The Future of Note: A Visionary's Perspective

As I look ahead to the future, I am filled with excitement and anticipation. As the founder of Note, I have been on a journey of growth and innovation, and I am proud to say that we are making waves in the education industry. At our core, we are driven by a desire to disrupt the status quo and challenge the values that have held us back for too long.

One of the biggest lessons I've learned throughout my journey is that if you build a really good product, people will come. This is not just a cliché, but a hard truth that has been proven time and time again. We've worked hard to create a platform that is easy to use, effective, and intuitive, and as a result, we've attracted a loyal following of students and educators who are eager to see what we have to offer.

But I don't just want us to be another successful company in the education space. I want us to be a disruptor, to challenge the traditional ways of doing things and create new possibilities for students and teachers alike. This is why we're committed to staying ahead of the curve when it comes to technology and innovation. We're constantly looking for new ways to improve our platform, to add new features and functionality that will make a real difference in people's lives.

Education is an area that I believe is ripe for disruption. For too long, students have been forced to rely on outdated textbooks and dusty old resources that fail to engage them or provide them with the tools they need to succeed. We're changing all of that with our innovative approach to learning, which combines cutting-edge technology with a focus on personalized education.

Our goal is to create an all-in-one learning tool that will serve both students and teachers. We've already launched a range of products for teachers at the end of 2020, and we're excited to build on this success in the coming years. Our vision is for a platform that allows teachers to deliver high-quality content to their students, and provide them with the tools they need to track student progress and adjust their instruction accordingly.

One of the biggest challenges we face is how to balance our desire to innovate with our commitment to affordability. We don't want to price ourselves out of reach for students and educators who are already struggling to make ends meet. That's why we're committed to being smart about pricing, and focusing on creating value that will benefit both our customers and our business.

So what sets us apart from our competitors? For one thing, we're not afraid to take risks and challenge the status quo. We're constantly looking for ways to improve our platform, even if it means spending more time and resources upfront. This approach has allowed us to create something truly innovative, rather than simply building on top of what's already been done.

Another key difference is our focus on community. We believe that education should be a collaborative effort, between students, teachers, and parents working together to support one another. Our platform reflects this values, with features like discussion forums and peer-to-peer learning opportunities that encourage collaboration and connection.

Finally, we're committed to transparency and openness. We don't believe in hiding behind jargon or technical buzzwords - instead, we want to make sure that everyone understands how our technology works, and what benefits it can bring to students and educators.

As I look to the future, I am excited about the possibilities that lie ahead for Note. We're just getting started, and I have no doubt that we will continue to challenge the status quo and create new possibilities for education. If you're listening, I invite you to join us on this journey - check out our platform and see what we have to offer.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the AI Minds podcast is a podcast where we explore the companies of Tomorrow built AI first I am your host as always Dimitri o and this episode is brought to you by Deep grham the number one text to speech and speech to text API on the internet trusted by the world's top conversational AI leaders startups and Enterprises like Spotify twio NASA and City bank today we're joined by none other than abek the co-founder and CEO of note what's going on dude how you doing doing well doing well how are you yeah well I'm excited to talk to you because of the explosive growth that note has seen I want to get all into your story I know you decided to start not in high school can you walk me through the Inception of the tool and being at such a young age like deciding to go on the entrepreneurial path yeah definitely uh I have always kind of been obsessed with tech um I stood in line for the first iPhone I dragged my parents to it um even though it wasn't for myself like I wasn't buying it it definitely wasn't getting it um I I always love Tech it's kind of where I've been at um but the start of no is actually one that's pretty crazy and it's like a long journey um I actually uh had taken my computer science class requirements like well not requirement but like it was it was something I wanted to do I taken a little bit earlier so i' had taken it in my sophomore year so I had been really sort of close friends with the computer science teacher um I would stop by his class uh pretty often here and there cuz I just love talking about all that stuff um and so in senior year I actually ended up in this class um because I was trying to start uh sort of a startup that would uh take pictures of like multiple choice like Scantron test I'm not sure if like anybody remembers but they would like fill out the bubbles and so grade the the test with your phone rather than buying like an expensive machine um so I had had that idea and I found somebody in that computer science class his name was Dan uh really really smart um and our computer science teacher said hey maybe you guys should work together and so we started working on um this grading app uh we found a few friends uh that wanted to help us and we got a team together we'd meet you know at the library um and that's sort of the first kind of thing that we did um it never got off the ground we never built it cuz Dan was working on a different app um which at the time was also still called new uh it was basically a text box on an Android app um that would turn your text into like these multiple choice questions um at that time I was a horrible studier like I could not study for the life of me like I spent a lot of my time creating these like handcrafted notes I'd share them with my friends but at the end of the day I would do so bad on all of the different tests um it had gotten to a point where like being in a sort of Indian family like my dad was sending me a bunch of articles about how to study better he'd be like hey um you know you should do a bunch of these practice questions that's the only way you could do better um and so I was kind of adjusting my studying strategy but I wasn't really uh I was kind of just going at it and then I saw this and I was like wait I mean this works really well if I could just type in my notes or just take a picture of my notes and it creates questions for me um that's insane right and at this time this is we're talking 2016 for context like there's no chat GPT where like like seven years away or like what six years away from that um so this was basically like magic to me and when I saw that I knew that you know every student had this um this could be really helpful uh because a lot of students spend a lot of time creating notes creating flash cards but they're not interacting with material yeah um and so that's really where it got started um you're scratching your own itch in a way yeah exactly and was that first iteration of the not that you planned on doing where you would take pictures of a test and then it would automatically grade it there had to be some kind of photo recognition software or potentially machine learning back in those days so I'm wondering how a few high schoolers were diving into some object detection or machine learning in 2016 yeah I mean luckily there's a lot of apis that people had created so I think Google had come out with some OCR at that time like it was it was brand new so they had come out with OCR at that time and we were trying to use that though it was a little bit uh more challenging for the grading one honestly we didn't really dive into it too much there uh but where we were using it for not it was a much easier sort of application of the API so luckily that was that part was handled uh but Dan had built like the original models to take that whatever you scanned and uh make it into questions so yeah for him to be a junior and uh create those models I thought was absolutely insane um and we pretty much hit it off and I think uh from there I kind of just took kind of control of making the IOS app but yeah he sort of made these models on his own and yeah like we're saying six years before chat TT absolutely crazy well it just hits home that idea of how something or a product can be very very cool and technically deep but if it's not really solving a pain point for users it doesn't make that much of a difference does it no no I think uh yeah at that time it was just something I guess he was kind of having in his own like it it was a it was basically a project at that time and it wasn't really being applied um and even um the API right it was is out there for anybody to kind of use but you know depends on how you use it um so we were able to find like legs for that pretty quickly and then get it into the IOS app and sort of get the ball moving and yeah I mean when when we first showed it to everybody it was like you know pretty amazing for them to see you know getting a test instantly created from whatever they were putting in um so that you know wow factor was I think enough of a motivator to be like hey I think we have something uh special here but obviously you know our journey was much longer than we anticipated since 2016 and so you didn't like studying did having this app and this new companion help you with the studying could you write your dad back and say I got it all covered now stop sending me these articles yeah so unfortunately like by the time we launched it I had graduated from high school so I wasn't able to use in high school but I started at Ruckers that year um and I did start using it for like my econ classes um and I for the first time ever actually did better in school um and and I don't know if it was just the app because at the time it was like pretty like early on but maybe it was just being involved in like learning better and and finding a way to help other people that was just kind of motivating me to also study better and find those tips but yeah it it changed the game for me U at that time much better in college than High School and so you had a bit more of a journey with Dan and him splitting off you wanted to continue using it you had amassed a bit of a user base right but nothing like it is today so can you explain how that transpired yeah yeah so throughout College we were sort of working on it it was more on and off because I mean going into college for your first time and kind of um you know you have a bunch of different is you have a bunch of free time so it was it was you I was able to work on it a lot more um and Dan was actually 2 years younger um I mean it still is two years younger um and he's still working on uh he was still working on it with me at that time but we had like maybe what 1,000 2,000 3,000 people using it it was nothing really spectacular um we were still motivated uh but it was more so just like kind of like a project at that time um it wasn't until like after college um that I kind of realized I didn't really enjoy kind of working in a corporate world like I wanted to create my own thing and I J you got a job oh I did get a so I did an internship at Intel uh my junior year or sophomore year summer um and I yeah that was enough like I I like Intel I love in know hate against Intel it was great it was a great experience but I realized at that time that if I wanted to be happy and uh like for me it was about building new things and ENT and and seeing how people reacted with it like that was like I was 100% sure about that and that's really where the drive kind of took into to say like hey I don't want this to just be like a project I want this to be a company um and so that's really where things started to pick up in a sort of company format in senior year I was talking to uh investors uh in my dorm um trying to raise some money to get this off the ground because at this time we were sort of bootstrapping we managed to get a check of $25,000 from like a a Turkish investor by the name of starters Hub um and they kind of got us the motivation like building this into a business and they gave us a little bit of tips and tricks there um and then by uh 2019 we registered as a company um so this is a junior year of my college uh 2020 I graduated then the world changed with Co and actually it was a pretty big uh thing for us because education now moved completely online right so um once that happened everybody was looking for a tool uh uh to use this in the classroom um and we had this Ai and at that time like I said there there's nobody applying AI in this way that we're applying it so teachers were messaging us hey can you build something where I can put in um my Powerpoints and you know you know get a get a quiz to give to my students right so there quests that sorted piling in we were starting to get movement but honestly you know for us it didn't really change too much we got up to 18,000 people which at that time was a huge mountain like we go go from 2,000 to about 18,000 because of covid um but yeah up until 2022 basically that's about the movement we've seen um and then now I mean we're talking about a whole different League uh from 2022 to now uh mid 2024 uh we went from 18,000 to 1.8 million uh users so it's uh yeah we're operating in a different sort of Realm uh but it's it's been great and yeah Dan you know had you know another job opportunity that he left for um went to no he didn't go to inel uh I think he went to I catch fun Citadel I think in around 2021 or maybe early 2022 um so he left right before this you know went kind of bananas for us yeah um so yeah what was the Catalyst that yeah um made it shwed up like that because I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that are thinking I would love to have 18,000 people using my tool and that when you're at 18,000 it's like yeah this is not a little there's a lot of people if you get 18,000 people into a building that fills it up and so it's got to be a big building but there was obviously something that you did that made it just go vertical what was it yeah for us um so at this time we I had found a new sort of co-founder Abby um he's our CTO right now so he he had been working with us throughout Ruckers as well um but we had sort of this idea of like hey uh people love going uh from notes to practice questions um but what if we could go from notes to flashcards so we had been speaking to these 18,000 people and like you said 18,000 is like now a small amount but at that time for us like it was so precious right we were we were talking to them and we were like you know what can we do better like how can we get this to more people like um and so they were telling us hey I use flash cards all the time I use sites like Quizlet I use Anki brainscape like I use flashcards so can you apply this AI to flash cards and that's exactly kind of what we did um but on top of that and this was sort of the The crucial Point um at this time like I said AI is not really a huge thing so not everybody's like on board with the idea of AI it it's it's also not like performing that great so like you're putting in text and it's creating flash cards but they're not like high quality flash cards that people are probably used to seeing now at this point um so there was definitely improvements needed in technology um and so at that time we decided to add a feature where you could just create flash cards separately um and then one of our biggest competitors sort of started charging for their platform um uh it was Quizlet um and and then we said okay well we don't need to charge for this I mean there's there's no reason that this feature should be paid um and we started offering it for free um and I guess from a tech side from a product side that was the spark um but I mean the main sort of uh I think unique factor that we have in not is definitely our marketing capabilities we were able to connect with the audience extremely well and and it's it's it's most likely because we were students right like we were students building a product for students it was not something that we had to guess like hey what do other students like what do other students not like we we knew right what do they do in their free time where do they go all that stuff yeah exactly so actually one of our friends one of my friends from high school uh so actually my c one of my cousin's friends from high school uh uh Ramia she's our CMO now uh she joined our team around then um and she has her own sort of food blog if you guys may know it's it's called eats by Romeo so she has like I think now she has over close to half a million followers across her Instagram and Tik Tok on her sort of food account so she had been doing this for a little bit up until then and we said hey Ramia you know we want to kind of show the world about note um and we started working uh together and at that time so like I said August up until August of 2022 for context we had 18,000 people in September we put out a Tik Tok um that got 6 million views didn't pay for this um it it just went out I was at a wedding at the time and I was literally seeing our phone blow up um and then at the end of September like fast forward to the end of September we had 100,000 people using the site right so from 18,000 to 100,000 we're talking about uh an absolute uh immense jump for us um and it was getting to a point where you know a month later uh in October we were at 200,000 and then I was like okay um like I'm getting emails like basically every two hours like hey there's this issue there's this issue can you fix this how do I do this and I was like like my job had become basically replying to like emails yeah support um so that growth was was really good and yeah I mean marketing has been our huge sort of uh what was it just sending Tik toks and just for context or by the way I've seen you all pop up on my feed and I got so stoked when I did because knew you were in the startup program and I was so excited it was like wow look at that you all are killing it like my random feed I have no reason to be seeing this but I am and so I just remember it was almost like a how-to video or it wasn't a howto video there was a great hook to it and I remember it was like oh yeah I could see why this would blow up but what were the things that you specifically did to make sure that it had that virality and was it only through viral growth is that really what it was yeah I mean so far like just to give you know a precedent um we had spent so we have spent over like close to very under $220,000 in about the last one and a half years to get to 1.8 million users right for most companies that's their monthly budget like that's what they're spending monthly um and they're not seeing yeah even if you if you add up all the cost of personnel too it's way more yeah yeah at that time we were just bootstrapping it we were putting out the Tik toks we we we kind of had this I I would say obsessive nature to Tik Tok like it was like we were looking at the numbers and we were like okay this Hook is losing people this Hook is losing people and we obsessed over like the first 3 seconds cuz that's usually what most of the audience is watching um but at that time for us we we kind of learned a few tips and tricks about like hey it's not always about sort of shoving your product down people's throats like that's not what every big company does they they build a brand so they they promote other things in that ecosystem that that people in that audience would like and then eventually you sort of you know get more of a bigger audience so I think right now on Tik Tok we're sitting at little shy of 200,000 followers and Instagram I think a little bit shy of 100,000 and and what's crazy is if you look at the big brands in this space they're around the same number and they spent probably 100 to 200 300 times maybe more um but yeah for us it was obsessing over the hooks um and it was building relatable content so even if you go on uh our Tik Tok right now you're going to see some absolutely crazy things like we just had a post about uh the Olympics and there was like a bunch of like um crazy things that led up to the Olympics like there was this uh Scandal about like pooping like people pooping in the SE the sen river river yeah yeah so we are we've become sort of this like I wouldn't say like news news agency or like news delivery method but like we started connecting with the audience in such a proper way at this point where people are following us not just because we're a study account it's because you know we resonate really well with that audience so yeah now you know that's kind of the brand we've built and I mean it's all props to Ramia and her team and what she's been able to accomplish with such little sort of uh like sourcing of money there um but yeah we we that's definitely a sort of our troan horse in growing at this large and so after you raised that initial 25k check from the Turkish fund you didn't go out and raise more once you saw you're growing like crazy you need to scale I imagine server costs are starting to rack everything is is kind of racking up yeah yeah so what basically kind of allowed us to do this transition in the first place was uh a check from mocker Capital so we got it around I think end of 2021 like tail end of 2021 we're talking 2022 until like the money hit um and that's what allowed us to kind of make this transition we still were it was like 10 what maybe 25k or 150k um so it wasn't like a crazy amount like it's like if you wanted to pay yourself that like you basically had no money so we weren't taking any money out of it um so it just got us to sort of that transition but what was great was marcker this kind of everybody hears about YC but I think mucker is like one of the most underrated funds cuz YC kind of works with you for about like two to three months and then they kind of send you off to defend for yourself but mucker has worked with me up until um we raised like our seed round this this year which was about or sorry last year which was about like 2 million um but that like they worked with me up until then um and so for them for the most part um that was you know kind of the the Catalyst for that transition um and then like I said we we had the next round of funding but you know we never had an excessive amount of funds like the the whole basis of the company is about saving money and doing things scalably like even now we don't spend a lot you know every month um but that that's kind of what allowed us to get there and I have an interesting sort of story that I'm sure a lot of other Founders can relate to but hopefully they can't um but in the end of 2022 that as you can imagine that 125 Grand kind of went dry cuz our server costs were insane like our aw us bill in October was like $30,000 right and at that point you know if you get a bill of $330,000 you're lasting four months right and we had already spent a lot of money by then too um so at that point I had about I'd say close to 130,000 saved up you know from working you know um and I started paying the bills uh out of pocket uh for the next say 6 s months I lived at home and I paid those bills for six or seven months um until we could get our next round of funding um because nobody and the market had gone to Absolute uh at that point 2022 yeah of course nobody wanted to fund anything it was the and it was crazy CU I I remember I was like we got 200,000 people in two months like I'm sure somebody's going to want a piece of this right and soon we were at 500,000 soon we were at 600,000 700,000 and nobody was willing to write a check um so yeah I just kept uh like using the money that I had saved up and taking that Gamble and then uh luckily it has sort of paid off in in one sense and we'll see if it pays off later but yeah at that time super tough uh you know wouldn't recommend to anybody at that point but uh we've had a a crazy Journey i' say in the last two one and a half years because of that and so as you look ahead in the future what are you thinking about for note how is it going to evolve or or or continue to do what you're doing best are you going to do what your competitor did and just start charging for the product now and then create a competitor that will C crop up yeah yeah I think um for me the biggest thing I've learned throughout this journey so far and I know I have such a long journey ahead but the biggest thing I've learned is that if you build a really good product eventually people will come um obviously they won't come by themselves you need good marketing you need you know the good things but at this point note has those pieces and I I can like sort of go off and sort of lean on that and for us we want to continue to build a great product and I think education is one of those places that's sort of ripe for disruption cuz I think a lot of people don't put much money into it now now people are putting more money into it because of the sort of um forthcoming of AI like an AI has become like a big thing now um but people weren't really investing in it before so my dream for no for the last you know 3 four years has been making or being sort of a disruptor in the space right I want to continue to disrupt every single company that's ever been in the space um and continue to sort of challenge the values that they've kind of put in because if you look at some of our competitors they've stayed the same since I was in Middle School like they they look the same they work the same maybe they have a little more bells and whistles here and there but they're not really changing a lot of things so for no my vision is to make this sort of the all-in-one learning tool um for students uh and now for teachers um so we we just launched something for teachers at the end of uh 2020 uh four like the the school year um and now we want to make this sort of that all in one tool where not only are the students who are studying here but the teachers can come where students are studying and deliver content to them that they feel is necessary um and build off of what their students are already doing um so I think there's a huge sort of potential there um and as for charging I think we're going to be a lot more smart uh about that uh I think for us we have understood where there's sort of a willingness to pay and where there isn't um and for us it's about I I feel like when you're in that position where you can say that you're you want to disrupt businesses you're never going to be sort of like sitting back and charging for things that you've already built because that's what these comp competitors do right they they sort of charge for the features that have been there for the last 10 years and then that upsets people because they're like hey this was free like three years ago yeah I I mean I I used this like two weeks ago and and now you're charging me for it it's so that part I think is what upsets people people and for us I don't think that will be a problem because we don't like to sit still we like to make new things even if it comes at the expense of what we've built and I think that's one of our biggest strengths like that we've built into the the culture is like it doesn't matter if we spent two years building something if we can recreate something in the next 3 months that will be better than that we will do it like we don't care like uh for us that's like the biggest thing so that's kind of the vision um that's our understanding so um if a new company does come uh I think we will want to instruct them too so I I think that's that's ingrained in our DNA so it's a it's a big part of us Well I this has been a pleasure talking to you man I'm so excited for your success and I wish you continued growth success for anybody out there that is listening that is note KN n WT and I encourage everyone to check it out it's been fascinating hearing your story and hear the drive and determination behind it yeah no it's been a pleasure talking to you uh this is actually my second podcast I only did a podcast in college I don't it was just with another student too so this is like first official one so it's it's great to kind of have that honor uh here and uh um yeah I'm looking forward to everybody listening to our story because we don't really go out on social media and share too much about it so um thank you for for having me and and for the wonderful questions I don't know how I feel about being called official but I'll take it we'll end it there\n"