We shipped Inkwell on February 26th. A portable Markdown editor, single exe, no install, no telemetry, no cloud. Rust and Tauri v2 under the hood. We put it on GitHub and Gumroad and made a post on r/markdown. The post was #1 there for two days and is currently sitting at 10k views.
The Numbers
Four days later:
- 125 downloads across Windows, macOS, and Linux
- 60 GitHub stars
- First Gumroad sale was on day two
- macOS adoption growing faster than expected with 28 DMG downloads on v1.0.1 alone, despite us having zero Mac hardware for testing available.
We did not expect this. The app was built for a specific kind of person, someone who wants to write in Markdown without an Electron tax, without an account, without their words leaving their machine. We figured that audience existed but didn’t know how quickly they’d find us. Other side of that coin was us having issues juggling copious amounts of mds all over our projects and vscode just didnt work. Extension or not. That’s where Inkwell started brewing slowly.
What Happened
There was no paid promotion or anything. The growth came from:
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GitHub discoverability - the repo picked up stars organically
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Word of mouth - we can’t track this, but the downloads suggest it
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r/markdown post - probably the biggest reason as it was received extremely well
We also opened PRs to get Inkwell listed on 5 awesome lists:
- awesome-tauri — 7.3k stars
- awesome-rust — 55.9k stars
- awesome-markdown-editors — 2k stars
- awesome-privacy — 18.1k stars
- awesome-local-first — 141 stars
The awesome list PRs are still open. If they land, that’s backlinks from repositories with a combined 80,000+ stars. GitHub backlinks are among the highest-authority links on the web, so we are focusing on it first. We’ll see.
We’ve also made a listing on AlternativeTo. Their UI is terrible, ended up having to add all possible writing apps as what Inkwell replaces, just because the UI fails when you choose one at a time. Clunky.
What We Learned
The single-exe model removes every friction point. No installer wizard, no PATH configuration, no dependencies. Download, run, write. People respond to that, and we’re pretty sure it played a key role in driving those downloads.
Privacy is a feature, not a checkbox. Zero telemetry means we genuinely don’t know who our users are. We can’t A/B test nor track retention. We know download counts and star counts and that’s it. Querying the API to check downloads cause you can’t really track them well felt arcane. Also natural. This is the trade-off, and it’s the right one.
macOS without a Mac is possible. GitHub Actions builds the DMG. We’ve had two bug reports from macOS users so far (both are fixed now), which either means it works well or nobody has tried to break it yet. Probably both. Well, maybe they couldn’t contact us, but we did update our contacts now so everything should be fine. You can find them on GitHub as well as on our studio’s page.
Inkwell is free to download and use. The Pro license on Gumroad exists to fund development, not to gate features. Everything in the free version stays free.
What’s Next
The roadmap stays roughly the same. Find & Replace and typewriter mode are next for v1.1. But the reception has changed how we think about pace. There are real users now. Every commit matters a little more and apparently there’s a lot of Mac users. We are keeping track of it.
We’re also still building the rest of 4worlds. Gallery and Publishing are coming. It’s a laborious task but one that we thoroughly enjoy. The site itself got an SEO overhaul this week with structured data, Open Graph images, a proper 404 page, agent-readable metadata. The plumbing is slowly being set in place.
Lastly, there’s Lore, not this Lore, but our other product. The Obsidian killer. It’s glorious and we’ll be sharing a demo video on our socials soon. It is essentially what I’m working on right now full-time while J.R. (the other dev) is working on designing the Publishing page.
More soon.
QED ∎