HoverNotes
Technical founder building privacy-first AI notes for online video learners and local Obsidian workflows
Overview
HoverNotes is a U.S. company and privacy-first AI video note-taking product that I operate remotely from Seoul. It turns online lectures, tutorials, and course videos into structured notes users can keep in their own Obsidian/Markdown workflows. I founded and built the product across browser-extension workflows, a Next.js web app, AI note-generation systems, payments, analytics, localization, SEO, and production operations.
Growth Milestones
- Built and grew HoverNotes to five-figure MRR within its first year, owning product, engineering, and growth.
- Around 20K installs across Chrome and Edge as of June 2026.
- Global monetization through Stripe, WeChat Pay/Alipay one-time passes, and Razorpay/UPI.
What I Built
- Video-in, notes-out AI workflow: the extension captures realtime video learning context, the web app deduplicates and ranks visual frames, and the backend generates structured notes from transcript plus selected visual context.
- Local-first note-taking: Obsidian vault saving, screenshot handling, note history, reconnect/recovery paths, and guardrails against destructive auto-save behavior.
- Regional payments: Stripe for global card payments, WeChat Pay/Alipay one-time passes for China, and Razorpay/UPI for India.
- Product analytics: activation, paywall behavior, platform-specific drop-off, media payload size, warning telemetry, and AI Notes session health.
- Growth and reliability systems: SEO/content infrastructure, localization, regional pricing, billing reliability, release management, and production observability.
Stack
Next.js, React, TypeScript, browser extensions, Lexical, Python/FastAPI, PostgreSQL/Drizzle, Stripe, Razorpay, PostHog, Vercel, Cloudflare R2, and AI/LLM workflows.