say to our members, we say, hey, maybe we'll build it, maybe we won't. We're just trying to build the best product for you. Hopefully that's good enough. But yeah, bugs, we say, thank you for Reporting the bug. We will do our best to have this fixed in the next version because I think that's also something that our again, a way that we try to differentiate ourselves because that's one of the things that the big players can't really do. Just based on the whole bureaucratic structure of Apple or Google or Microsoft. They can't really say to customer, you know, a they have so many customers that there is just a tidal wave of voices. So they can't really say to their individual customers like, hey, thank you for reporting this bug. We will fix that to the best of our ability. But that is something that we can do. Right? So that's just like one more way that we can kind of level up our customer service by just making sure that, you know, our users actually feel heard when it comes to bugs. Because I think those are, you know, that's the more annoying thing as well. Right. Like features are nice to have, but the bugs are the things that will really drive customers away. So I think it's really important to prioritize fixing those over adding flashy new features your competitors have or whatever.

Right? Yeah, no, I 100% agree with the buck part. I noticed myself that, you know, fixing them adequately in a very fast really helps. And it seems to also, well, not always, but in some cases also build a better connection to. To that customer. You know, on multiple occasions they have upgraded for me at least from monthly to yearly, for example, or giving me like more feedback or with whatever they come across next time. Like there's like they attach video or whatever to help me chase and find it. So. Yeah, for sure. Oh, and by the way, I can imagine if you email them or respond to them while being, you know, the co founder of supernotes, I suppose that also, you know, it is a title and it shouldn't matter, but I think it's nice if people do get an email like that. They're like, wow, okay. They actually take it like really serious.

Yeah, for sure. People really, when you recognize like people's contribution as well. So like in the release notes, for every release we try to reference the user that, you know. Cause we have this community forum thing that we try to reference the user that actually like mentioned them, the user that actually reported the bug or requested the feature originally or whatever. And people seem to like that a lot because all of our power users, it just makes them a little bit more excited every time there's a release because they get to like be like, oh, my name was mentioned or whatever. And that's Actually really nice because like, yeah, again, it's not something the big guys can do, but because we are actually literally having these conversations with all of our customers, we can actually like do that matching and say, oh yeah, this user actually, you know, first reported this bug, we got it fixed. Thank you very much for reporting it.

Right, yeah, for sure. I think that's such a, you know, at large, Adam, by large is such an interesting topic to zoom in on actually. I mean, but I always say this in, I guess in a scattered way, like sometimes mentioning it, but it's part of a larger whole is the. Because, you know, both you and I, like, we're not having massive teams, not a massive company. So you get to be able to play into things that you would never be able to do as a VC funded, 500 personnel kind of, you know, company. And I remember it's one of the best advice you could probably give like new indie hackers or people starting out. Right. Or you know, starting out doing startups and stuff is my first mistake. I don't know about you, but I can share specifically for myself. I definitely did that. I think the first two things that I built especially one was really the I'm going to enter a market where I'm going to be dealing with a, you know, a bit bigger companies or anyone really. I didn't have my targeting right, but I really tried to present myself as we rather than I as if, you know, it's a bigger company. And so what I was going for was more credibility because, you know, there's a team page rather than about me or about us. There's a. I speak about we. And then I think I turned 180 degrees where it's like. I think it's actually great that you're on your own because you're able to provide things that you wouldn't be able to pull off, such as this. Uniquely as an indie hacker. Right. You gotta compete on the things that someone else cannot compete because they are too big.

Yeah, no, for sure. I think that's something that definitely you should. If to some extent, obviously you should lean into. I think, you know, sometimes customers have like concerns about solo founders and. Key man. What's that thing called? Keyman. Keyman. You know, like if you get hit by a bus or whatever. To really get hit by a bus.

I have no idea. I never had that. What?

No, there's like a phrase for if, you know, if like. Yeah, if there's one person in your company that gets hit by a bus and then the Entire company disappears because, because they got hit by a bus. I don't know, whatever it's called, you know, people are concerned about that, but I honestly, I think it's getting better. Like people are less concerned about that than they used to because they've seen some of their previous products that they used that were VC funded or whatever and had hundreds of people on the team and everything. You know, those go out of business just as much if not more as the indie hacker products. Right? So like. Right, yeah, I think maybe decades ago or whatever, you could rely a little bit more on a company having existed for a while to mean that it will continue to be around for the foreseeable future. But with all the VC funding and everything and everybody like burning through their run rate at incredible speeds and things like WeWork and all these examples of people just spending crazy amounts of money on stupid stuff, I think it's just kind of woken up people a little bit to the idea that like, just because you have a lot of people, you know, a big headcount and you've raised a lot of money, that doesn't mean that you're gonna, you know, you're gonna be around for a while. In fact, Google, you know, Google helps with that as well because they, they're a huge company. As a company, they're probably going to be around for a while, right? But they keep killing off every single product that people like. You know, it's like, oh, I like stadia, I like whatever it is. And, and then Google kills it and you're like, well shit. So yeah, so I think that's obviously that sucks for everybody, that's effective, but I think it, it does help when you're an indie hacker, when you're solopreneur to be like to, you know, be able to say like, hey, I'm doing my best to stay in business and provide this product to you just like everybody else. And that's probably good enough, right?

Yeah, yeah. When you said Google killing off product. Oh, that's such a. I've never really been hit. Only one time when I believe it or not, was perhaps a little bit of an influencer on Google. Until I wasn't because then it was dead because I killed it.

I mean you've seen that like Google graveyard website, right? Of like all yes. Businesses. It's pretty incredible actually.

Well, I've had it with Google domains now.

As in, oh yeah, they did that recently.

50 domains and 50 something domains on there now. They did me a favor because I realized I should probably not have that many domains to begin with until I turned off renewals for a couple of them. But in all seriousness, yeah, that sucks. So I guess they're doing me a favor now by signaling to, you know, people at large, like in general that it's perhaps not the worst thing that there's one person caring a lot about a product rather than a big company with the flick of a wrist just throws away a product.

So yeah, so Google has definitely become pretty, pretty notorious for that. And yet Irwin, you are still an Android user.

I, yes, but Android is open source, right? So they can't really kill it off, can they?

I mean I, yeah, that's technically true, but.

Definitely not true in reality.

I mean Google, Google Wave was, I, I think maybe Google Wave was open source. Right. And they like a decade ago and.

Yep.

I mean there's no Google Wave anymore or it became like Apache Wave, I don't remember. Anyway, yeah, there's too many to count but for any of you that haven't seen the Google Graveyard website, just Google Google Graveyard and you can have a scroll through all the many, many things that, that Google has killed. Hopefully soon they will kill Google, Google Keep and all of those, all of those note, note taking users can come to Supernotes. That would be wonderful. Yeah, well not for Google Keep users.

But yeah, it's not like I'll keep a whole lot of things on Google Keep but there's some stuff of mine as well, so I hope not.

You just have to use it and move it to super nuts. I guess.

I suppose I should. Yeah. Well, there's one thing I always had in mind. This is really, really, really off topic and random, but I always imagined Google starting a product called Graveyard. That'd be the most hilarious thing ever.

Just like to lean into the whole, to lean into the reputation. What would it be though?

I, I'm not entirely sure.

A way to find places to be buried. Right.

But then they can push out of the material out of this, they could push them out of the SEO out of the first page. Right?

Yeah, true classic SEO would be hilarious.

So to tie everything in, I had one more question on my list and that is what will the future hold for Supernotes? Are you going to hire more or are you going to put it on autopilot? Are we going to get a password manager? We're going to branch into different segments, build a different product.

Super passive.

What's in the future?

Yeah, I mean I think kind of a lot of those things, right? Like hiring, trying to automate Stuff and whatever else. Yeah, I don't know. I mean at just like a fundamental personal level, me and Tobias are, are very passionate about the product.

Product.

We use Supernotes ourselves like every day. So it's pretty important to us that it sticks around for as long as possible. You know, I think there was potentially like a moment a couple years ago or a few moments, you know, where we like might have had a, a big exit or whatever or at least like raise some VC funding. But I think probably the time for that has passed as alongside the zero interest rate environment. Right. I think all that crazy money that people were just throwing around at stuff. Like I know one of our, you know, well, a bunch of our competitors have raised money but like, you know, million millions and millions of dollars. And I'm like, what as a, as a note taking app do you need to do with $20 million? But yeah, so probably not anything like that. We have no plans to like raise more money because luckily, you know, we've gotten past, you know, gotten into profitability, past break even and all that. So we're not super worried about like exiting or anything like that. But yeah, we would definitely like to hire people. Probably that's something honestly that I think a lot of other people are better about than we are. Like, we probably should have hired some, some customer support people by now because it's becoming pretty unmanageable to like communicate with all our customers and everything because yeah, we have a forum and you know, people can email us and we have an in app messenger via intercom. People send us DMs on Twitter for customer support stuff. So yeah, so it's just kind of, that's definitely something we need to figure out. But yeah, beyond that, you know, obviously like developers and stuff are very expensive to hire, so I'm not sure how soon we'll be able to like grow the team in that way because we still really like working on it and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, I guess kind of right now we think of it mostly as a lifestyle business, right. Like we, we want to continue building it, continue growing our community, helping, you know, trying to make everybody help each other out. And, and after, as I said before, after five years of building, we still have a backlog, a feature backlog that's a mile long, so it's never ending. Yeah, it's gonna take a while to get through that yet. So still plenty of things to build. But yeah, I mean we, Tobias and I actually do have some ideas for things like totally unrelated to supernotes that we'd like to build because yeah, in all honesty, like the last year it was very slow. Relatively like our growth. 2022 is pretty good. But 2023 things slowed down a lot and obviously I think to some extent that was via commonly stupid and various things like that. So. Yeah, but yeah, I mean I love working on it. I think that's the best thing about. And as you said before again. Oh yeah. When people learn how to program they make a to do app and they make a note taking app and whatever and whatever. And I think, you know, part of the reason for that is like note taking is a very personal process and that's kind of why we built our own note taking app. And, and it's actually a lot of fun to work on because there's so many interesting problems. Right. Like our app has real time collaborative features so that when people are editing a note card together, you know, we do real time sync and some of that stuff isn't trivial. But it's generally if you enjoy like working on problems it's. They're very fun problems to work on. You know, building a web based editor, doing real time collaborative editing, designing the whole like sharing system which sometimes I can't even like wrap my whole head around because some of the complexities around like permissioning and stuff like that is very complex. So anyway, so yeah, so it's like we just love, love working on it. But yeah, I mean we're always kind of also thinking about oh like what could we build that's not in the B2C space so that we don't have to compete with Microsoft and Apple and Google and all that stuff. So yeah, it's pretty good. And maybe one day we will add some tailwind to our website.

Oh, I'm listening. We should talk about that another time when the time is there.

Those. For those listening. I think to Irwin actually called me out the other day because I told him I'm not really sure I like tailwind that much and he had some choice words for me.

So I simply cannot accept if there's someone that doesn't like tailwind. Right. That's part of my personality, my online Persona. It's, it's intolerable in real life. I'm actually more susceptible to it just a tiny bit. But you got to choose a camp, right? It's either pro or. Anyway, it's good to hear that you have these plans for Supernatural and I'm sure, yeah, it would be very interesting.

To have a product and be in the anti camp, right?

It would be odd. Yeah, for sure. I hope 2024 definitely has more growth than 2023 and that it definitely stays growing and like, at the bare minimum, a good lifestyle business. And I really hope that whatever you guys come. Well, I'm already sure that whatever you guys gonna come up with as another product, if ever, that is going to be beautiful and performant and very, very, very good. So no doubt about that. Very eager to see if you guys come up with something new we can wrap up.