Obsidian

Shida Li (Licat) and Erica Xu (Silver) launched Obsidian in 2020 after building Dynalist — a popular outlining app. The premise: your notes should live as plain text Markdown files on your own device, not in someone else's cloud. Obsidian was radically local-first in an era of cloud-everything, which became its identity and its moat. Plugins — built by hundreds of community developers — transformed it into a knowledge management powerhouse. A passionate community of developers, writers, researchers, and PKM enthusiasts adopted it and spread it obsessively on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. The base app is free; revenue comes from Obsidian Sync (cloud sync), Obsidian Publish (web publishing), and commercial licenses for business use. The community built thousands of free plugins. Obsidian became one of the most beloved note-taking tools ever built, hitting hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers with a two-person core team. A masterclass in building for a passionate niche and letting community do the distribution.