Meet GoodNotes founder, who turned dorm-room passion into top download on Hong Kong’s app store
- Steven Chan spent hours developing GoodNotes while juggling lectures and exams during his varsity days
- GoodNotes received US$6 million seed funding in 2020 from Race Capital to develop an expanded app version into a note-sharing platform
The eureka moment that put Steven Chan on his path to entrepreneurship occurred 12 years ago while he was scrawling mathematical equations on loose-leaf paper notebooks at the University of Queensland. Apple’s iPad, freshly launched in 2010, just did not match the feel of putting pen to paper.
Frustrated, Chan - who was pursuing a degree in mathematics - decided to build his own application from scratch. Having learned coding since 10, Chan toiled through his sleeping hours to create what he hoped would be the best application for recognising hand-written characters, scribbles and even mathematical equations.
“I had this belief that bringing pen and paper to the digital world [was] something that will be fundamental,” Chan said in an interview with the South China Morning Post, adding that he bought stacks of Moleskine notebooks to feed his obsession to mimic the colour of the pages in his app.
The result is GoodNotes, a free-to-download app used every month by more than 15 million active customers, who each pay a one-time US$7.99 charge to unlock all its annotation, handwriting recognition and organisational features. It’s the top-grossing productivity app in US, Hong Kong and mainland China, according to SimilarWeb, an online traffic monitoring service.
Now London-based, GoodNotes employs more than 100 globally, with 40 working in an open-planned office in Tsim Sha Tsui district. The staff get daily catered meals and free Uber rides, an improvement from Chan’s dormitory.