I was a Product Manager at TikTok, doing market research and competitive analysis.
My job required me to constantly collect information from the web — articles, reports, competitor moves, trend signals. And somewhere between the bookmarks, the screenshots, the Notion pages, the random Google Docs and the seventeen open browser tabs I swore I'd get back to — I lost the plot.
Not because the information wasn't there. It was everywhere.
That was the problem.
The research stack that was slowly killing me
At any given point I was using:
- One tool for quick capture
- Another for screenshots
- Bookmarks for "I'll read this later" (I never did)
- A notes app for actual writing
- A separate doc for analysis
- My memory for everything in between
Every tool did one thing. Nothing talked to anything else. And when I needed to pull together an analysis or walk someone through my thinking — I'd spend more time finding my own notes than actually thinking.
I kept re-learning the same things. Re-researching topics I'd already researched. Re-reading articles I'd definitely read before.
It wasn't a productivity problem. It was a retention problem hiding inside a workflow problem.
So I built something for myself
I didn't set out to build a product. I just wanted one tool that could handle the whole loop — clip it, organise it, let me think with it, and help me actually remember it.
That became pronoto.
The Chrome extension came first because that's where the problem started — on the web, mid-research, needing to capture something fast without breaking flow. One click, it's in. No tab-switching, no formatting, no friction.
The AI came next because a folder full of clippings is just a slightly better graveyard. I needed to be able to ask questions across everything I'd saved. To find the thread between an article from three weeks ago and a note from yesterday.
The teleprompter came because I kept having to present my research — to stakeholders, to teams — and I'd write brilliant notes that I then couldn't articulate out loud without stumbling. Practising with auto-scroll changed that.
Then I talked to other people
Once I started sharing pronoto, something became clear quickly.
Everyone had the same problem. Not just researchers. Not just people at fast-moving companies.
Students re-reading the same textbook chapters and still blanking in exams. Consultants with hundreds of notes they never visited again. Creators drowning in inspiration they could never find when they needed it. Professionals who kept learning the same things because nothing stuck.
The tools they were using were optimised for one thing: getting information in.
Nobody had built something for getting it back out — for understanding it, practising it, actually owning it.
pronoto grew because the problem is universal. We are all consuming more than ever and retaining less than ever. Information overload isn't about volume. It's about having no system to close the loop.
What the loop actually looks like
Capture — clip an article, write a voice note, jot a thought. Frictionless, fast, in seconds.
Understand — ask AI what you've saved. Get summaries. Find connections across notes you forgot you had.
Practise — load a script into the teleprompter. Say it out loud. Run it again. Make it yours.
Recall — when it matters, it's actually there. Not in a folder. In your head.
That's the loop I needed at TikTok. That's what I built. And it turns out — a lot of people needed it too.