An Interview with Gabriel Jourdan from GoodNotes.

Introduction 

Whether you are an architect, legal advisor, executive manager, translator, movie editor, or even a basketball coach, note-taking is an inevitable part of your everyday work life.

Since we are in the business of digital content strategies and marketing automation, we deal with massive amounts of content. To manage the data and information right, we shifted from working with traditional notebooks to using GoodNotes. We mainly use it for brainstorming ideas on documents, plan our content strategies, marketing automation ideas and obviously, note-taking.

In this blog, we wanted to share some tips and tricks for our clients and followers.

We thank GoodNotes for taking part in this blog. 

An Interview with Gabriel Jourdan from GoodNotes.

Question: Gabriel, thank you for taking part in this interview for our blog on note-taking. We thought it would be a good idea to share some of the insights and knowledge straight from the people at GoodNotes.

Being responsible for growth and marketing at GoodNotes, we are curious to know how the idea of developing a Notes Application came up? It’s not that notes applications didn’t exist before.

Answer: The first version of GoodNotes was developed in 2011 by our founder when he was still studying Math at an Australian university. He wasn’t happy with the existing solutions because the digital ink never felt right to him. His background in Math helped him to develop the ink algorithm that powers GoodNotes since then.

Question: How could GoodNotes help our customers? Our customers range from international business people, trainers, manufacturers/exporters, and marketers dealing with plenty of content?

Answer: GoodNotes replaces pen and paper with a much better digital version of it. Everyone who wants or needs to use pen and paper in their work may be for jotting down thoughts and ideas, taking notes in a client meeting, annotating documents or marking up photos, and finding a fast and uncomplicated solution in GoodNotes. Since we’re living in a digital era, using a digital replacement of paper products, cuts out annoying and repetitive steps of traditional paper products used in anybody’s workflow. Scanning, printing, copying, rewriting notes, or, worst of all, faxing – all of these can be avoided by only starting with a digital solution from the very beginning.

Question: What are the top three advantages when we compare GoodNotes with traditional note-taking?

Answer:

1. As I mentioned before, all the downsides of traditional paper products are avoided. Thus, time and effort are saved.

2. It is way more flexible. During a presentation, you could just open the iPad camera to take a photo of an interesting slide that you want to add to your notes, and you can annotate it right away.

3. It is way more organized. Everything is in one place, and notes can be searched.

Question: Who are the top users of GoodNotes?

Answer: Lots of our users are university students or have a business background. Because of our app’s versatility and simplicity, the user groups are so diverse, and we continuously discover new exciting use cases by talking to our users. They go way beyond traditional note-taking in classes or meetings: Digital bullet journaling and planning, running tabletop role-play games, or as a template for cross-stitching.

Question: Do you have any vision of how note-taking will evolve in the future?

Answer: The input with a pen or pen-shaped tool to any surface is the most precise and direct way of expressing what’s going on in someone’s mind. We believe that it will still take a long time before this way of note-taking will ever be replaced. The future will enable people to do more with their handwritten notes.

If there were only one feature we would want to improve in digital note-taking, it would be the paper’s feeling when we lay our hand and pen over it. Do you believe this feature could be reached someday?

Answer: There are already solutions for it available like e-ink tablets or special display protectors, but the most essential part of the experience is digital ink. It needs to be as direct and frictionless as on real paper. Providing the necessary hardware solutions is only the next step.

Please share with us a few of your best tips on note-taking.

Answer: 1. Always take notes even if you think you won’t need them later.

2. Use an appropriate note-taking system for the situation like Cornell notes or the outline method.

3. Consider taking notes long hand over typing your notes. It helps you to digest and remember things better because you’re forced to use your own words instead of blindly copying everything you said. There is a great paper on that by researchers from Princeton University.

4. Last but not least: Use GoodNotes and read the GoodNotes Blog for tips on better note-taking 🙂

For more information, visit us at https://threeedots.com, or email us at marketing@threeedots.com