A note-taking app with 890 paying customers

Meet Nicolas Bichon.

Nicolas is a 36-year-old iOS/macOS software engineer living in Montreal, Canada for 7 years. Before that, he lived in Brussels, Belgium for 6 years and is originally from France 🥖

He's currently working at Practice, a start-up he joined as the first software engineer 5 years ago. He's also a father of a 3-year-old little boy.

This story is all about his side hustle Type.

The story told by Nicolas Bichon

What is Type?

Type is a note-taking app for macOS in the style of app launchers. It allows you to quickly capture your thoughts from anywhere via a hotkey.

Notes are stored in text files (markdown format is supported), and you can also link existing files, which is useful for Obsidian users, for example.

A timestamp is automatically attached to each entry, allowing you to remember when you took a note.

The main goal of the app is to be able to take notes without interrupting your flow.

Starting out

In July 2022, a friend tagged me in one of Tony Dinh's tweets, where he challenged me to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in one week, which I did, and then it took me a year to release it. Keeping momentum is hard.

My ideas always come from tools or apps that I would like to use, otherwise, I don't find the motivation to continue building for a long time. I also choose ideas that are (on the surface) quite limited in scope. No databases, no back-end if possible.

With Type, it started because I wanted to take quick notes during the week for my next 1-1 but never knew where to put them, and wanted to stay focused on my current task.

Launching - and getting customers

I launched the product on Product Hunt on November 29th, 2023.

I reached 100 customers on the day after the launch. I finished as the 8th product of the day on Product Hunt, which enabled me to be featured in their newsletter the following day. This, along with an article in TechCrunch and in the Club MacStories newsletter, contributed to a successful launch!

I sold over 300 units and made $1,000 in sales in 3 days.

As of today, I have 890 paying users.

The app has been paid upfront for 8 months. I released an update in August 2024 to introduce a free trial because I was convinced my app couldn't grow exponentially with a paid upfront product. People are used to trying a product for free these days.

So far, I really think this was a good idea. More people can try it, and I also got more small press releases because now even journalists can try it for free. Something I didn't anticipate.

Some of the press coverage I got:

• Quick Note Taking - Type
  The author also posted it on reddit, which gave me a lot of traffic because I replied to every comment.

• 6 Mac Apps That Are So Good, They Feel Illegal

• Take notes without interrupting your flow

• Type für Mac: Schnelle Notiz-App mit Tastenbedienung

• Apps SO GOOD You’ll Wonder How You Lived Without Them!

Marketing

My main motivation to move from a paid upfront to a free trial business model was to grow faster ASO-wise (App Store Optimization). The idea is that getting more users would give me more ratings, which will help me rank faster. It's too early to say if it will work.

When the app was paid upfront, I thought the only way of getting more sales was to get press features.

But something I didn't realize yet by then was that people mostly search for macOS apps on Google, not on the Mac App Store.

That's why I now want to invest heavily in SEO. That's my goal in the coming months.

I terms of marketing I have done everything bootstrapped. I didn't have the means and also because I wanted to experiment. I consider this project as my playground.

For the launch, I published a few teasing tweets on X, which went a bit viral:

• Post two weeks before launch

• Post 1 week before launch

• Post 1 day before launch

Then I launched on Product Hunt and got a few press releases.

A few days later, the sales went down and that's when I realized the launch is just the start. The real work begins after that.

I invested some time in ASO without meeting my expectations, even though I'm pretty well ranked now, mostly because of what I explained above: people are searching for macOS apps on Google, not on the Mac App Store.

Next step for me is localizing my app, submitting it to Setapp, and investing in SEO.

Get in contact with Nicolas:

• X

• nicolasbichon.com

• usetype.app

PS - Props to Denis Moulin for creating the app icon and the design of the main window.