RevealNotes

Inspiration

As international students from underprivileged backgrounds, we had to find the “hidden path” to U.S. universities: full-ride scholarships, realistic application strategies, trustworthy programs, and advice from people who actually went through the process.

The problem is that most online advice is noisy. Reddit threads, articles, agencies, and school pages often mix useful information with outdated, vague, or misleading advice. Sometimes people misinform intentionally. More often, they just repeat things without real experience.

We built RevealNotes because access to reliable context is an unfair advantage.

What it does

RevealNotes is a browser extension that adds verified community notes to any webpage.

Anyone can read notes, but only verified students can publish notes or vote on them. This keeps the information grounded in real experience instead of anonymous guesses.

Users can add context to college admissions pages, scholarship websites, Reddit posts, articles, agency pages, and other opportunity-related content. Notes can clarify misleading claims, add missing context, warn about unreliable advice, or explain what actually worked.

How we built it

We built a browser extension that detects the current webpage and shows relevant notes for that URL. Users can submit notes, view existing notes, and vote on whether a note is helpful.

The core system includes:

• a browser extension frontend
• a backend for storing notes and votes
• user verification so only real students can contribute
• URL-based note matching so context follows users across the web

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was designing trust. If everyone can post notes, the tool becomes another noisy comment section. If posting is too restricted, the community cannot grow.

We solved this by making notes publicly visible but limiting publishing and voting to verified students.

Another challenge was keeping the product general enough to work on many websites while still being specific enough to solve a real problem: unreliable opportunity advice for students who cannot afford mistakes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that RevealNotes directly addresses a problem we personally faced.

Instead of building another chatbot, we built a tool that lives where people already search for information. It adds context at the exact moment someone needs it.

We are also proud of the verification-first design. The goal is not more opinions. The goal is more trustworthy context from people with real experience.

What we learned

We learned that misinformation is not always obvious. A post can sound confident and still be harmful. A website can look professional and still leave out important details. For students with fewer resources, bad advice is expensive.

We also learned that trust is a product feature. The value of RevealNotes depends not only on the notes themselves, but on who is allowed to create and rank them.

What's next for RevealNotes

Next, we want to improve verification, expand note categories, and add reputation for contributors.

We also want to start with international and first-generation students applying to U.S. universities, then expand to other areas where hidden knowledge matters: internships, scholarships, immigration, financial aid, healthcare access, and worker rights.

Our long-term vision is to make hidden knowledge visible to more groups of people who do not already have the right network and opportunities.

Built With

• apis
• bun
• cloud-services
• databases
• drizzle
• frameworks
• hono
• jose
• platforms
• sqlite
• zod