Postach.io Turns An Evernote Notebook Into A Blog

One of the more interesting projects to emerge from Evernote's 2013 Devcup hackathon is called Postach.io, a new blogging platform that turns your Evernote notebook into a content management system. Input Logic, the Vancouver-based company behind the now just four-week-old service, has already caught the attention of local investors, as well as Evernote, who met with the team to discuss possible monetization ideas.

Input Logic was founded two years ago by UI designer Shawn Adrian and programmer Gavin Vickery, with the intention of becoming a software development firm. The company bootstrapped its first app, proposal writing aid QuoteRobot, and has sustained itself with contract work over the past couple of years. The five-person team (three full-time) has worked for clients, including Nest, Michael Kors, ski resort Mt. Washington, and others, doing everything from coding to design.

This year, the company stopped doing client work to focus on Postach.io instead.

Adrian says that, initially, neither he nor Vickery were Evernote users, having "not drank the Kool-Aid," so to speak. But at the urging of Lance Tracey, Full Stack partner (now investor, who just funded the company with $200K), they decided to take another look.

"We started playing with it, got into it, and said 'hey, this thing has really come a long way,'" Adrian explains. "And Gavin especially just got fully addicted to it," he adds.

Later on, when the co-founders were collaborating on documentation for a newly redesigned QuoteRobot using Evernote, a thought occurred to them: "Wouldn't it be great if we could just publish it instead?" Vickery, too, wanted that same functionality for his own blog – he writes all his blog posts in Evernote anyway, why not just publish directly from there?

So they decided to build a service that did just that.

Having worked on CMSes in the past, the team built Postach.io to include nearly everything you would expect from a lightweight blogging system: customizable themes, RSS (Atom) feeds, built-in Disqus commenting, support for multimedia, and more. In fact, anything you can store in Evernote – images, audio, video/YouTube, etc. – will work on Postach.io, too.

Currently, the half dozen themes available are reminiscent of sites like Svbtle or Medium, favoring clean, minimalistic design and rounded icons. Now the plan is to extend Postach.io's feature set even further, with special themes designed for Evernote Food and Hello app users, as well as support for social sharing, wikis,  and community features designed to help new bloggers have their content found.

To use Postach.io yourself, after setting up an account and authorizing the service with Evernote, it's only a matter of tagging posts in a pre-determined notebook with the tag "publish" to make them go live on your blog. You can also use Evernote's date field to schedule posts for a later time.

Blogs are given their own subdomains like yourname.postach.io, for example, but you can have them work with your own URL instead, if you choose.

In the future, the service might monetize by charging for premium features or converting users to Evernote Premium, while doing a rev share with Evernote. But those ideas are still in the works. Today, the focus is on growing the product and user base, which today includes 1,500 bloggers who signed up since the April debut.

Blogging platforms, of course, are numerous – from the big guys like Tumblr, WordPress and Blogger to newcomers like Medium, Svbtle, and Posterous repository Posthaven. But the team behind Postach.io see the value in building on top of a successful platform instead of creating a destination site of their own. (And they're not the only ones with the same idea: see also Everblog or maybe this IFTTT recipe.)

"One of the big things with Evernote is that you own your content – it's actually on your own computer," Adrian explains. "Even if our servers are struck by lighting and everything falls apart, everyone will have their blog posts."

Interested users can sign up for Postach.io here.