Notable

Amal Sarva is a serial entrepreneur who has started multiple companies and invested in over 40 startups across diverse industries. After years of building various ventures, he identified a fundamental problem: everyone uses some form of note-taking, but existing solutions were overly complex. He saw an opportunity to rebuild note-taking from scratch to be fundamentally collaborative and teamwork-oriented, while remaining significantly simpler than competitors. The vision was to create a "next generation, note-taking platform" that made sharing notes and collaborating on them as easy as possible.

Notable raised $1M in seed funding from a curated group of early-stage investors, including Bloomberg Beta and 500 Startups, along with angels in the New York startup community whom Sarva knew personally. Rather than follow the typical startup playbook of raising enormous sums and hiring expensive Bay Area developers, Sarva built lean using what he calls "Ship While You Sleep" methodology—leveraging a distributed network of 50 developers across 12 time zones. Only 5 people were based in New York, while the rest worked remotely at various commitment levels (15-20 core contributors, ~30 part-time). This structure kept burn rate to approximately one-third of what a traditional 20-person New York-based team would cost.

The first product released was a Chrome extension called "Notes for Chrome" rather than a full web application. This strategic choice proved crucial: apps are far more discoverable and shareable than abstract web services. Users could discover it in the Chrome Web Store, download it, and others could see it on their colleagues' laptops, creating organic visibility.

Sarva employed a deliberate media strategy to drive awareness. Over several months during beta refinement, he proactively tweeted and mentioned the product to 20-30 productivity-focused writers he thought might be interested. The persistence paid off when the deputy editor of LifeHacker heard about Notable through Twitter, eventually leading to a featured article. That single LifeHacker feature drove 5,000 downloads in just a couple of weeks, validating both the product and the media outreach strategy.

The Chrome extension as a launch vehicle worked exceptionally well—it proved that a focused, discoverable product format is easier to market than an abstract "subscription service" or "web tool." Strategic, targeted media outreach with persistence also worked: rather than spray-and-pray pitching to dozens of journalists, Sarva thoughtfully engaged writers interested in productivity over time, building relationships before asking for coverage.

The free-first model worked to acquire users quickly (15,000 in ~90 days), but the business model remained undefined at the time of this interview. Sarva was intentionally building engagement—getting users writing lots of notes and collaborating—before deciding on a monetization strategy. He envisioned eventual expansion to a full platform including Android apps, web apps, Gmail/Dropbox integrations, and enterprise teamwork features akin to Microsoft Office's $300B market.

Notable had achieved meaningful traction with 15,000 free users approximately 90 days after launch, driven primarily by earned media. The team was executing efficiently with minimal capital burn despite having 50 people contributing to the project. Sarva's vision was to continue growing engagement and user base, then strategically scale with a Series A round to build out full product features and go-to-market capabilities. His philosophy: raise 1-2 years of runway to achieve something "really meaningful" before attempting a Series A, rather than raising arbitrary dollar amounts chasing milestones.