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Samuel Suresh had never planned to go viral over digital notes. But in his journey to becoming a content creator, he did exactly that.
For many, it’s easy to stay a small fish in a campus of 30,000 students. Back in 2019, Samuel was still a Business and Science student at the Western Sydney University, one of the largest universities in Australia. But Samuel did eventually make a name somehow on campus. After discovering Goodnotes in his first year, he became one of few students taking notes on the iPad. “Other students would see the notes I was making and then they’d ask, ‘Hey Samuel, what’s that tool you’re using? Can you show me?’,” he says.
To anyone who’d ask, he’d give 15-minute explainers: how to use Goodnotes on the iPad with the Apple Pencil, to create visual notes for his classes. “And they’d be super excited,” he says. “The crazy thing was — I’d see these same students the very next week, having gone and bought iPads and gotten Goodnotes for themselves.”
“There really is something here that’s resonating with people around the world,” he remembers thinking then. “I wanted to tell my teachers at school. [I wanted] to share it with more of my friends.” From these initial thoughts, an idea for a viral YouTube video was born. In August of that year, Samuel published “The iPad Pro is INCREDIBLE for Taking Notes - A Student's Perspective,” on his channel, the same 15 minute explainer he’d deliver to fellow students, except in sharable video form. “In the first few months, it got to 100k views. I didn’t expect that to happen at all.” The current viewer count today? Over 1.3 million.
“I don’t think I knew how to process it to be honest,” he says. Soon after, Samuel went on to publish other viral hits: an extended how-to on iPad note-taking, Apple product reviews, and day-in-the-life vlogs at university, to name a few. Today, his channel boasts 334,000 subscribers and over 18 million total video views.
The Metamorphosis: Becoming a New Student with Digital Notes
In another popular video, Samuel highlights a beautiful textbook he created for his anatomy class using GoodNotes 4. Bright, bold illustrations of body parts and Samuel’s precise handwriting color the book’s pages. With 2.2 million views, it was also one of the first times a Goodnotes Notebook went viral.
But while the video highlights the textbook as the end-product, its focus is as much about a metamorphosis, a process of becoming. The video begins in black and white; in the background, Samuel’s internal monologue rings of self-doubt and self-denigration. “[I was] talking about how frustrating it is to be a student learning in university, and how you’re rewarded for memorization, for compliance,” he says. “You get sick of it, because that’s not what true learning really is.”
But then, the video regains color, as if Samuel is reinspired: “It was sort of a symbol of me making a decision to learn.”
“Based on true events,” reads one of the video’s frames. “There were a lot of things going on at that time in my life. I was doing a medical science degree with the hopes of going into medicine and becoming a doctor,” he says. But as one of few students who hadn’t studied chemistry or biology in high school, the path ahead was challenging. “I was behind. I realized that there was a lot of work that needed to be done.” And rather than finding the path of least resistance, Samuel says that he wanted “to learn properly.”
“The conditions were there so that when you put the tool into my hand, I just enjoyed the process,” he says. “The thing that made it worth it for me was the person I became in that process — making a decision every day to show up to class, to learn, to be engaged. It wasn't just about a bunch of notes. It was about being a particular kind of student.”
And for Samuel, it’s through Goodnotes that this ‘particular kind of student’ comes to life. “Nothing is static and stuck on the page. As a new idea comes in, you can move things out of the way to put something in there. That just opens up so many possibilities.”
“It’s a great tool, but when you put the tool in the hands of [someone] who wants to own their learning, I think that's when you see magic happen,” he says. Several of Samuel’s followers soon also sent him personalized messages, praising his content for inspiring them to own their learning. “I think that’s probably been the most fulfilling thing.”
Radical Creativity Unlocked
Even outside content, assisting others in their learning journeys is a common thread in Samuel’s work. Currently, he collaborates with universities to help staff deliver better teaching strategies for students. In every role he’s had — whether student, creator, educator — Goodnotes has always been a helpful tool. Besides creating compelling visual textbooks for science classes, “I [also] use Goodnotes to ideate for my YouTube — ideas come up and I draw together brainstorms,” says Samuel. “In my work at the university, I’m always using Goodnotes to read journal articles, or when we're having collaborative brainstorming sessions. And then in my videography work, sometimes [Goodnotes] is used in storyboarding.”
“One thing I really enjoy doing [with Goodnotes] is taking an image from the internet, putting it on my notes, tracing over it, deleting the image,” he says. “Sometimes I collaborate on a note with colleagues or friends who have Goodnotes on their iPad too.”
Samuel has a lot to say about the app — there’s even a “letter to Goodnotes” video delivering earnest user feedback on his channel. It might be unsurprising that Samuel professes spending “hours and hours and hours” using Goodnotes. Why? For him, there’s a radical power to be found when handwriting is made editable.
“What I found off-putting about handwriting notes is that learning is actually quite a chaotic process — you find a new piece of information that comes in that changes [all your notes],” he says. With the lasso tool, the resize tool, and the ability to mix-and-match colors, “what I love about the iPad is it can contain the necessary chaos that is inbuilt into the process of learning.”
“It’s one thing to get your thoughts down. It’s another thing to get your thoughts down and be able to edit them,” he says. “Digital note taking in Goodnotes showed me the possibility of being a different kind of student: the kind of student who takes the knowledge they are learning and makes their own thing out of it. It’s a chance to Own Your Learning.”