Apptisan #017 — Minimal
Minimal is a simple yet powerful notes app. Inspired by meditation, nature, and architectural design, Minimal provides a beautiful space to think, write, and organize projects.
Name: Minimal
Developer / Team: Arthur Van Siclen
Platforms: iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS
Read this newsletter issue in Chinese (中文) .
Please describe your product.
Minimal is a writing app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering collaboration, publishing notes as websites, todo lists, markdown-style formatting, and more.
Minimal’s highest value is focus. While it includes the features of other top notes apps, Minimal hides these features away until the moment they are needed. It feels as though Minimal has only the tools and interactions you want, and nothing else.
Minimal’s most innovative feature is the Note Lifetime. When a certain duration passes without engaging a note, the note dies, leaving from for the thoughts and ideas that are most relevant. The Note Lifetime keeps your notes fresh, organized, and ever-reflective of the present moment. (Rather than the note permanently disappearing when it dies, it is auto-archived.)
While most notes apps collect cruft, Minimal discards irrelevance and effortlessly induces focus. It is the app for focused writers and project organizers.
Here’s a list of the primary feature set:
Note Lifetime
Collaboration and Cloud Sync
Full offline-mode
Publish notes as websites in microseconds
Search anywhere: spotlight, notes list, and find in note
Folders and tags
Markdown-style formatting
Todos and todo-calendar integration
Custom styling and typography
Deep system integrations: handoff, iMessage, shortcuts
Was there a pivotal moment that inspired your product’s creation?
I was working as a software designer and developer and kept coming back to using a paper notebook, and I wondered why. What is it about a real, physical notebook that I find so empowering and compelling?
The answer is in its simplicity. A notebook exposes everything and brings with it zero vestiges. It is the ultimate blank slate, the ultimate form of open expression.
Listening to jazz and drinking Negronis one evening, I realized that none of the existing notes app honored focus as a primary value. None of the notes apps out there were spacious. None of them respected an open mind. In short, they did not truly embody those attributes of a real, paper notebook. So I decided that Minimal would go in the opposite direction: instead of collecting information, Minimal would discard it; instead of exposing features, Minimal would hide them. I drew up Minimal that evening in my paper notebook, and promptly got to work.
What makes your product unique compared to others in the market?
While most notes app collect thoughts, Minimal discards them. While most notes apps expose features, Minimal hides them until the moment they are needed. While most notes app obsess over workflows and integrations, Minimal steps out of the way.
Just like breathing, the tendency is to overwhelmingly favor the in-breath. But the out-breath is just as important. Minimal is that out-breath.
Minimal’s greatest distinction is the Note Lifetime. When a note goes unedited for a certain number of days, it dies. (It is auto-archived.) Just before it dies the writer gets a notification, which serves as a chance to re-engage the note if it is important, delay the note’s death, or let it go. (It feels great to let a note go, like breathing out while meditating, or softening the muscles of the shoulders, or forgiving someone.) The end result is that Minimal is an ever-fresh, always-current notes app that reflects the present moment.
Maybe the easiest way to distinguish Minimal is to describe who it is made for. While most productivity apps are designed for people who believe they need to do more, add more, collect more (more more more), Minimal exists for people who believe that they need to focus, to be present, and to think clearly.
How have you marketed your product, and what key lessons have you learned?
There are two primary means of marketing Minimal: the initial phase and the embodied / manifest phase.
The initial phase is a way to get the foot in the door, a way to reach new communities. We pay for search advertising (primarily on the App Store) and to a lesser extent advertise on social media with performance ads. I am confident we lose money on 90% of our ad spend, so we have not been able to scale it up. I’m okay with that – this is like planting seeds in a new part of the soil freshly exposed to ecological succession: you don’t need millions of seeds, just a handful will do.
The embodied or manifest phase is all about how Minimal works in someone’s life. If it works well, they keep using Minimal and might even invite a friend or two. This is the real engine of Minimal’s growth. Some people might call it ”product-led growth,” but I think that does a disservice to the full spectrum of utility in creating a useful product – we aren’t just adding numbers to a dashboard, we are deepening value. The growth doesn’t just occur on a single dimension, but on multiple dimensions that simultaneously compound.
Minimal has an incredible retention rate. If it were not for that, I’m not sure it would be a sustainable operation. In some ways I was lucky in committing to an ethos and feature-set writers could commit to, but in other ways this was by design: by focusing on real value and real life use patterns, it hasn’t been so difficult to find a community that appreciates Minimal. Minimal’s strong retention rate starts with myself: I use Minimal every day.
I like this incentive structure, favoring retention over growth. Minimal succeeds when its customers value it, keeping Minimal deeply aligned with its writers.
Keep in mind that retaining customers is far more powerful than expanding the inflow of new customers. Here is the math to prove it, with X * (R ^ P) = C where X refers to initial customers, R refers to retention rate, P refers to intervals, and C refers to total customers after P intervals.
Control: 1.0 * (0.8 ^ 12) = .0687
Double Inflow: 2.0 * (0.8 ^ 12) = .1374
Double Retention: 1.0 * (0.9 ^ 12) = .2824
What has been some memorable feedback since your product’s release?
I love hearing from neuroatypical writers who find Minimal uniquely focused and soothing. For a lot of people, including myself, the internet is an inhospitable landscape. Anything I can do to move the needle in making our digital tools conducive to a clear mind is something that I can be a little bit proud of. Minimal’s anonymized website publishing has been used by dissidents in oppressive regimes to share controversial ideas, including criticism of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and pleas for Hong Kong independence. Seeing these sites go up startled me, making me realize how far-reaching some small design decisions can be.
Are there any products out there that you feel deserve more recognition?
Overlap by the Moleskine team that also made Timepage is a timezone tracker / converter that I wish I made. It includes custom interactions and excellent information density.
Swisstopo is a beautiful app, made in the original tradition of contoured topographical maps. It very simply shows trails and positioning through Swiss villages and mountains on hand-drawn contoured maps, making it easy to navigate without having to spend much time on device.
The Katadyn Be Free water filter is the best gift I have received. I carry it into the mountains, granting infinite access to drinkable water while keeping my backpack light. On some hikes I can carry only this one small piece of equipment, sans pack, making for a light walk.
The Kettl tea company is nailing Japanese green tea. They offer a curated collection of high-quality varieties at affordable prices with decent steeping instructions, and they ship around the world.
How do you organize your day? Do you have any time management tips to share?
There are two guiding natural laws in productivity. The first law applies to creating a hierarchy of initiatives: the single most important task is oftentimes far, far more important than the next most important task. The second law applies to allocating effort: our most productive period is dramatically more powerful than other productive periods (this is the Pareto principle in action, the 80:20 rule).
Following these two “laws,” I’ve developed what seems to be a very natural way of working. When I have clarity and energy, I will work pretty much non-stop until the initiative is complete. I’ll dream about the problem, my breaks are walks where the problem pulls my mind in all sorts of different directions that I couldn’t find sitting down. This is how I built Minimal’s collaborative sync, turning into a sort of maniac, letting myself marinate in the problem for many days. This is how I built the Shape app in a whirlwind month of intensive, obsessive effort.
This method is not unique to me – a lot of craftspeople seem to approach their work this way, letting enthusiasm move and consume them.
I’m amazed at what one can accomplish when they really give themselves to a problem. I’m not a computer scientist, but I can still explore resolving sync conflicts from multiple writers. I’m not a visual designer, but I can still really go for it with a pattern like Shape’s ever-changing color gradients. Humans are remarkable in this way – we are continuously moldable, and when we thoroughly orient ourselves to a problem we have a good chance of solving it. This is a big part of why it is so advantageous to let one problem wash over us for brief periods – days or a couple of weeks. (Another reason is that these long days that bleed into each other maximize the level of complexity we are capable of holding in our minds, multiplying our chances of solving the problem.)
I’m lucky if I have five or six periods like that in a year. It is not sustainable all of the time, at least not for me. Most days I will find my most productive period and try to solve a single problem in that timeframe – maybe 6am to 10am, maybe 5pm to 7pm. The rest of the day I’ll read, exercise, respond to customer emails, and really scale back my ambition. If a problem grabs me, I’ll stay with it, but otherwise it’s better to not sit in front of a computer feeling unmotivated and unfocused. I try to only work when I am useful. I am not a keyboard warrior – good work originates from a healthy mind.
I’d also like to highlight a discovery about productive vs unproductive days. There is a moment when tackling a complex challenge where the mind sort of revolts. Maybe it is right when the complexity ramps up about 30 or 40 minutes into the problem, the mind says, ”no more,” and there is an immense urge to check iMessage or check the news or otherwise let the pressure off. That is a critical moment to push through. My productive days are defined by sticking with it, and my unproductive days are defined by giving in. Five minutes after sticking with a challenging problem that pushes the limit of attention and mental organization comes this incredible reward, this pure joy, that then makes it easy to push through the next mental challenge. Most computer-based work is boring until that first obstacle is overcome and the mind becomes truly willing to hold all of this complexity together. This is sort of a hack or a hidden trick that turns the enthusiasm and focus dial way, way up. At that point, almost anything can be exciting.
As an independent developer with several successful product launches, what insights or advice do you believe could be beneficial to other developers in your field?
My biggest piece of advice is to honor real customer value. It is far easier to create something useful and then make money than it is to make money and then create something useful.
The last few years have seen an “entrepreneurialization” of the boutique software world, and many of these new players look for money before they look for value. They rarely see real, lasting traction in their venture. Many give up just when they’re getting started because they have poor signal, not seeing past the figures in their sales dashboard to the customer on the other side.
My grandfather is kind of the opposite of this new business persona – he was a successful businessman who led his work with the belief that everyone can win; he obsessed over customer value and made money and friends along the way. When I look at the two categories of entrepreneurs side by side – those obsessed with customer value and those obsessed with revenue and profit – it is obvious to me which one is truly winning. There is a calm confidence in the entrepreneur making real lives better that just isn't there with the unendingly hungry revenue-obsessed. They hold themselves like they know who they are, like they know what is important, like they know how they fit into the world. People respect both categories of successful entrepreneurs, but they prefer being around those whose revenue is just a footnote in their story.
So my advice is simple: make someone else’s life better, in big or small ways, at any scale. It’s completely realistic to accomplish that, and from that point generating revenue and creating a sustainable operation is much easier.
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you envision for the future.
After graduating high-school I traveled and rock climbed full time, visiting destinations as far away as rural China, the mountains of central Turkey, driving my van a few times from southern Mexico to British Columbia, and hitchhiking across Europe.
I studied yoga at Naropa University and practice almost every day. In the early days of meditation apps I built Timeless, which was promptly featured by Apple and received a lot of attention. Timeless offers a more authentic approach to meditation (versus the pop-mindfulness that quickly proliferated), and I like to think that Timeless helped steer and push the bigger apps to level up the quality of their offerings.
My good friend Gian Torri and I built a subscription tea service, traveling to Japan to source loose leaf green tea and matcha, and offering detailed instructions for preparing the tea via iOS app. This was an incredibly fun and challenging project.
Other than Minimal, my other big project right now is Shape, an app for teaching people to lucid dream and helping experienced lucid dreamers deepen their practice. Like Minimal, Shape “tricks” people into meditating: the easiest way to lucid dream is to adopt a meditative outlook of open curiosity and a non-reactive mind. I see much of my work this way: building the infrastructure that supports clear, introspective minds. When it comes to this kind of personal development, even tiny progress or little nudges make a difference. I realize it doesn’t really work to tell people to meditate – it is much more effective to provide an environment where meditation feels natural and inevitable.
For the future, I’d like to keep leaning into this work. Minimal can get better and better. Some of its use patterns could be far simpler, and as I become a better designer and explore more, I hope to bring these improvements to Minimal’s community of writers.
I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. While I’d love to do more physical products (like the tea company) or in-person events, I think it is more fruitful for everyone – myself and Minimal’s writers – to only take one high-value step at a time. For now, Minimal is a rich environment to explore, make improvements, and ship new and simpler ideas. I have a lot to learn and much to offer without looking too far.
About Apptisan
Apptisan is a portmanteau of “application” and “artisan”, signifying “a weekly exploration into the world of apps and the passionate artisans who create them.” Each issue is a conversation with global creators, aiming to uncover and present intriguing products to a wider audience.
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