Unified notes/documentation hub for long-running side projects
Problem
Indie hackers and developers running months-long side projects end up with knowledge scattered across a text file, two markdown docs and memory. When they return to a project after weeks, context is lost; there is no lightweight tool that keeps per-project notes, decisions and state in one navigable place without becoming a second job.
Opportunity
A minimal, git-friendly 'project brain' that consolidates scattered notes, decisions and next-steps per side project, designed for pick-up-after-a-month continuity rather than corporate wiki bloat.
Market analysis
The scattered-notes pain is chronic and widely echoed, but the solution space is saturated: Obsidian plus a markdown file in the repo covers most of it for free, and developer-focused tools like Dendron and Fabric already chase the decision-record niche.
Market · Indie hackers and solo devs managing multiple long-running projects; persistent low-grade pain, notoriously low willingness to pay.
Pricing · Comparable personal knowledge tools are free or near-free (Obsidian free with ~$50/yr sync, Dendron open source) — little pricing headroom below prosumer wikis.
Pros
- + Pain is universal among side-project builders and resurfaces constantly on HN.
- + Git-friendly, plain-text approach matches existing developer habits.
- + Narrow 'pick up after a month' framing is sharper than generic PKM.
Cons
- − Obsidian/markdown-in-repo is a free 80% solution that is hard to displace.
- − PKM and decision-log space is a graveyard of abandoned tools.
- − Solo-dev audience shows very low willingness to pay for notes tooling.
Existing / similar tools
Source
Hacker News (Ask HN)
Every notes tool for this audience dies the same death: writing notes is a second job, which the opportunity statement itself admits is the enemy. The only version with a real edge is one that writes itself — mining git history, commit messages, open issues and README drift into an auto-maintained project brain, with notes as optional annotations rather than the primary input. That shifts the product from PKM (saturated, unpaid) toward code archaeology tooling, which is a more defensible and more technical niche — but it is a different, harder build than the idea as stated.