How do you price your app?

Hi Patrick! Couple points of feedback for you, some of which may go beyond pricing:

You mention that your niche is note-takers who care about the technical details behind data format, storage, and sync. I think it'd be helpful to go one step further and identify an existent group of people, for example "programmers". Why? Because otherwise you won't be able to utilize a couple of the primary advantages of targeting a niche:

• Niches make marketing easier, because there are places where small groups tend to hang that you can advertise them for cheap (e.g. Hacker News), but the same is not true of large groups. However, if you don't clearly identify your target audience, then you can't find out where they hang. Where do "lovers of Markdown and local file storage" hang? Nothing pops into mind. Where do programmers hang? I can name 10 places off the top of my head.
• Niches facilitate word-of-mouth growth. If you make a tool that's equally useful for carpenters, teachers, and lawyers, it won't spread, because these people never talk to each other. However, if you build something great for people who often self-segregate based on their shared identity, well those people talk to each other all the time, and that's an opportunity for your product to get recommended and grow organically.

Going further, whatever niche you pick, you should make that apparent on your landing page! Right now your landing page says "Cross-platform Note Taking App". That doesn't directly appeal to your niche, which means you're missing out on a third big benefit of niches:

• Businesses that target niches can tailor both their marketing copy and their product features to customers in that niche, giving them a strong advantage over competitors targeting the broader market. Programmers will almost always prefer "XYZ note-taking app for programmers" over "XYZ note-taking app for everyone".

Just to clarify, I'm not saying you need to target programmers. You just need an identity-based niche (that reflects some group that already exists in society) rather than a features-based niche, otherwise it will be difficult to take advantage of any of the 3 aforementioned benefits of niches.

As for pricing, I think you can only write off competitors if the way in which you've differentiated is so significant that people in your target market have to use your product. If I'm a construction worker, I have to buy a truck — I can't buy a car. If I'm a rich person who wants to show off, I have to buy a luxury vehicle — nothing else is an option.

If you're targeting a really good niche of people, then it will be somewhat easy to determine the features that they have to have. Then you can build features based on that, increase your products appeal, and also further differentiate from competitors.

As things stand, I really like your product! I love Markdown, local file storage, and cross-platform capabilities. But these aren't quite crucial features that prevent me from considering other options. I still use Google Drive, because I like the reliability (I know it'll always be around), share-ability, the integrations, and the varied file formats.

By the way, none of this is to say that you should change your entire marketing and development strategy. Maybe you shouldn't! But I do think it's important to realize that, as things stand, you probably won't be able to fully realize the advantages of a "true" niche business. You're in a position where you're straight up competing with Evernote, Google Drive, etc on features, and that comes with some challenges.

Hmm, just checked it out. I'd strongly encourage a subscription model. As a user... with one-time-pay, I have to pay more up-front, but might not like the thing, whereas if I can use a trial, get hooked, and then only commit a few dollars a month...

And as an entrepreneur (here's my IH interview)... on my worst months I lose customers on net, and I still make several thousand dollars, because most of my existing customers do stick around and they pay again every month. Whereas if you have only one-time-pay, each month you have to find hundreds of new customers in order to pay your rent and phone bills.

With a subscription model, you can focus on making the product better, and continue making money. With a one-time-payment model, you have to spend a lot of effort on continually marketing. I'm guessing that as a technical person you'd prefer the former!

(Also this looks pretty cool! I've struggled to find a good system for writing and organizing markdown documents. I think I'd need something that would work on mobile though, and I don't care about desktop sync at all (by contrast, I kind of like browser-based systems because then I can link to my documents elsewhere.)