The problem Clarity Notes solves

YouTube is a treasure trove for people who don't have access to great institutions for their education, improvising skills in general, etc. This was the case even in pre-covid era, but after covid this grew exponentially and people started to realize the importance and value of these contents. Slowly YouTube started to turn into a online classroom. But there was no 'easy-to-use', handy, seamless online notebook available out there. I tried to search for existing options available to solve this but figured out most of the current products either redirect us to a different page to take notes, or have an overlay on top of YouTube or had dull UX. Later, I shared this problem statement inside BuildBySTL community and started to build one which is embedded inside the YouTube website adjacent to the video player giving the native experience. And when we launched we were happy to realize that other people as well had such problem and started to love it. What started as a product for the problem for one person turned into a solution for hundreds of other people.

Challenges I ran into

When i started building Clarity notes i didn't have enough knowledge in web development. So anyways i started with HTML, vanilla JS and CSS knowledge i had and learnt the same through the development. Once the product is launched and after seeing great response i decided to learn reactJS and nextJS to make further improvements in the product. In a span of 5-6 weeks i learnt the same and built the improvised version of the dashboard. (twitter announcement). Given my state, i had faced lots of issues in figuring out SSR, readwise and notion integration, adding tagging feature etc.