I believe good old-fashioned note-taking is still one of the best ways to build a personal knowledge database. Many of us prefer using online note taking applications for research, bookmarking sites, or quickly jotting down ideas. There are many online
note taking applications, but the most recent one I came across was Classmint.
Classmint is engaged in building tools that help explore knowledge differently. Classmint is an interactive study notes tool. It lets anyone create annotable, audible, beautiful notes that can be folded like a paper. It also maintains automated revision list to aid in revision. Students/Teachers can keep their notes private or publish them.
Out of curiosity, I reached out to the person behind this product and I was happy to get a chance to interview Rajan Chandi, Co-founder at Classmint. Here is a transcript of the interview.
Please note that the interview has not been edited.
How did you get the idea for creating Classmint?
There are two stages of this idea.
This dates back to my college days. I was spending a lot of time on building actual software projects, mostly for fun and contests. Our books were thick and hard to understand in short time. My solution to the problem was buying out study notes from the smartest senior. It worked pretty well and i was able to score distinction throughout my engineering.
Recently, I built and launched Qlazzy.com, an aggregation of all open educational resources. Qlazzy had many features like Lessons, Questions, Study Notes, Subjects, etc. We were tracking the data and realized that most users are well engaged with Study Notes. This was great recall to my personal experience and positive history with study notes. So, me and my co-founder Amar Prabhu built out the product.
What motivated you to create it?
I had personal connection to the study notes format. Secondly, we found that our users already like the notes. So, we decided to build study notes with an edge.
The thing about technology is that it enhances a natural human ability. For example, a car enhances the natural human ability to relocate. We are set out to enhance the natural human ability to learn.
All our tools like text annotations, image annotations, notes player can multiply people’s interest and inherent ability to learn. We think we can have a very positive long-term impact on humanity and we could build a sustainable business in the process.
Building a software product is like a fun thing for me and my co-founder.
So, we didn’t need a lot of motivation to build that.
In your premium version you have mentioned about games. What are your plans for that?
We are not there yet, but yes, we will launch them. The format of notes, will allow for some of the games. We can’t disclose actual concepts about it at this point. It is going to take around a year for us to get there.
Do you have plans to associate with any colleges or other educational institutes or do you want to keep it open?
We want to keep it open at this point. In future, we will make our tools available to colleges, institutes and e-learning providers. Like, within 6 months.
What are your future plans for it?
We want to see our notes about everything, everywhere.
For example, I am studying a bit of psychology these days and putting together notes here:
http://beta.classmint.com/subject/view/Psychology
We want a lot of people to benefit from the technology we are building. We now have more than 3000 monthly active users, and we aim to reach around 100k monthly active learners within the next 6 months.
Our content independent tools like text and image annotations are already demanded by our early user community. They want them to be integrated into their websites and blogs.
We feel we can also add a lot of value to online content creators, blogs and e-learning websites.
