tl;dr: I’m joining Delphi to build something new. Supernotes continues to be independent & timeless.

Back in 2018, my co-founder Tobias and I dreamt of building a better way for students to take notes and learn together. We kept getting lost in long-form documents, uninspiring interfaces, and a struggle to collaborate together.

Over seven years, we built Supernotes – a fast, robust, and timeless notes app designed with the future in mind. Instead of long documents, we pioneered a short-form notecard format, perfect for reading, memorizing, and sharing ideas. We pushed the boundaries of what defines a notes app with our unique organizational format, mainstream VR support, and novel location tagging for all your cards.

The question we’ve been trying to answer this year is: what’s next?

Do we go further and build an “everything app” that risks diluting the quality of Supernotes? Or do we keep Supernotes sharp and take what we’ve learned to create something new with AI?

I’m excited to announce we are indeed building something new, but this time we’re not building alone. Tobias and I are joining Delphi to help shape the AI digital mind of tomorrow, while keeping Supernotes independent and unchanged, in line with our commitment to establishing a long-lasting, sustainable product.

Today, we all want something different

When we started Supernotes, the goal was to build a great notes app, as that is what we (and many people around us) were looking for. Somewhere along the way though, needs and expectations changed. The world shifted from “give me a great tool for taking notes” to “give me an everything-app that reads my mind, answers my questions, and manages my life.” We felt that pressure up close. Should Supernotes handle files? Calendars? Tasks? Email? The gravitational pull toward “everything” is strong, and this pull has been infinitely compounded by the onset of LLMs and Generative AI.

We’ve debated taking those paths many times, because we know that every time we bolt on another feature, the tool risks losing its sharpness. Chasing the everything app dilutes the exact quality that makes Supernotes feel great: intentionality. That’s why, over and over again, we’ve chosen to innovate within notes rather than stapling on another generic module and turning Supernotes into a kitchen sink.

Could we raise VC investment to compete with giants that roll a plethora of products into one? Perhaps. But scaling a feature checklist isn’t the same as building a great tool.

We’ve watched all-in-one suites and AI writing assistants hoover up adjacent features and make acquisitions to expand their footprint. Competing head-to-head in that game as a small, sustainable team would mean raising money and committing to a growth story we don’t believe in for Supernotes.

AI in existing interfaces

Since the release of GPT-3, our Community has been asking for more AI in Supernotes. This is not surprising: GenAI is incredibly exciting and one of the biggest paradigm shifts in software for a generation. So like everyone else, we experimented. We built many AI prototypes, tried a wave of AI-enhanced notetakers, and kept bumping into the same feeling – these tools automate existing habits rather than help you build better ones. They make you passive. They skip the part where thinking happens.

If we retrofitted Supernotes to follow that trend, we’d risk flattening the deliberate experience that our community has come to love. The end result (for us) was excitement about AI combined with a reluctance to add too much of it to Supernotes. We traded notes with other teams wrestling with the same trade-offs, and those conversations sharpened a conviction we now hold firmly: an AI-first tool deserves a fresh perspective and a daring new interface, not a patch stitched onto a much-loved notes app.

What’s Delphi?

While we were exploring our thoughts on AI, by coincidence a company doing exactly that reached out. An email from Dara at Delphi landed in our inbox. Delphi is innovating thoughtful ai-powered presences for real people, with early adopters ranging from Tiago Forte to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Their team had been following our work for a while, and asked us a simple question.

“Would you like to join us?”

We were intrigued, so in July we flew out to spend time at their office in San Francisco, and something clicked. Their vision, “build your digital mind,” aligned with our own curiosity about how people can interact with knowledge, reflect, and learn. But unlike the manual ethos behind Supernotes’, Delphi is AI-first by design. It isn’t just another chat box; their prototypes ask questions, nudge deeper understanding, and push beyond the limits of today’s GPT-shaped interfaces, helping you save the most precious resource you have – your time.

As anyone reading this probably understands, we care deeply about user trust. And we think Delphi’s approach is best-in-class in this regard: you can only make a Delphi of yourself (no characters, no adult themes), and the team’s ethics and guardrails have taken a concept that could be dystopian but have instead made it feel human (not hollow). Backed by top investors and advisors, they have the resources and ambition to pursue a true blue-sky interface for sharing knowledge. We were excited at the chance to help responsibly shape that future.

So this month Tobias and I are joining Delphi to help build your digital mind of tomorrow – bringing Supernotes’ hard-won lessons about structure, speed, and intentionality into an AI-first canvas. With Delphi we can explore use-cases that stretch far beyond note-taking. It’s work that deserves commitment.

What’s next for Supernotes?

Our promise is that Supernotes will be around for many years to come, still our much-loved daily driver for drafting, jotting, mapping, and learning. And to continue being what we’ve also strived for it to be: a fantastic, reliable notes app. A timeless one.

Like Things 3 or iA Writer, our ambition has always been to stay sharp and focused. We already have a rich feature list with realtime sync, proper offline mode, an open API, and apps for Mac, Windows, Linux iOS, Android, Web and VR. Supernotes will continue receiving periodic updates and maintain its independence as a sustainable business, as there is no fundraising treadmill that pushes us toward an exit.

A bright future

Our priorities might be changing, but we still have the same mission: “knowledge shared is knowledge gained”.

A huge thanks to our community for supporting us and always helping each other out, which is a big part of why we can try new things without worrying about the future of Supernotes. If you have any questions, feel free to post on the Community Forum or reach out directly on Intercom – we’re around!

So here’s to a future where software doesn’t just save us time, but helps us think more clearly, learn more deeply, and connect more meaningfully. We’re just getting started at Delphi – if you’d like to help us shape this future, we’re hiring.