Obsidian just announced they're hiring their fourth engineer. Their fourth. Let that satisfying number sit with you for a second.
The note taking app that millions of people use daily the one that has productivity nerds, developers, students, and researchers swearing by it was built by three engineers. The entire company? Nine people. No venture capital. No boardrooms full of suits deciding what features to cut. Just a small, focused team that decided to do things differently.
And it worked. Spectacularly.
The Numbers Are Absurd
Third party estimates peg Obsidian at roughly $350 million in valuation, pulling in around $25 million in annual recurring revenue as of early 2026. These aren't official figures the company is private and doesn't share financial data but even the ballpark is staggering for a team this small.
That's nearly $3 million in revenue per employee. Per. Employee.
For context, Obsidian has surpassed 5 million downloads globally since its launch. The app's Discord community has over 110,000 members, and its Reddit community ranks in the top 5% of all subreddits. All of that traction, from a team you could fit inside a minivan.
Who Actually Built This Thing?
The story starts during COVID lockdowns in 2020. Co founders Shida Li and Erica Xu both University of Waterloo graduates were quarantining and frustrated with existing note taking tools. They'd already built Dynalist, an outliner tool, together. But they wanted something more a personal knowledge base that actually respected your files and your privacy.
So they built Obsidian.
Today, Shida Li serves as CTO, Erica Xu as COO, and Steph Ango (known online as kepano) leads as CEO. The engineering team which up until this hiring announcement consisted of Liam Cain, Johannes Theiner, and Matthew Meyers alongside Shida has carried the entire product across desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and mobile (iOS, Android). The rest of the nine-person team handles customer success and operations.
That's it. That's the whole company.
How Do You Make Millions From a Free App?
Obsidian is completely free for personal use. No sign up required. No paywall blocking core features. So where does the $25 million come from?
Optional paid services. That's the entire business model.
Obsidian Sync runs $4–5 per month and gives you en-to-end encrypted syncing across all your devices, version history, and collaborative vaults. Obsidian Publish costs $8–10 per month and lets you turn your notes into polished public websites. Then there's the Catalyst License a one-time $25 payment that gets you early access to new features and a community badge. And for businesses, there's a Commercial License at $50 per user per year.
No ads. No data harvesting. No investor-mandated growth hacks. Users who want extras pay for them. Everyone else uses the app for free, forever. It's a model that shouldn't work as well as it does but that's only if you're thinking about it through the lens of traditional Silicon Valley playbooks.
Why Obsidian Wins With a Skeleton Crew
Here's what makes their efficiency possible, and why a team of hundreds couldn't necessarily do this better:
Local first architecture. Your notes live on your device as plain Markdown files. There's no massive cloud infrastructure to maintain, no server costs spiraling out of control, no data breach nightmares. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, you'd still have every single note you ever wrote, in a format any text editor can open.
Community as a force multiplier. Obsidian's plugin ecosystem is enormous thousands of community-built plugins and themes extending the app in every direction imaginable. The core team doesn't need to build everything because their users build it for them. They just maintain the core app and the API. It's crowd-sourced development at its finest.
Six years of focused polish. Obsidian launched in 2020 and has been refined relentlessly since. No feature bloat. No pivot-of-the-month. No meetings about meetings. When your team is three engineers, every decision matters and every line of code counts.
Zero outside investors. Obsidian is 100% user supported. The company, legally registered as Dynalist Inc., has never taken VC money. As Obsidian's own team has publicly stated: they don't need it. They want to stay small, follow strict principles they refuse to compromise, and their users are happy to fund development directly. Their target? 10-12 people, maximum. Not 10,000.
Product led growth. Obsidian doesn't run aggressive ad campaigns. Loyal users spread the word in productivity communities, "second brain" circles, and developer forums. The product is the marketing.
The Notion Comparison Everyone Makes
It comes up every time. Notion has hundreds of employees, billions in VC funding, and significantly higher revenue. But Notion also needs all of that infrastructure - it's a cloud first collaborative platform that requires massive server resources, a large sales team, and constant enterprise feature development.
Obsidian operates on a fundamentally different philosophy. Many users actually run both: Notion for team collaboration at work, Obsidian for personal thinking and writing. They're not really competitors in the traditional sense they serve different needs. But the efficiency gap is impossible to ignore. Obsidian generates millions per employee. That ratio is almost unheard of in tech.
The Job Posting That Broke The Internet
The fourth engineer hire grows the engineering team by 33% a statistic that sounds absurd for any company worth nine figures. The role requires Senior or Staff level experience with at least 8 years in the field. It's fully remote with no location based salary reductions and competitive San Francisco-level compensation.
This is how you attract elite talent when you're nine people: offer the best engineers in the world a chance to work on a product millions love, from anywhere, with actual autonomy and zero corporate bureaucracy.
The Bigger Picture
Obsidian is proof that the bloated, VC-fueled, hire-fast-fire-fast model of building tech companies isn't the only way. It might not even be the best way. A small team with clear principles, a product people genuinely love, and the discipline to stay focused can outperform companies with 100x the headcount.
In a tech landscape full of billion-dollar companies that can't turn a profit, Obsidian feels like a different species entirely. Three engineers, nine employees, $25 million in revenue, and millions of users who would genuinely riot if the app went away.
They're hiring one more engineer. Just one.
And somehow, that feels like plenty.
