It’s midnight on March 29, 2012, when I and my fellow co-founders (Georg Petschnigg, Jon Harris, & Julian Walker) of a newly-formed startup called FiftyThree quietly push out a new drawing app to the App Store. I climb into bed then check my phone and immediately see tweets begin to pop with our hashtag #madewithpaper, downloads begin to climb, and drawings done in our signature inks start showing up on Tumblr. Within hours the app climbs to #1 on the App Store and articles hit every major tech media outlet including a premiere on the newly-launched The Verge. The adrenaline is rushing, and I don’t sleep at all that night.

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Today marks 10 years since that night we first released the Paper app. I haven’t written much about Paper, because, honestly, I’m not sure how to. How do you fit a decade-long mission into a tweet thread? Like many creative tensions, I’m often caught between opposing feelings of having nothing to say and also too much to know where to begin.

Origin stories in tech are often about as true as the comic variety—mythologized to create an allure of genius and clean up any of the messy legal bits. In honor of its 10 years, I thought it’d be fun to pull back the curtain and share a few of the details of how Paper came to be.

1. Born from the ashes of a Microsoft project.

While Paper was born in 2012, its roots go back a few years prior when we co-founders first met at Microsoft working on the idea for a new device called Courier. Before the iPad, this was a two-screen digital journal + pen with an entirely new OS and apps designed for a very un-Microsoft customer—creative types. Despite internal excitement for the product, Ballmer shut down Courier in 2010, and if it wasn’t for a leaked prototype video that caused a stir online, things might’ve ended there.

Courier was dead, but we couldn’t quite shake off the mission. As my co-founder Georg would say, “Hope is the last thing to die.” (Apparently in German, it sounds less depressing). At some point we realized that if we wanted this to exist, we’d have to make it ourselves. In that moment, FiftyThree was born.

There was one minor hiccup…

2. None of us had built an app before.

In 2011, things were different. The iPad was nary a year old and the App Store was fresh too. “App” was the word of the year and the tech world buzzed with excitement searching for the next big app. User experience patterns were still up in the air which kicked off a cambrian explosion of experimentation.

None of us had built an app, and I hadn’t even shipped any production software (outside an all-in-one printer). Though we collectively had many years of experience in designing and shipping very sophisticated software, none of us had built and shipped a mobile app. This turned out to be a blessing as it meant we could rethink the most basic assumptions about mobile as the clay was still soft.

3. Designing on principle

In 2011, most startups had dreams of creating the next social media app. There was little excitement (much less funding) for building tools, and the productivity world was still dominated by the same players who had ruled the PC-era of the mid-90s. This software was designed for workflows—file systems, menus, key commands, wizards.

We were aiming for a different kind of “flow”. The kind of freeform thinking you do on a post-it note or whiteboard when the tool disappears and ideas can freely spill out from your head to the page. Through this lens, most of the typical software patterns had to be rethought from core principles that drove the creative process.

This is easier said than done. Many projects begin with principles (ex: easy, simple). But the hard part isn’t coming up with the principles so much as adhering to them or rather becoming subservient to them. But when you do, they can lead you to some very interesting places.

4. No back buttons

Paper had no Back or Close buttons.

We held the belief that early ideation is about always moving forward. This is the “Yes, and…” philosophy that unlocks creati