Building Standard Notes to be long-lasting

May 27, 2017

It's the greatest love story of all: you find an app that you absolutely love. It solves all your problems. And it makes your life better. It's a fairytale and the both of you live happily ever-after.

Except, it never quite happens like that does it? The app you depend on to solve your life's problems begins wanting to "scale." The company who makes the app took out an investment to build it, and now those investors want to see bigger returns. How? By attracting more customers.

Attracting more customers in today's world is done by adding more features that cater to a wider audience. Month after month, your beloved app grows and grows in features and complexity. It takes a little longer to load now. You notice a lag here and a bug there. On some days, you find it completely unusable. There are so many moving parts now that the developers can't keep up, and when they fix one bug, five others pop up.

It's the dreaded software bloat. And unless you take very careful measures to prevent it, it is guaranteed to happen.

Let us take a moment of silence for all of our fallen apps.


We don't want to treat you this way. We don't want to grow by doing more things. We want to grow by doing one thing so well that the entire world knows it and entrusts us to do this one job for them.

For us, it's your notes. Notes are one of the most important byproducts of our existence. It's how we know ourselves. And it's how we know our past. While your favorite social networking app desires to entertain you and thus finds new ways of doing so every quarter, we're not here to entertain you. We're here to protect something that is important to you. And we're here to make sure it's the easiest thing you'll do all day.

You won't find fancy text recognition algorithms in our apps. No fancy machine learning, notebooks, real time collaboration and commenting. Not even close. But you will find an app that respects you as a long-term user. An app that won't degrade with time. An app you know will be there for you tomorrow, to protect and maintain your most valuable life assets: your notes.

That's our promise to you. In fact, we apologize whenever we release new features, and celebrate when we have the luxury of simplifying.

This is what we mean by being a long-lasting, sustainable notes app. Imagine you bought a notebook from a bookstore that said "this notebook will begin disintegrating from the day you buy it until it completely implodes and disappears one day." You wouldn't buy that notebook.

Think of us as a long lasting notebook. The kind of notebook you'd expect.

And now you know what "Standard Notes" means :)

Thanks for reading

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