Soon, he would have his chance to work on Simplenote again. The app resonates with people," says Johnston. "Simplenote just sat there, but to our surprise, people kept using it. "I’ve always wanted to focus on it, but you make tough decisions - we made a call to focus on Simperium." It’s all more obvious in retrospect, Johnston says, since Simplenote so clearly heralded a future filled with hundreds of thousands of apps all synced and hosted in the cloud, but at the time, it was just a useful little app for keeping day-to-day notes and lists. "It’s been great source of stress for me since Y Combinator," he says. "Is it a bigger business to sync text notes, or to build the app that powers syncing everything?"ĭevelopers loved Simperium, but Johnston still loved Simplenote. They went on to join Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in San Francisco, and founded Simperium in 2010 to build a new vision for syncing files. Simplenote made money from a subset of users who spent $19.99 to remove ads and add Dropbox syncing, but the co-founders decided to head in another direction. The app did one thing, and it did it remarkably well, years before Apple ever uttered the word iCloud.
He and Cheng built Simplenote in 2008 because they hated Apple’s yellow Notes app and its awkward marker-felt font. Johnston felt a little negligent, since Simplenote had existed for years before Simperium ever came to be, and had a very dedicated user base. “Is it a bigger business to sync text notes, or to build the app that powers syncing everything?” Johnston and co-founder Fred Cheng asked themselves two years prior.
Simplenote was once a prime example of Simperium’s syncing prowess, but the app had fallen by the wayside. Johnston had been spending most of his time building Simperium, a syncing engine for apps that is part iCloud, part Dropbox and kept Simplenote in sync across platforms. Simplenote, his once-beloved note-taking app, had been gathering dust for the better part of two years.
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