We built the research workspace we wished existed.
PowerNotes started in a law school library. Today it's used by everyone from those writing their first research paper to PhD candidates finishing their dissertations — and everyone in between who takes their work seriously.
Research is how we learn. We built PowerNotes to make it worth doing.
Most people approach research the same way they always have — tabs open everywhere, notes scattered across documents, citations hunted down at the last minute. The process hasn't changed much, even as everything else has.
We think that's a problem worth solving. Not because research is hard — but because a structured research process produces genuinely better thinking, better writing, and better work. And because in an AI era, the process matters more than ever.
A well-organized research workspace isn't just more efficient. It's the foundation that makes AI useful.
Where it started.
After seven years as an electrical engineer, Wilson enrolled in law school at Northwestern. He was good at the thinking. The research process was another matter.
Copy-pasting passages into documents with no source attached. Notes scattered across files with no connection to where they came from. Hours spent reconstructing a bibliography that should have been building itself all along. It wasn't that the research was hard — it was that the workflow was broken. Everyone was improvising in the same inefficient ways, and no one had built a better system.
That was the insight. Not that research is hard, but that people were doing it with the wrong tools — or no tools at all. PowerNotes started as a solution to that specific problem for law students. Then it turned out that law students, undergrads, high schoolers, middle schoolers, and professionals were all dealing with the same underlying issue: their research had no structure, so their thinking had no foundation.
Today, PowerNotes is used by students and researchers across every level of academic work — at nearly [X] institutions, in law schools, community colleges, research universities, and K–12 programs across the country. Some instructors have built their entire course research workflow around it. That still surprises us, in the best way.
Not aspirations. Decisions.
These are the things that shape what we build, what we don't build, and how we think about research.