When Steven Chan was in his final year in university, he wasn’t focusing on schoolwork like the rest of his class. He was building an app.

“I was about to graduate but didn’t want to go straight into a job," Chan says. Instead, he took a chance working for himself, choosing the easiest classes to free up time for his venture.

Here, Chan spoke to the App Store Editors about where his note-taking app Goodnotes came from, and where it’s headed next.

When iPad was first introduced to the world, Chan began looking for a digital note-taking solution. And when he couldn’t find one that he liked, he decided to put his studies on hold and focus on developing an app that suits his needs.

But just because he put his books away doesn’t mean that he’s forgotten what he had learnt. Instead, he put his maths know-how into developing Goodnotes’ proprietary vector ink engine, recreating on iPad the smooth, natural writing experience of pen on paper.

“I bought a bunch of traditional fountain pens to compare how they wrote,” Chan says. ”And I put a Moleskine notebook side by side with my iPad to match its paper colour and texture on the screen.”

When Goodnotes was released to widespread acclaim in 2011, Chan became his own boss. "Some users even sent us ‘love letters’,” he says. ”One of them told us that their father was in the hospital, unable to speak, and used Goodnotes to communicate. That was really moving.”

For five years, Chan worked on the app solo, but when Apple Pencil was launched, he recruited a team to help him expand the app.

“I realised that it was more than I could do on my own, and I needed more engineers,” he says. Today, Goodnotes has a 300-strong team hailing from more than 40 countries and regions.

With 25 million active users worldwide, Goodnotes has evolved from a simple note-taking app to include features such as auto-correct, file management and search, as well as AI-driven formulae rendering and a database of study sets. The Marketplace offers a wide range of exquisite notebook covers, paper and stickers, plus plenty more options for customisation.

Chan’s dream is for Goodnotes to become the primary tool for users to capture inspiration and record information, and to help them plan, brainstorm and create. “Goodnotes’ mission is to create the best human-AI collaborative platform, to improve our users’ productivity and free them to focus on their creativity,” says Chan.

A long-requested feature, the Whiteboard breaks through the page boundaries of traditional notebooks and PDF documents by offering an infinite canvas that supports multi-user collaboration.

And Goodnotes’ new AI can digest and organise complex, scattered or scribbled content – whether they’re written, typed or audio – to create notes, charts and mind maps.