From the founder

I built Sorenda because my notes stopped helping me

Writing things down was easy. Finding them later and putting them to use was not.

My name is Onada Nelson. Below are four situations from an ordinary week: how I used to work and how I work now. Every card comes from my own notebook.

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Note 12 January 2025

I have 2,300 notes and can’t find anything I wrote more than a month ago. The problem isn’t how I write. It’s that nothing happens to a note after I write it.

Why Sorenda

#idea

Save, translate, send

Inés doesn’t read English, and the essay was written for her

My friend Inés and I have argued for years about how to keep notes. I found Maggie Appleton’s essay on digital gardens, and it said everything I had been trying to tell her. Inés lives in Madrid and won’t read a long piece in English.

I used to paste the text into a translator, fix the paragraphs and send a wall of text to a messenger. Now the page is saved into a note in full, translated right there, and the link opens without signing up.

BeforeThree apps and half an hour

NowThree actions in one note

1Pasted the link; the page is saved with a short summary

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden maggieappleton.com

A digital garden is a set of notes that grow and change over time, rather than a feed of finished posts…

How to keep notes

#for-ines

2Translate into Español ▾

EN · original

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date…

ES · translation

Un jardín es una colección de ideas en evolución que no se ordenan estrictamente por su fecha de publicación…

3Link for 7 days ✓ copied

Search by meaning

I remembered what the conversation was about, but not a single word

In the spring I had coffee with Tom, who has built a team from scratch twice. He said one thing about the first hire, and I wrote it down. Six months later, when I actually started hiring, I couldn’t find it: the note never says “advice” or “hiring”.

Sorenda’s search compares meaning, not letters. I describe what I remember in my own words, and the note turns up.

BeforeGuessing phrasings and scrolling the feed

NowDescribe what I remember

advice on who to hire first ✦ AI

Coffee with Tom …Bring in the person who will do what you keep putting off. You don’t need a copy of yourself. 14 April · matched by meaning: “first employee”, “who to bring on”

Job post: developer Draft of the role description, version 2

Four Thousand Weeks …saying no to good things for the sake of the main one

Agents

Most of my notes died the day after I wrote them

I would write down an idea and never come back to it. Not because the ideas were bad: nothing connected a new note to the old ones, and I don’t have time to reread everything.

Now an agent does it. It reads new notes, finds related ones among the old, and sends me a report once a week. Nothing changes until I decide.

BeforeIdeas nobody rereads

NowA weekly report and suggested links

Weekly report · 8–14 September

34new notes

6suggested links

3forgotten topics

On Fridays I ask Claude what I promised during the week

In meetings I write down who I promised what, but by Friday half of it is buried in my notes. Sorenda connects to Claude: it searches my notebook, reads my tasks and answers with links to my own notes.

It can create new notes on its own, but it only suggests changes to existing ones.

What did I promise to do after this week’s meetings?

search_notes · list_tasks — 5 notes

Send Mark the updated deck from Tuesday’s meeting · due Friday
Rewrite the first-screen copy from the interview with Anya: “not clear where to start”
Invite Anya to the beta done on Wednesday

Sorenda didn’t make me more organised. But I no longer lose what I have already thought through and written down.

If you too have hundreds of notes you never open, start with one new note. Sorenda will help connect it to the rest.

Onada Nelson founder of Sorenda

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