Supernotes

Supernotes is a thoughtfully crafted note-taking app, with a focus on design, performance, and community. It uses a unique notecard system to help you capture, organize, and share ideas effortlessly - perfect for personal, work, or educational use.

Get to know Supernotes

Supernotes has been lovingly developed and designed by just the two of us over the past six years – me, Tobias, and my co-founder, Connor. Our HQ is in London, UK. I think one of the big reasons for our success is that we do everything in house, from the design, development, marketing and more. We don’t tend to outsource anything unless there’s passionate designers or open source projects that we want to support. That attention to detail and care in building a great product is something that is reflected by our awesome community who’ve supported us with hundreds of 5* reviews, testimonials and genuinely helpful feedback.

Connor and I started building Supernotes because of our struggles trying to share notes and knowledge with each other at university. PDFs, screenshots, word documents – there was no unified quick format to share our notes. If I missed a lecture I’d get a bunch of photos that would be lost in a sea of other messages. So we set out to build a solution.

Instead of relying on traditional files and folders, we broke down everything into notecards that were themselves taggable, nestable and shareable. This gives your knowledge so much more flexibility. If I missed 5 mins of a lecture Connor could just send me a notecard on those first few slides and I could pop it in the relevant place in my notes. This way of piecemeal sharing was one of our standout features from the start.

The notecard format itself is also designed to help you think better. We have a soft-limit of 1200 characters (you can go way over this) to gently nudge you to split up what you’re writing into a new card. By dividing your train of thoughts into separate carriages (mind the pun), or cards, it allows you to link them together in different and more useful ways. This became apparent when we launched Supernotes in 2020 on Product Hunt for the first time – the overwhelming feedback was that we’d not just built a tool for students but a new medium for everyone, for personal, work and education.

Tool Stack of Supernotes

Our tech stack is quite unique, and our release strategy was unconventional. We decided to build for web-first, focusing on sharing and collaboration from the start. This advantage has meant that our syncing and real-time editing has always been a first-party, not tacked on afterwards. We were fed up of apps where syncing was always an afterthought. The local files only model is fantastic if you’re only using one device but quickly breaks down if you’re using multiple at a time.

For this flexibility we chose React as our frontend framework, with FastAPI / Postgres serving our API and backend. And then we use Capacitor and Electron for our mobile and desktop experiences. I think it’s sad that Electron gets such a bad rep, as it’s an amazing framework. It’s incredibly performant if the underlying infrastructure has been well coded and optimised like we’ve done.

Another pain point we were trying to address was inconsistent experiences between devices. Customers on Android were often treated as second party citizens, waiting for features to arrive when they were already live on iOS. Or skinned down mobile experiences where things wouldn’t function as on Desktop. Since all the Supernotes web, mobile, desktop, and now VR apps are all built from the same code – it means we support full feature-parity whichever device you are using – anything you can do on Desktop you can do on Mobile.

We constantly look for improvements and refactor our code to make it more performant and up-to-date. One of the things we struggled with was typography, always wanting different glyphs or using “hacky code” to make things look right. So a year ago we launched our own typeface, SN Pro, and made it open source. I think that’s also why a subscription model is important for small independent software businesses like ours – it means that you can get dependable reliable income that gives you the freedom to build open source projects and give back to the developer community. As well as maintain a consistent service, and performance – continual upkeep of our API and all our apps isn’t a trivial task.

Personal Stack

Like many, I also use Supernotes for my personal notes. My daily journal, restaurant recommendations, recipe ideas, cool code snippets, reflections on calls and so much more. I’ve also been testing our a fantastic new calendar app called Daybridge that’s in closed alpha at the moment – it’s been in development for almost 4 years now and I’ve got to say it’s mindblowing – they’ve built their own standalone calendar system that doesn’t need Google / Outlook etc. to work. Layers is where I share my designs, again developed by an indie developer and it’s a great place to switch to after the recent Dribbble changes.

I also use Raycast with our Supernotes extension’s quick daily command to append ideas to my daily notecard. Their built in emoji picker / quicklinks / clipboard history are super useful as well. And then finally Spotify, I listen to wayyy too much Spotify.