Plans for Memo App

Burak Tokak
4 min readJan 25, 2020

I have published an app called Memo less than a month ago, and collected a lot of valuable feedback from users. Today I had the time to compile them all in a structured way and create a roadmap for Memo.

I would like to share this plans with you, and collect further feedback on it.

Little Bit About Memo

Memo is a note taking app that uses your GitHub Gists. This means, you own the gists and memo is just a tool to create an interface for you to interact with your notes and even easily search in them.

You can use Memo in your browser or download the Desktop app. Similar to a version control system, you can login with GitHub to push your changes to your gists, or use it totally offline.

During this month;

  • 2,000 unique users tried Memo
  • 15% of them kept using it (created more than one session)
  • About 300 people upvoted on ProductHunt

Memo is also open source, and has about 100 stars on GitHub at the time of writing this post. Check it out!

Multiple Memos

Most users said that some sort of tagging system is vital. My main goal with the app was to give users the most simple way to create a system for themselves in plain text format. But most people think that grouping the sheets in a way would be a good addition.

In the light of this, I decided to add some sort of “notebooks” feature. For users of Memo, you can imagine these as being Memos. Currently you have one Memo and you can have sheets for that memo, and you will be able to add another memo that you can add more sheets in them.

So you will be able to have a memo for your personal sheets, one for business related sheets and another for one to collect feedbacks for your app, like I did :)

Making a really easy to use interface after login, and letting user choose which notebook (Memos for our case) will be vital for this.

Embedded Images

Another feature that has been requested was some sort of embedded images system. Currently you can add images to your notes by adding an image url, this url will show a preview on the insights sidebar.

My current vision is to be able to add images by dragging and dropping in a line. The image will be uploaded to a server and the image URL will automatically added to the line. And I will create a secure server to store the images.

This is really similar to how github does it in the textarea to create an issue, PR or for comments.

Mobile Application

My main goal was to create a note app focused mostly on developers, designers and tech workers, (people that have a GH account) and I didn’t really think a mobile application is needed, but as the feedbacks and my own experience indicates, an mobile application is must!

I have started porting the react app into react native!

Submitting to Mac App Store

More than 35% of the users use the Mac desktop app. I will work on submitting the app and make it easy for Mac users to download the app via Mac App Store.

Plans for Monetisation

For an app like this showing the users that the development will keep going is really important as Marc Köhlbrugge’s comment on Betalist;

Biggest reason actually I’m writing this post was to show that I’m invested in making Memo better. Another way to do this is apparently share the way I’m looking forward to monetise Memo. Keeping it sustainable will be the actual goal instead of making it profitable.

So my thought was to make the creating a second Memo (mentioned notebooks feature) a premium feature and charge a premium user for few dollars a month or a really good price annually. I feel like this sort of price point is a fair one and seems to be sustainable as there is live examples like Bear.app

What do you think? Share me in the comments.

If you haven’t heard of Memo and stumble upon this post, please check it out!

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Burak Tokak

I love making systems work efficiently and faster. Full Stack Web Developer. Currently working as freelancer