How learning React led me to create an app used by 10K people

But now I digress.
I’ve had an idea for a long time of a free, minimalist, no login required, note-taking app.

Why free, minimalist and open?
I’m not sure, but I do know that I’ve often found myself in the need of taking a quick note − like copying a snippet of code, making a grocery list or just dumping some quick thoughts − and being frustrated that I had to create a new Google doc, change the sharing settings, etc.

I wanted something quick and by “quick” I mean open-write-save-share quick.

So I figured that if I needed something like this surely I couldn’t be the only one?
So I asked around if other people had the same problem, did my research and after weeks of customer development started coding straight away.

You can create notes — that can contain links, images, lists or snippets of code — on the fly and share them with your colleagues or friends in seconds.

As one guy has said on Product Hunt:

You can use it for whatever you want, but here are some ideas:

Since launching, over 30,000 quick notes have been created by over 10,000 people. An average of ~1,000 a day. The most active country is China. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that QuickNote is an anonymous service.

One of the main feature requests was a Chrome extension so that people could take notes from any tab.

.

QuickNote is now my de-facto way to take notes or even create a draft for blog posts (like this one).

I’m not sure what will happen in the future or how people will use it but frankly, I don’t care.
I created QuickNote for myself and I love it. I have no plans to monetize it nor make it a “serious” project. QuickNote is hosted on AWS S3 and uses AWS Lambda as backend which means it would cost pennies even if it scaled to millions of people using it every month.

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