Featured Startup Pitch: NimbleNotes – Applying technology to make studying more efficient

COMPANY: NimbleNotes

ELEVATOR PITCH

The digital notebook that helps you study.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

NimbleNotes is an online note-taking and study platform, designed to help students learn more efficiently. Our digital notebook improves the learning workflow with unrivaled search and filter capabilities, instantly generated flashcard decks, and study session analytics.

Every student wants neat, organized notes that make it easy to find the key information for each subject, and lots of quality study materials to prepare for exams. Unfortunately, creating these can be so time-consuming and tedious that many students resort to ineffective learning methods, like simply re-reading notes or textbooks. Those that do tough it out end up wasting a bunch of time finding and copying information from their notes into physical or digital flashcards and study guides. NimbleNotes removes the hassle from this process, bridging the gap between note-taking and studying, and allowing students to focus on what’s important: Learning the course material.

NimbleNotes features three key elements to improve a student’s learning workflow:

1. Our note editor uses a data-driven approach to organizing your notes, providing customizable templates that group related information for faster note-taking and consistent styling. We support multimedia notes, like images and videos, as well as content-specific notes, like LaTeX and code syntax (available soon).
2. The note filter helps you locate the exact information you need, anytime you need it. It also powers our unique study material generator which can instantly create entire decks of flashcards from your notes.
3. You can review these study materials in our built-in study tool which provides detailed reports and stat tracking for an optimized learning experience. Support for practice exams and additional study modes are coming soon.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

Our existing competitors fall into two distinct categories of software.

1) Note-taking:
– Evernote, Google Docs, OneNote

2) Studying:
– Quizlet, Anki, StudyBlue

How is NimbleNotes different from other note-taking apps, like Evernote, Google Docs, and OneNote?

Current notetaking apps take a style-driven approach where they provide a set of tools for you to manually ‘structure’ your information by applying different styles to text, images, and sometimes video. The smallest piece of notes recognized by these tools is a page. NimbleNotes takes a data-driven approach instead, breaking notes into much smaller pieces (‘components’) based on the type of data they contain (e.g., text, number, date, image, video, etc.), and providing style and structure for information as it’s entered. These components can be used to group related data in templates (e.g., questions and definitions), which can be added to any notebook for faster note taking that doesn’t compromise on neatness or organization. This data-driven approach lets students focus on keeping up with the lecture, and it also plays a vital role in the powerful search and instant flashcard generation in NimbleNotes.

How is NimbleNotes different from other study apps, like Quizlet, Anki, or StudyBlue?

All other study apps require students to locate information from the notes they’ve taken and copy it into the app, essentially doubling the amount of work–or more, depending on how hard the information is to find. NimbleNotes can instantly generate hundreds (!) of flashcards from your notes with one click. Creating targeted study sets is trivial with our advanced notebook filtering system. We also offer study session analytics that help identify strengths and weaknesses, to optimize your learning patterns. Instant practice exams and study guides are on the way, as well as lots of other study modes.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

I guess it’s no surprise that three guys hoping to improve the learning process all met at school. Tim and Kahmali have been close friends since the seventh grade at Boston Latin School. Anthony and Kahmali met in their freshman year at the University of Massachusetts, where they also spent multiple years tutoring Computer Science and Math to hundreds of college students. They’ve spent an unthinkable number of hours studying and learning together. It didn’t take long for Kahmali to see the benefit of bringing this team together. The three of them have worked together for years–at another SaaS startup, on many side projects, and now on NimbleNotes.

Check out their individual bios below.

Kahmali Rose, CEO: Kahmali is the heart and soul of NimbleNotes, keeping the project on track and the team motivated. Acting as both a programmer and project manager, he contributes to every feature, reviews every bug report, and continuously engages with the community. He’s technically still a Computer Science and Math undergrad at UMass Boston. You can contact him directly at kahmali@nimblenotes.com.

Timothy Hicks, Chief Design Officer: Tim makes up the eyes, ears and right hand of the NimbleNotes team. Equipped with a strong sense of design, a background in the arts, and years of user experience training, he keeps NimbleNotes looking and feeling perfect for every user. Tim studied Industrial Design at MassArt. You can connect with him directly attim@nimblenotes.com.

Anthony Reid, CTO: Anthony is the brain of NimbleNotes, tackling our most advanced technical challenges with ease. Although he’d never admit it, he’s the wizard responsible for all the magic of NimbleNotes. He recently graduated from UMass Boston with a degree in Alchemy…sorry, Computer Science. You can reach him directly at anthony@nimblenotes.com.

BUSINESS MODEL

Starting from free forever.

HEADQUARTERS: Boston

WEBSITE: nimblenotes.com

YEAR FOUNDED: 2014

TWITTER: @NimbleNotesApp

FACEBOOK: facebook.com/NimbleNotes