I shipped texspark 0.4.1 this week. The editor works. SyncTeX jumps land where they should. The website has a yellow button, the button counts downloads, and every download pings my phone through a little Telegram bot I wired up. The machine is built and humming.
There’s just one problem left, and it’s the one nobody warned me about: almost nobody knows this thing exists.
The chart that keeps me honest
I set up analytics recently. Here is what I’ve learned from my traffic data so far: my most loyal visitors are (1) me, checking whether the site looks right, and (2) Googlebot, dutifully crawling the sitemap I submitted. Somewhere in there are a handful of real humans — and I’m grateful for every one of you, whoever you are.
When download #6 came in from an IP that wasn’t mine, my phone buzzed and I genuinely stared at it for a moment. Someone I’ve never met dragged my app into their Applications folder. That feeling doesn’t show up in any chart, but it’s the whole reason to keep going.
Turns out this is a different job
I spent months on the fun problems. Making a native NSTextView behave with LaTeX. Getting inverse search to follow \input chains. Parsing TeX’s 79-column log wrapping so error messages stop losing their line numbers. These problems have a shape: you push, they resist, eventually they yield.
“Getting people to visit a website” has no such shape. There’s no compiler error telling me what’s wrong. The honest answer to “why is nobody coming?” is simply that the internet is very large, texspark.io is very new, and no amount of ⌘B fixes that.
So I’m doing what engineers do with unfamiliar problems: reading the documentation and making a list.
The list
Here’s my plan, in public, so you can watch it succeed or fail:
- Directories. I signed up for AlternativeTo, where new accounts must wait a week before submitting anything. So right now my marketing strategy is, quite literally, a waiting room. (MacUpdate is next.)
- Writing. Posts like this one, plus actually useful ones — what I’ve learned about multi-file LaTeX projects, editor internals, why native macOS text handling matters for CJK writers.
- Telling people. Colleagues, grad students, the LaTeX forums I’ve quietly read for years. This is the part that feels most unnatural to a person who chose a career of typing alone in a quiet room. Doing it anyway.
- Not yet: the big launch posts. Checkout isn’t open (paperwork — the boring kind, being finished). A launch that sends people to a product they can’t buy is a launch wasted, so Show HN stays in the drawer a little longer.
If you’re one of the humans
The trial is the whole app — every feature, 14 days, no signup, no email. If you write LaTeX on a Mac, try it and tell me what’s broken or missing: support@texspark.io. Bug reports are gold. Blunt opinions are platinum.
And if you know someone whose thesis lives in seventeen .tex files held together by hope — send them here. Word of mouth is the one channel that no waiting room can delay.
— the LaTeX nerd behind texspark
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