We often hear how fortunate we were to get a review from John Gruber on his popular blog, Daring Fireball. He loves Simplenote. And it's true: honest praise from influential people is extremely helpful.

But exactly how helpful was his review? What did we do to earn his praise? And who are these Simplenote guys anyway?

I'll give you a hint: this is not another story about how to become a hugely successful iPhone app developer. This is a story about following a dream, not finding it, floundering a little, recovering, and proceeding to build more focused offerings that a growing number of people are using on a daily basis, like Simplenote and JamYourFace.

My background is in game development, and we started Cloud Factory to build a crazy mirror-world game for Android called Duo. Some people at Google really liked it, and we flirted with them a little. We made an unreleased Flash version too. But at the time, Duo was a poorly defined product in search of a market, and we soon realized that it would not be our path towards early revenue.

We needed early revenue because we had quit our full-time jobs and we wanted to bootstrap our company. So we spent some time making Simplenote.

Simplenote was born in late 2008 as a decidedly minimal note-taking app for iPhone and iPod touch. Inspired by the great Notational Velocity, our first version was little more than a redesign of the built-in Notes app. We gave Simplenote a cleaner visual aesthetic, instant searches, and landscape typing.

We gathered feedback, iterated, and released updates. After building a small but loyal following, we started tackling the next feature we wanted most: transferring notes to and from your device. Simplenote 2 would be released as a free upgrade with automatic, wireless syncing.

Meanwhile, Eric (a former cloud) had read a post by John Gruber regarding what he thought was lacking in iPhone notes apps. Eric sent a politely worded email inviting him to try Simplenote. Gruber was curious, gave it a try, and liked its potential. He proceeded to offer us some great feedback.

Importantly, John Gruber was first and foremost a star user for us, and only secondarily an influential blogger. We were receptive to his feedback, patient for his replies, and respectful of his time. We didn't nag or beg. Eventually, after several months of happily using Simplenote, he decided (with a little encouragement from us) to tell the world his honest thoughts about the app in the form of this extremely thorough, mostly glowing, and very epic post.

Sales skyrocketed, relatively speaking. My co-founder, Fred, had created a bot named Cumulus Prime to enter our Campfire chats and make an announcement whenever someone had signed up for a new Simplenote account. Cumulus went crazy that day. It was a singularity, a furious spike whose tallness and sharpness reduced all our previous sales data to a tranquil sea of ho hum:

That's how helpful Gruber's review was. But we weren't suddenly filthy rich. We weren't even mildly stained rich. You'd be going too far if you said we had "made it." Actually, we were still very much cash poor and nowhere near Ramen profitability in spite of our decidedly minimalist lifestyles. But we were happy, legitimized, and hopeful.

What's surprising about this story of Simplenote is that John Gruber was not our kingmaker. People assumed that with his review, we had joined the ranks of the rare but highly publicized few who had wildly succeeded in the App Store. Not so! We're still working very hard every day to achieve even mild (let alone wild) success. It's a tough market. We've made some mistakes. John Gruber's endorsement alone was not enough.

What Gruber did for us, though, was discover us and help a lot of other great people discover us too. He contributed ideas to the product and helped set us on a path. He encouraged us to persist. For all that, we're very grateful.

In the meantime, Simplenote's user base has grown steadily. We're releasing ongoing updates. Our systems are scaling. The number of support emails is declining, not rising. And throughout all this, we continue to resist the temptation to add lots of features, choosing instead to stay focused on a smaller market where we know we can excel: text notes.

Running Simplenote's syncing service used to be free thanks to our focus on text notes and the liberal quotas offered by our hosting service, Google App Engine. But awhile back we started incurring costs. For any technical folks, that will lend some insight into how much text we're managing now. It's a lot!

We're pushing hard towards "making it," which brings us to the end of this story, and the beginning of the next. If you use Simplenote, and you want to add more value to your core experience, you might consider the new premium subscription that we're offering in the next major update. You'll help us continue to make Simplenote the best solution in the world for mobile text notes. You can read details about Simplenote Premium here.

Thanks so much to everyone who sends us kind emails and tweets. As an independent developer, we read them all, and they mean a lot to us. Catch us on twitter at @simplenoteapp, @cldfactory, @cloudmike, and @fredrocious.