Meet the Founder

Hi, I'm Thabani.

SymbioLearn started as my final-year university project in 2023. The first version was pretty simple: upload a PDF and ask questions about it.

I put it online the following year. Around 35 people signed up on the first day, and almost none of them came back.

For a while I responded by adding more things. Notes, quizzes, flashcards, more ways to work with the PDF. I spent a lot of time making things that other study apps already had, and it still wasn't something people had much reason to come back to.

What kept bothering me was that getting information wasn't really the difficult part anymore.

You can ask an AI to explain almost anything. You can generate notes, questions and summaries in seconds. But you can read a perfectly good explanation and still struggle to explain the idea yourself. You can understand something on Monday and have very little of it left by Friday. You can recognise the answer in your notes and then freeze when the exam asks the same thing differently.

That is the part of studying I've become much more interested in.

Voice came into SymbioLearn because talking exposes those gaps quickly. When you have to explain something out loud, you notice where you stall, where you're vague and where you're relying on words you don't really understand.

The rest of the product has gradually started organising itself around the same idea. Your material becomes concepts. You work through them. The things you get wrong stay around. Old material comes back. You can see where an explanation or question came from instead of having to trust an AI answer blindly.

I'm still figuring parts of it out.

Some things that were in SymbioLearn a year ago aren't there anymore. Some things that are there now will probably change too. That's normal for me at this point.

Away from SymbioLearn

I write software for a living, but I'm not at a screen all week.

Dance has been part of my life for a long time. I play trumpet at church, and music is one of the things that gets me away from thinking about software for a while.

My faith is important to me. So are the people around me. And I still like making random things simply because I want to know whether I can make them work.

SymbioLearn just happens to be the one I've kept coming back to since university.

If you want to see what the product looks like now, start with a module and add something you're actually studying.

Or, if you're curious about how SymbioLearn itself has changed: About SymbioLearn.