This week, my friend and I finally decided to pull the trigger and release the first live version of Jots - the developer-focused journaling app to accelerate your goals as a developer.
And the results are in!
- #3 Product of the Day (June 2, 2025)
- 150 new signups
- Featured in the Product Hunt newsletter
We are very grateful for these results and want to thank everyone who upvoted and engaged with us so far!
However beyond these numbers and results, there are deeper reasons why this first launch is meaningful for us.
We validated our problems
Throughout our careers, we have been keeping notes of our observations, learnings and accomplishments. However there was never any existing solution that fully satisfied our writing needs in terms of simplicity and developer-centric functionalities. It is out of this frustration that Jots was born, to solve our own problem. Foremost, we are the first users of Jots because we need the tool. Sharing this tool during launch with an external audience and getting so much support and positive feedback has validated that our problems are also shared by other developers. And that Jots can be a viable solution for others too.
We started to build our community
Our intention with Jots, is that we want to build a great community around our product that fosters collaboration. It has been great seeing so much engagement with active comments and discussions. This launch has given us more visibility and has grown our community. We look forward to the great things we can do together in the future. If you also want to be a part of the journey, we have a Discord where you can meet other people, learn journaling tips and participate in the product creation by sharing ideas and feedback.
We are getting quicker feedback loops
The engagement has been high and we have been getting feedback requests and suggestions to improve our tool. We are taking these into consideration as part of our roadmap. Having our users influence our decision making is ensuring that we are building the product they need and that we aren’t just shipping features in silo.
We have more responsibility
Now that we have many more active users, we feel accountability and this is fuelling our motivation even more. We want to keep improving the tool and shipping new features for our users. They trusted us with our launch by signing up, now we want to provide them with the best experience.
Also, setting a launch date in our calendar forced us to get things done at a much faster rate as we were working towards meeting the deadline. With our teaser page up on Product Hunt we had no choice but to make it happen.
We are providing value
There is nothing more rewarding than knowing that your solution is providing value to others. Getting those positive feedback and thank you messages have really warmed our hearts over the last days.
Jots is built for the community and we want this principle to remain at the core of everything we do. We have decided to launch Jots open-source allowing you to contribute, modify and extend the tool to suit your needs. Now that Jots is out in the wild, we hope many more of you will benefit from using the tool.
Here are a few comments we received during our launch:
I really like how this isn’t just about taking notes but about growing intentionally as a developer.
Jots is a smart idea — love the positioning as a second brain for developers. Too many journaling tools miss the mark by being generic; your dev-first focus and emphasis on growth/promotion alignment really stand out.
Insight suggestions are surprisingly helpful
In summary, launching Jots this week has been a pivotal moment due to all the reasons mentioned above. We were unsure if this week was the right one to launch and almost postponed the date. But we are glad we decided to take the leap. For anyone hesitating to release their product, there will always be an excuse to postpone, so just do it sooner rather than later.
If you have a story from your own launch, I’d love to hear it! Drop it in the comments below or to send me a message via Linkedin.
If you want to get started on your dev journal, try Jots.
If you want to give some extra love to Jots on Product Hunt, here’s the way -> ~https://www.producthunt.com/products/jots?launch=jots~
Thanks for reading! Hopefully you now feel more inspired to start building things to solve your own problems and one day share these creations with the world!
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