All About ShareNotes.com

We’d like to tell you that ShareNotes.com was one of the web’s Cinderella stories with the kind of lightning-in-a-bottle instant success that garners millions of hits overnight. The kind of traffic that gets you noticed by web titans like Google or Rupert Murdock and the deep pockets they represent. Yeah we’d like to tell you that, but the term “meager beginnings” comes to mind instead.

Like most things on the web, truth is far less exciting than any stories we could dream up.
ShareNotes.com was actually the brainchild of a young and struggling Med student looking for a way to fill the pot holes in his study materials. At college you can take great notes in class and still miss some key points that you would no doubt be tested on. Med students expect to go without sleep, but no sleep, no social life and no money while still barely passing seemed almost too much to bear.

The light bulb moment came after one too many sub-par midterms and perhaps too few hours of rest. There was no way that one student was going to get notes on every single thing he or she was expected to know, certainly not in med school. If the student body had a way to “share their notes” he thought, collectively they would have all the study materials they would even need. From that conclusion it wasn’t long before he realized that students from all over the country could benefit by sharing their notes with each other online, and thus ShareNotes.com was officially born.

Although the idea was inspired, the site suffered severely from a lack of exposure. When ShareNotes.com was launched, Tom over at Myspace only had a few thousand friends; blog was not yet a household name and the mention of Twittering at med school left students wondering just what kinds of symptoms might be involved. Email chains and word-of-mouth we’re just not enough to get the idea off the ground and for several years it floundered with only marginal success.

The greatest merit of ShareNotes.com is the idea of collaboration. Basically, the more students that are involved, the better the end product becomes. In that same spirit of collaboration, some like-minded individuals came together to hammer out a real business plan that would take ShareNotes.com from a good idea, to great site. In its 5th year of existence, ShareNotes.com was reborn: same idea, better website and a whole lot more exposure. This time armed with the full strength of Tom’s millions of friends, the newer Facebook crowd and yes a dash of Twitter, the word is finally out.

In the recent years ShareNotes.com has grown exponentially turning what was once a handful of students into a thriving community of thousands of students from all across the country. Now pre-law, bio, business, under grad and PhD students are all benefiting from the resourceful intuition of one overstressed med student. While the rise was initially anything but meteoric, we’re now one of the nation's fastest growing online communities. The best part is its 100% free to use, simply create a login and start sharing / downloading lecture notes. Click here to get started.