YC Applications
His YC application pitched "Superhuman for note taking." His users never wanted it for their teams.
In 2020 Kevin Lin applied to YC alone with "Superhuman for note taking": 28 very active users, no revenue, and team plans as phase three. Dendron raised $2M. Then daily user interviews showed his users never wanted it for their teams. The form is below.
In 2020, Kevin Lin applied to Y Combinator with a note-taking tool that lived inside a code editor. His one-line pitch was "Superhuman for note taking." Superhuman is the fast, paid email app.
Dendron was a free, open-source extension for VS Code, Microsoft's code editor. Notes were plain markdown files on your own disk. You filed each one in a hierarchy, like aws.ec2.pricing, and found it again by typing its path. He called that "lookup."
He applied alone. Before Dendron he had built a one-man AWS consulting firm that billed $320 an hour. He shut it "while I was fully booked and profitable." He had worked on Dendron full time since February 2020, and he ran his own notes on it: "+20K" of them.
The traction was small and honest. The preview launched in June 2020. Two months later it had over 100 users in Discord, 28 of them "very active," and no revenue. It was not his first application with this idea; the form lists what had changed since the last one.
The money plan came in three phases. First a pro account. Then cloud features. Third, "team features (small teams to enterprise)."
YC took Dendron into Winter 2021. On 9 April 2021 Lin announced a $2 million seed round from FUSE, Founders' Co-Op, First Rays and Altair Capital. One year after launch, he wrote, Dendron had 3,000 commits and 27,000 downloads. The client would stay free. The plan was to charge "teams and enterprises" for single sign-on, private registries and access control. GeekWire reported that Kiran Pathakota, a former Amazon program manager and one of Dendron's first customers, had joined as co-founder.
The tool kept shipping. Dendron did its Launch HN in November 2021. Version 100 came out in June 2022, and Lin wrote that the team had released "over 600 features" since 2020.
Then the team plan failed. In 2024 Lin wrote that "it wasn't until we tried (and failed) to introduce paid team plans two years later that we realized we didn't understand our users." They then booked 30-minute user interviews every day for months. What they learned: "our users had no desire to use Dendron with their teams. It was a power tool for power users." His summary: "limited product fit but no market fit."
In early February 2023, Lin told the Discord community that Dendron had not found "product market fit for a venture backed business." He mentioned burnout and personal matters. Dendron went into maintenance mode, and recurring donations were paused. The licence moved from GPLv3 to Apache 2.0, which makes it easier to fork. The last release, 0.124.0, shipped on 12 August 2023.
The company pivoted to Nimbus, which promised to cut Datadog log bills by "60% or more," Lin wrote on his blog. Nimbus's changelog stops at 26 April 2024. YC now lists the company under the Nimbus name, status inactive, with Lin as a former founder.
Dendron still works, because it is just files. The VS Code Marketplace shows over 170,000 installs. The GitHub repo has about 7,500 stars. The top of its README says active development has ceased.
Lin now works at OpenAI on Codex, his GitHub profile says. His GitHub lists side projects that are tools for AI agents, including a CLI for managing SKILL.md folders. The same profile now describes Dendron as "a tool to help humans manage context (think cursor but for markdown files)."
The form got the user right: one person, thousands of notes, who wants any of them in seconds. It got the buyer wrong. Phase three was teams, and teams were what his users did not want.
The application below is reproduced verbatim. Read it knowing how it ends.
Dendron: Y Combinator, Winter 2021 · Accepted Reproduced verbatim from the founder's application. Source: getintoyc.com
Company
If you have a demo, what's the url? Demo can be anything that shows us how the product works. Usually that's a video or screen recording.
_(no answer)_
Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.
Superhuman for note taking
What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.
We are making a note taking tool that lets users find notes in seconds, no matter how many notes they have.
If you are familiar with tools like Roam and Obsidian, then you're familiar with Dendron. We provide the same functionality as the aforementioned apps but tuned for our custom hierarchical note taking engine. This engine lets users create notes using flexible hierarchies.
These notes can be found again by searching their path in the hierarchy, a process we call "lookup". Through lookup, users can find any specific note in seconds no matter how many notes they have.
These notes are stored locally on the user's file system and can be synced via tools like Git and Dropbox or Dendron's (upcoming) native cloud sync. Users are also able to publish all or a subset of their notes as a website where they can find their notes using the same hierarchical engine that they use locally.
The current implementation of Dendron is an open-source, markdown- based, note-taking tool that runs as an extension inside VSCode.
Founders
Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founder(s). This video is an important part of the application. (Follow the Video Guidelines.)
_(no answer)_
Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.
Build a one man AWS consulting company with fortune 50 clients and a standard rate of $320/hour. Shut down said company while I was fully booked and profitable to work full time on Dendron.
Category
Which category best applies to your company?
Other
Progress
How far along are you?
We launched our preview June of 2020. We've hit the following milestones within two months of preview:
\- over 100 users in our community Discord channel \- 28 very active users (people who use Dendron multiple times a day and are active on our Discord channel at least once a week) \- formed a community moderator group of half a dozen dendrologist with coverage of every major timezone \- have desktop clients available across all operating systems
How long have each of you been working on this? How much of that has been full-time? Please explain.
I left my full-time job at Amazon to work on Dendron. The first year was split between doing consulting work while working on Dendron. Starting February of 2020, I've moved to working full time on Dendron.
Knowledge management has been a lifelong obsession of mine and I use Dendron to manage a corpus of +20K note
Are people using your product?
Yes
How many active users or customers do you have? If you have some particularly valuable customers, who are they? If you're building hardware, how many units have you shipped?
We have over 100 active users in our community Discord, 28 of which are very active users (people who use Dendron multiple times a day and are active on our Discord channel at least once a week).
Do you have revenue?
No
Anything else you would like us to know regarding your revenue or growth rate?
We plan on getting to 50 very active users before launching our paid plans.
If you are applying with the same idea as a previous batch, did anything change? If you applied with a different idea, why did you pivot and what did you learn from the last idea?
The most notable changes: working on Dendron full time, launched the tool, and have active users.
The idea is still the same but the implementation is different. Instead of building a standalone app, Dendron launched as an extension inside VSCode. This let me avoid much of the undifferentiated scaffolding work required to build a text editor and focus on Dendron's features around hierarchies.
Idea
Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?
I'm working in this field because its something I've been trying to solve for myself over the last decade. In that time, I've created a solution that has almost completely solved "information overload" for myself in domains that I care about. I now want to bring that solution to everyone in the world.
Knowledge management tools of the past fifty years allow users to input more information in expanded formats. But when it comes to getting information back out, we are still stuck with the same set of primitives as people in the fifties (keyword search, tags, and folders).
What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?
People are overwhelmed with information and stuck in "google doc hell" - the condition caused through tools that make it easy to create new notes but difficult to find existing notes. By storing notes in hierarchies and using lookup to reference them, users can find any particular note in seconds even if they have thousands of notes. Just as important, if a user is unable to find a note using lookup, they can be confident that the note doesn't exist. While the concepts of hierarchies are not new, hierarchies have never been used to their full potential in note taking tools. This is because the tooling around them sucks. All note taking tools (and even your file system), supports hierarchies. But besides holding your notes, these hierarchies do nothing but get in your way. You can't use them to find notes. They are difficult to change. They add friction to creating new notes. Dendron gives you all the good parts of hierarchies and takes away the friction.
Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?
I divide competition into two groups: established and upcoming.
Established competitors are Notion and Roam. These tools all provide a better take on knowledge management and have significant traction and funding with their current user base.
Upcoming competitors are Obsidian, Logseq and Foam. These tools are all free and attract a similar customer base as Dendron.
At this point, no competitor offers the equivalent of Dendron's hierarchal features. My greatest fear and hope, is that they do. Using hierarchies to manage notes goes against what is currently trendy (eg. structureless approach to note taking). Half the battle right now is convincing people to give Dendron a shot because of our focus on hierarchies (once they do, they end up sticking with it). If more tools adopt hierarchies, it'll lower the friction for people to adopt Dendron. If we end up in a world where we compete on hierarchical features, not only will Dendron have a headstart but it will also have significant mindshare in pioneering the new trend.
What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?
Dendron is hierarchy first because we believe hierarchies are among the most efficient structures for people to make sense of vast quantities of information. The reason we don't see more people using them is because there has never been a note taking tool that has made working with hierarchies simple and scalable. Dendron is such a tool.
How do or will you make money? How much could you make?
We plan on making money in three phases:
\- 1st phase: pro account (custom badge, priority support, once a month zoom chat, etc) \- 2nd phase: server side features (eg. private hosting, cloud sync, online editor) \- 3rd phase: team features (small teams to enterprise)
We also have a completely orthogonal revenue plan that involves creating a marketplace for notes. This involves making it easy for people to publish and monetize their knowledge - think substack/medium but for notes. This would vastly increase our addressable marketplace (to anyone that needs to consume information) but also a departure from our current plans of making revenue. This is something that we would likely explore either in conjunction of after phase 3.
How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?
We plan on publishing vertical specific notes on particular domains to drive adoption from people within that domain. The "Open AWS Catalogue" (aws.dendron.so) is an example of a domain specific publication to attract people from AWS into Dendron.
Equity
Have you incorporated, or formed any legal entity (like an LLC) yet?
Yes
What kind of entity and in what state or country was the entity formed?
n/a
Please provide any other relevant information about the structure or formation of the company.
n/a
Legal
Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? If so, please explain.
no
Who writes code, or does other technical work on your product? Was any of it done by a non-founder? Please explain.
Kevin is the sole full time developer for the project
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The rest of this article: His YC application pitched "Superhuman for note taking." His users never wanted it for their teams.
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