I Was Failing an Exam on a Tram. So I Built an App.

It was 7:43 AM on a Wednesday. I was standing on the N6 tram in Zurich, holding onto the overhead bar with one hand and a 47-page PDF about distributed systems on my phone with the other. I had an exam in two hours. I’d been “studying” for three days, which in practice meant I’d opened the PDF four times and fallen asleep three of them.

The tram lurched. My phone almost flew out of my hand. And I thought: I’m going to fail this exam because reading a PDF on a phone is an objectively terrible learning experience.

That thought wouldn’t leave me alone.

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s the thing — we have more learning material available today than at any point in human history. YouTube lectures, research papers, podcast episodes, entire university courses posted online for free. The internet is basically a university with no tuition and no graduation ceremony.

And yet. Most of us still “study” by reading the same paragraph six times and hoping something sticks.

I looked at my options that morning on the tram. I could:

Keep scrolling the PDF (not working, clearly)
Open a flash card app (but I’d need to manually create every card, and I had 110 minutes)
Search for a summary (maybe someone on Reddit explained distributed consensus better than my professor — actually, almost certainly)
Give up and accept my fate (tempting)

None of these felt right. What I actually wanted was something that could take this PDF and just… do something useful with it. Break it down. Quiz me. Show me how the concepts connect. Make my brain absorb the information instead of just passing over it like water on a windshield.

That app didn’t exist. So eventually, we built it.

The Tram Napkin Sketch

I didn’t literally sketch on a napkin — I used the Notes app like a civilized person — but the core idea was dead simple.

What if you could drop any piece of content into an app, and it would generate an entire learning toolkit?

Not just a summary. Not just flash cards. The whole thing. A visual brain map showing how concepts connect. Key takeaways. Flash cards for drilling. Quizzes for testing. Even a memory matching game for the stuff that really won’t stick.

I texted our team: “What if we built an app that eats PDFs and spits out brain maps?”

The response: “That’s either brilliant or insane. Let’s find out.”

What ThinkBud Actually Does

ThinkBud is now live on the App Store, so let me walk you through what we built.

Drop Anything In

The input side is deliberately flexible. You can feed ThinkBud:

A web link — paste any URL and ThinkBud extracts the content
A PDF — upload documents, textbook chapters, research papers
An image — snap a photo of a whiteboard, handwritten notes, or a textbook page
Audio — record a lecture or import an audio file

That’s it. One input, and ThinkBud takes over.

Get Six Learning Tools Out

From a single import, ThinkBud generates:

Brain Visual Map — This is the showpiece. An interactive mind map that breaks your content into a visual hierarchy. You can zoom, pan, explore branches, and actually see how ideas connect. I can’t overstate how much better this is than reading a wall of text.

AI Summaries — The key points extracted and organized. Not the kind of summary that’s just slightly shorter than the original — actually useful, condensed takeaways.

Smart Flash Cards — Automatically generated question-answer pairs. Swipe through them like you would in Anki, but without spending three hours creating the deck manually.

Quiz Mode — Multiple choice and free-form questions generated from your material. Instant feedback on what you know and what you don’t.

Memory Match Game — A matching game that pairs terms with definitions. Sounds simple. Turns out it’s annoyingly effective for retention.

Explore — An AI-powered research companion that lets you dig deeper into any concept from your material.

The Feature That Changed Everything

We had a working prototype with all the features above. It was good. People in our beta liked it. But the moment that turned ThinkBud from “nice study app” into something bigger was when someone asked:

“Can I export the brain map? I want to put it in my presentation.”

We hadn’t thought about export. We’d been so focused on the learning experience that we forgot people might want to share what they learned. And that realization opened up a whole new dimension.

PNG Brain Map Export

You can now export any brain map as a high-resolution PNG image. Print it, put it on a poster, embed it in a document, share it on social media, pin it to your wall. The visual quality is something we’re genuinely proud of — these aren’t ugly auto-generated diagrams. They look like something a designer made.

Interactive HTML Presentations

This is the one that makes people’s jaws drop. ThinkBud can take your brain map and generate a fully interactive HTML presentation. It runs in any browser — no PowerPoint, no Keynote, no Google Slides needed. Just share a file and anyone can click through your presentation.

Think about that. You import a 30-page PDF, ThinkBud processes it, and five minutes later you have a shareable presentation ready to go.

PowerPoint Export

For the more traditional crowd (or when your company mandates .pptx), ThinkBud generates polished PowerPoint decks too. Professional slide layouts, clean typography, proper structure. From raw content to presentation-ready in minutes.

Watch It in Action

We put together a quick promo showing how ThinkBud works from import to export. It’s easier to watch than to explain:

Who Actually Uses This?

We’ve been running a beta for a few months, and the use cases surprised us.

Students — The obvious one. Exam prep, lecture review, textbook chapters. The flash card generation alone saves hours of manual work.

Professionals — People importing meeting notes, industry reports, and compliance documents. One beta tester told me he imports his company’s quarterly reports and uses the brain map to prep for board meetings. That was not a use case we designed for, but it works perfectly.

Content creators — YouTubers and podcasters importing their own scripts to generate visual summaries they can share with their audience.

Language learners — Importing articles in the target language, getting flash cards with translations, quizzing themselves on vocabulary.

Parents — Importing their kids’ school materials and generating study games. This one hits different when you see a 10-year-old actually enjoying studying because it’s a matching game instead of a textbook.

The Technical Stuff (For the Nerds)

ThinkBud is a native iOS app built with SwiftUI. We didn’t take the cross-platform shortcut. Here’s why it matters:

Feels like an Apple app — Because it is one. Smooth animations, native gestures, proper haptic feedback.
Privacy first — Your existing materials stay on your device. AI processing happens server-side for generation, but we don’t store your content.
Fast — Native performance means the mind map renders smoothly even with complex topics and many nodes.

The AI pipeline handles multiple input modalities — text extraction from PDFs, OCR for images, speech-to-text for audio — and feeds everything through our content analysis system that generates the structured learning materials.

The Origin Story Nobody Asked For

I passed that distributed systems exam, by the way. Barely. A 4.0 out of 6. Which in the Swiss grading system is technically a pass but spiritually a defeat.

But the tram idea stuck. Over the next few months, whenever I was studying something — a new framework, a research paper for a side project, even a recipe — I kept wishing I had ThinkBud. Which is a weird form of motivation: building something because you’re annoyed it doesn’t exist yet.

The team was on board from the start. We’d been building native apps for a while and had the SwiftUI chops. The AI side was the new frontier, but the core challenge wasn’t the tech — it was making the generated content actually good. Anyone can generate flash cards from a document. Making flash cards that test the right concepts, at the right difficulty level, with properly phrased questions? That took months of iteration.

What’s Next

ThinkBud 1.0 is live, but we’re not done. Here’s what’s coming:

Spaced repetition scheduling — Intelligent intervals for flash card review
Collaboration — Share brain maps and study materials with study groups
iPad and Mac versions — The brain maps deserve a bigger screen
More export formats — We’re exploring Markdown and Notion export

Try It

ThinkBud is available now on the App Store. There’s a free tier to get you started.

If you have a PDF collecting dust in your downloads folder, a bookmark you saved three months ago with “I’ll read this later” energy, or an upcoming exam that’s giving you cold sweats — give ThinkBud a shot. It’s the app I wished I had on that tram.

And if you’ve got feedback, feature ideas, or just want to tell us about your own public-transit study disasters, hit us up on the contact page. We read everything.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a brain map to export.