One Billion USD for Note-Taking Apps

From taking notes to building a second brain

Adolfo Ramírez Corona
4 min readSep 25, 2020

I can’t stop thinking in this quote about the market for note-taking apps.

A market of more than 1 billion for note-taking apps is huge. Why? I mean, they are just note-taking apps, right?

According to Verified Market Research, the Global Note-Taking Management Software Market was valued at USD 897.7 Million in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 1.35 Billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 5.32% from 2019 to 2026.”
— via
$1.35 Billion note-taking Management Software Market Size & Forecast

I have already examined one of the reasons for this phenomenon: the importance of offering an app of apps, an app that does everything, or at least, an app that is the portal to our everyday digital life.

It’s better to have one method or tool that can handle all the little needs of your life than a lot of different techniques and resources for each of them.”
— via Why mom was right about note-taking apps

But there are a couple of more reasons for this phenomenon.

Photo by rupixen.com on Unsplash

Information overload

The rise of note-taking apps is related to the rise of personal knowledge bases, or what the market is calling tools for thoughts, like TheBrain, Notion, Workflowy, Dynalist, Roam Research, RemNote, Obsidian, TiddlyWiki, or the most recent Muse. And that is not a coincidence.

Note-taking apps have existed almost as computers have started to serve. They were part of the interface to enter data into the system and read messages from it.

However, the recent rise of note-taking apps is not just for this kind of function-input text, storage text, and output text-but for a new approach to interact with the texts.

As information overloads us, we need new tools to manage, filter, and exploit the information.

Adolfo Ramírez Corona

Author, psychotherapist, coach—Human behavior, UX, media & audiences—Father, husband, meditator—Courses & coaching: antifragilewriting.com—More adolforismos.com