Inspired by the way academics such as Michael Nielsen augment their memory, I took up the process of using Anki to store and review the large amounts of knowledge I encounter throughout my life by using a distributed practice system. I did this for academics at university and personal learning goals.

However, I noticed a problem. The behaviour/time trade-off, I like to call it. In order to be efficient in storing my knowledge for future review, I focused on taking note directly into Anki. It was difficult doing this because it required a behavioural change in class. I had to consider the best way to write in question-answer format while understanding the material. On the other hand, if I decided to best try to understand the material and write hierarchical bullet points, it took time for me to translate these notes into flashcards after the class.

So, I came up with the idea of Memoir. Memoir allows you to write notes, and immediately convert them into flashcards at the press of a button. In essence, it is a power tool for creating flashcards fast, removing the behavioural change and decreasing the time it takes to make your notes easily reviewable. Memoir also exports written notes to apps like Anki, SuperMemo, and Quizlet, a feature we implemented after receiving feedback that users wanted to use our app alongside their former platforms of choice.

Myself and 2 classmates (Alexander Wu and Ba Thien Tran) coded Memoir ourselves using ReactJS, MongoDB, and host it on AWS. We applied to Y Combinator and made it to final interview, being turned down due to the difficulties with the size of the university student market (and student willingness to pay for education products).

Thereafter, we released our working version on Product Hunt and received 80+ upvotes, 5/5 star reviews and 100+ users within that day. See here.