Internote wants to combine notes and publishing in one killer app

Johanes Sung has been trying to crack the problem since 2012. What he wants is to create the ultimate writer’s app – an app which makes the entire process from note taking to publishing seamless and beautiful. “I create products that solve my own problems,” he says, “I’m my own best customer.”

With Internote, a productivity and writing app that launched on the iTunes store earlier this month, Sung and his team at the Indonesian software company InterAre are on their latest iteration leading toward the goal.

But the journey that led to Internote began in 2012 with an iPhone app called Wisdom Writer. In its earliest version, Wisdom Writer was a simple, distraction-free writing environment. In version two, which launched in 2013, the app added various templates for different types of documents such as letters and reports and offered ways to export and print them.

Sung was not satisfied. “Somehow, it was only a half working product, people liked it because of the editor itself, not so much for the exporting features,” says Sung.

Tasty Matcha

The team then decided to rebrand and relaunch Wisdom Writer in a new app called Matcha in May 2014. “We stripped unnecessary features, put emphasis on a truly beautiful interface, with theme colors, a day and night mode, and just the right amount of features for writers,” he explains. “Matcha got about 250,000 downloads, but those came mostly from free campaigns. From the sales perspective it did not do so well.”

Most of Matcha’s users, Sung says, are based in the US, Canada and Australia. Designing their app for iPhone only, they went for a global audience from the start, not targeting their Indonesian home market where Android is by far the dominant mobile OS.

Despite the modest sales they achieved, the traction the startup got with Matcha was interesting enough to convince an angel investor to back the product. Sung declined to share details of the investment. By September, Sung and co-founder Djemi Limano grew InterAre into a four-person team, and the investment they had received gave them enough runway to keep working on Matcha and to make it available for iPad and OS X.

“The users we had in mind are bloggers and writers who need to have everything in place when they write. This includes journaling, note taking, capturing images and text from the web,” says Sung.

Originally they had planned to release the improved version of the app as Matcha Latte. However, after presenting the beta product at the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland, in November, the team came to the realization that it still needed more work.

“We had let Matcha Latte become too complicated, with too many features. It’s beautiful and has a great interface, but it’s hard to get started. I admit, even I had trouble explaining all its features,” Sung says.

The tough decision not release Matcha Latte just yet was what finally pushed the team toward their current product, Internote.

Big on blogging

“We went back to focusing on what we do best, which is the powerful text editor,” says Sung.