sabbatical. 5.5 months in. new app

Hey everyone,

Anton here. Writing this update from Dublin.

I'm finishing my 4.5 month trip to Europe and going back to the US tomorrow.

For now the plan is to spend some time with friends and stay in NYC and SF. But who knows how it all will play out.

This past month one surprising thing happened. I launched my own native markdown editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad (with a web version coming soon). It's called Wander.

It's pretty cool and I like it so far (used it to write this exact newsletter update). I've put tons of features into the app, but that is not the thing I wanted to share.

I usually work on 3 new products at a time and tons of older ones. I try to really launch something new 1-2 times every 2 months.

I had tons of launches over the years. Most of them of course flopped.

When I say flopped I mean I didn't get more than 200 people even trying the product I launched.

I also had several products over the years that had potential because they got like 1K people in the first month.

So I was surprised when the same happened with Wander! It does seem like everyone is launching their own markdown app. And we had tons already. So when I launched it on Reddit and tons of people commented and installed it, and then some other sites wrote pieces on it and new waves of users came, I was truly baffled.

It does seem that my own judgments of what would become popular and have potential to become a successful product/project are often wrong. I cannot predict anything. I thought 50 people would try Wander and I would need to carry on and focus on my other products.

So that is a small success story 5.5 months into my sabbatical.

Let's see what happens in one month. Can I double the amount of users? Can I make this product more popular and successful than montaigne.io, which I launched 4 years ago?

Anton