How Markdown to PDF has organically grown to 9,000 users per month and converted over half a million files.

Markdown to PDF is a side project that we started back in August 2013 and up until now, we’ve been letting it tick along and run itself. We created Markdown to PDF to solve our own problem and scratch our own itch and never expected it to get so many users.

Our problem was that when writing website and mobile application specifications for clients post-workshop, we wanted a consistent way to write these consistently across multiple members of the team and know that the same font, heading styles and spacing etc would be applied which when using Word or Pages can prove a bit of a nightmare.

2013-2019 Growth

You’ll be able to see from the above insight to our Google Analytics that over the duration of 5 years Markdown to PDF has increased naturally in growth. There’s also a trend in that weekends are usually a quieter time in terms of file conversions. This is since most of the users interacting with Markdown to PDF are either academics of business users.

On average the website is currently getting 9,000 active monthly users and has converted over 480,000 files. We wanted to take this side project a step further involving updating the website and building new features for users to make it more useable, providing more value.

We’ve recently rebuilt Markdown to PDF and we now offer users the option to register and create an account where they can access converted files anywhere, anytime. Users can still come to the website and convert a file without an account just as they did before, but for those more frequent users they will now be able to access all converted files, rename/delete them and download the original Markdown file along with the PDF.

What’s next?

Over the next few months we are going to be working on some exciting new features for Markdown to PDF.

Creating & Editing Markdown Files

Having the ability to create markdown files directly inside of Markdown to PDF will increase the value for users. No longer would users come to the website to simply convert and leave, they’d now be able to create and edit these files after signing up for an account.

Custom PDF Styles

Custom PDF styles will allow users to convert their Markdown files to PDF and the end result to be customised. Users will have more control over document colours and the options to choose heading and paragraph fonts.

Once we’ve talked these we will be working our way through feature requests from our users. Registered users of Markdown to PDF will also be able to vote on the features we will build next!

Check it out and sign up here.