Kosshi took me four years to ship
- Published on
I left my company at the end of 2021. Before that, a few of us had been building a new product internally. The product itself didn't take off, but I couldn't shake the feeling of building something from zero, so I quit to do it full-time on my own. Going from a salary to nothing overnight was a stretch, so the plan was to take freelance work for a few years and chip away at my own apps in the gaps. The app I wanted to build first was Kosshi. It had a different name back then — early 2022.
The freelance-plus-side-project plan didn't run as cleanly as it sounded. With several client engagements in parallel, the schedule pressure pushed me into stretches where I was busier than I'd ever been as an employee. I also have this trait where, once I commit to a piece of work, I forget about everything else and pour myself into it. That turned out to be the direct reason my own projects never got time. I'm just not the kind of person who can juggle. I'd take on a new project because it sounded interesting, then a while later, when things settled, I'd catch myself thinking: wait, wasn't I supposed to be shipping my own stuff? That same loop ran on repeat from 2022 for about four years.
When I quit, I'd loudly announced "I'm going to make a living from my own apps," so by now my old colleagues probably assumed I'd given up. Honestly, I had my own doubts too — was a Mac/iOS-only outliner really a viable category? Wasn't it too niche to justify the time?
On top of that, about six months into building it, I noticed Bike Outliner — a Mac-native outliner — had shown up. Trying it, the quality was high; it didn't quite match what I wanted (no iOS sync, no images), but it was close to what I'd been planning to build. Precisely because it was a good product, the question "is there any point in me doing this?" stuck with me.
Carrying those doubts, my focus gradually shifted toward hardware — an area I'd been drawn to anyway, and where I felt a different kind of traction from software. From 2023 onward, with the rise of AI, I started wondering whether betting my life on app development — or really, on programming itself — was a bad idea (looking at it now, I actually think this is exactly the moment for indie developers). As a result, Kosshi quietly went into hibernation.
But the pull toward outliners never went away. Every day, using someone else's outliner, I'd have the same thought: I guess I just have to build it myself. The frequency went up year over year. At some point I dropped the questions about "is this a business" and "is there a market," told myself it's fine if I'm the only user, and restarted the project.
About a month after restarting, I had something that worked. Using it daily, there were moments when it fit my way of working better than any outliner I'd tried. That's when I thought: I want to finish this properly and put it out into the world. From there I put everything into Kosshi and ran straight to release.
A month after launch, with no ads and barely any marketing, people are still installing it, and the number of paying users keeps going up day by day. This is the first time something I built solo has actually been bought, and that part is genuinely good. The day the first purchase came in, my wife and I went out to a yakiniku chain to celebrate, and over the grill she said, "the thing you'd always wanted to do is finally moving." I'll probably remember the taste of that meal for the rest of my life.
I've started a lot of new apps and services over the years, and honestly, in my experience most of them didn't work. With apps especially, I'd seen it again and again: what mattered was marketing — paying to drag users in — and even building something good wasn't enough to reach anyone. In a saturated app market, "build something good and people will come" had stopped feeling true to me.
With Kosshi, none of that holds. Without doing much marketing, it gets installed every day, gets bought every day, feedback shows up. None of that happened with anything I'd built before.
Years ago, on that app I built with coworkers, we ran user interviews — probably a few dozen, maybe up to a hundred people. We listened to every kind of opinion and felt sure we were on the right track, and still ended up at: we don't actually know who wants this.
Understanding what people genuinely want is hard. I'm not the kind of person who can intuit it from the outside, and lately I've come around to the conviction that the only thing left for me is to build what I myself need. From here on, the only question I want to ask is: will I still want to use this next year, and the year after?
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