Either A) because none of the existing apps are good enough, or B) note taking is pervasive and diversive enough that there is no one app to satisfy them all.

I think its a mix of both with a lean towards A personally. Knowledge workers are increasing YoY and nearly all of them take notes. The market is huge, and its quite normal for new(ish) markets to see a large number of competitors before the winners take over and the other 90% die off. To your other question -- Google Keep / Apple Notes are good for rudimentary use cases or small numbers of notes, but otherwise don't really compare to the popular note taking apps that have popped up lately.

The same reason why all other pen manufacturers didn't give up when Pilot came out with their V5 gel pens or whatever.

Because note-taking experience is subjective, and there are no solution which fits everyones taste and purpose.

That is not what I asked though. Every experience is subjective. I’m asking how they envision this being a good business model. Every bootcamp grad who can whip up a database backed web app can build a note-taking application that covers the major features. There is literally no defensible moat here and the incumbent is giving away theirs for free. What feature will you compete on? There are limits to how much innovation you can add to “storing rich text in the cloud”.

I suspect it's a combination of the intense passion people feel to work on this problem and the small user-base needed to support a small team to do the work.

I'm not so good at ballparking operational expenses, but Supernotes 2 probably needs somewhere around 2000 users to break even, which probably isn't hard to achieve.

After that, the founders are fully supported to pursue their passion. Sounds like a great business model for someone who wants to do this, and I think this is why you see a profusion of utility apps with ~$10/mo pricing models on the market today.

Neither of those apps do markdown, which I NEED, so I pay for a markdown note app

What is the advantage of Markdown over rich text without extra characters?

Markdown files can be backed up offline, version controlled with Git, grepped (in-file text search) and finded (search for filenames), parsed with awk perl or sed (yes, sorry, I've done that more often than I like to admit), edited with VIM (I live in VIM), and many other advantages.

In addition to what the other posters mentioned, markdown/plaintext is easier to work with for automation tasks.

For example I schedule tweets through markdown files https://github.com/reidjs/markdown-tweet-scheduler

Twitter doesn't support markdown, though. You're just posting text files. That's only a markdown file by technicality

I sort of misread the post, I meant to respond to why markdown/plaintext instead of Apple Notes or Google Keep. I found it more difficult to automate the task using Apple Notes' sqlite DB than markdown/plaintext files sync'd through iCloud.

For a lot of things such as tables, lists, adding links, etc, markdown allows you to do it "inline" while typing, instead of forcing out of band operations.

i think they just want to read people's notes.