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I work in consulting, helping companies with automation, product, and growth. That's been my career for a long time now: building things, just always for other people, and rarely the code itself. I studied law, then moved into business, then spent years doing exactly that kind of work. I was the guy who nailed the positioning and the marketing. Someone else did the shipping.
At some point I decided it was time to build something of my own. I chose the idea of a markdown viewer — MacMD Viewer. Not glamorous, but it came from an actual annoyance of mine: everything in my work ends up as markdown — automations, marketing plans, legal notes, dev specs — and it's miserable to read at any real length. The spec that finally pushed me over the edge was 40 pages long, all raw hashtags and asterisks, and I couldn't get through it. So I built the fix.
MacMD Viewer is the first product I've developed entirely on my own — from the app to the website, support emails, and marketing. I launched it in April 2026, and by July, my app was already generating $3,000 in monthly revenue! Here's how I got there.
What I wanted was simple: a small app that would preview a markdown file nicely on my Mac. Double-click, read, done. I looked around, didn't find one I liked, so I built my own.
Before building, I checked the data first. I mapped the markdown ecosystem to see where the gaps were. Two things stood out: surprisingly few apps owned the "markdown viewer for Mac" spot specifically, and the search demand for it was climbing fast, month after month, as more people started generating markdown files themselves. Small niche, but growing, and wide open. That combination is what sold me.
Almost every request I get eventually comes back to the same thing: editing. The market is already packed with editors — VS Code, Cursor, Obsidian, whatever. People won’t buy MacMD to get another one, I thought. They will buy it because they want a viewer: something simple and good-looking that turns their markdown into something readable, instantly.
The moment the app can write to your files, it turns into a different beast — save conflicts, undo history, "wait, did it just reflow my whole document?" I'd be maintaining an editor, badly, instead of a viewer that nails one job. So the app never touches your files. Your editor is one Cmd-Tab away, and it's better at editing than mine would ever be. MacMD does the other half.
I sell MacMD Viewer in three ways: direct from my site for a one-time $19.99 (no subscription), through Homebrew (brew install --cask macmd-viewer) for the terminal crowd, and through Setapp for people who already have the subscription. Skipping the App Store means skipping its review queue and its rules about what an app's allowed to do — a trade I made on purpose.
I've never run a paid ad. Never done a Product Hunt launch. Never even leaned on my own network. Almost all of my traffic is organic search — someone types "how to read a markdown file on Mac," lands on my site, and buys.
By the numbers
Two things about the traffic itself surprised me.
First: don't sleep on Bing and DuckDuckGo. A surprising share of my search traffic comes from them, not Google — I rank top three there on commercial queries Google buries.
Second: AI search is already real traffic. When people ask AI tools how to open or read a markdown file on a Mac, my pages keep coming up. It's a funny loop — AI made the problem way bigger by generating all these markdown files in the first place, and now AI points people straight to the fix.
MacMD Viewer launched on April 14, 2026, as v1.1.0. Not quite four months later, it's on v1.6.1.
The day after launch, I shipped five hotfixes in about 24 hours — v1.1.1 through v1.1.5. One of them was a keychain bug that asked users for their password on every single update. Brutal, but that's what happens when you push straight to everyone with no safety net.
So I built one. Every release now goes through a beta, then real testing on a second Mac, then promotion to production. And I've learned to test the update path itself, not just the app — my scariest bugs turned out to be the silent ones. At one point my auto-updater quietly told people they were "up to date" when they weren't, because I'd formatted a version string wrong. The app worked perfectly. The thing around the app was broken, and nobody would have known until they went looking for an update that never came.
AI changed how I work, not just how fast. A few years ago, shipping a native Swift app would have been out of reach for me. I'd have hired someone, or given up. Now, I describe what I want, then read the code it writes, tweak it, and ship.
I'm learning on the job instead of studying for years first. The bugs are still mine to fix — I just make them fast and cheap now. The core of it is Claude Code and Codex, which handle the actual building: the Swift app, the website, the release scripts. On top of that, I've built a library of my own Claude skills and workflows, so I'm not re-explaining the same thing every time. For the SEO side, I lean on DataForSEO for keyword and ranking data.
The rest is boring on purpose — GitHub for code and releases, a cheap VPS for the site.
The product side, honestly, is mostly small refinements now — MacMD already does its job well, and I keep improving it with what users send me. The harder problem is everything around it: getting it in front of more people, building the brand, reaching new customers. Building a good app turned out to be easier than getting it seen.
MacMD is just the first one, though. I've got other products I want to build — some pure SaaS, some iOS, some Mac. This is the one where I learned I could actually ship. Now I want to go do it again.
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