Remember anything,
forever.

A few years ago during the end-of-year holiday season, a friend was in town and invited me for a night of bar trivia. It was the standard mix: pop culture, TV, sports—and then…geography.

Geography questions came up that I knew I had learned before. But AP Human Geography class in high school was a looooong time ago… With each question, I could feel amorphous bits of knowledge about countries, seas, mountain ranges, etc. floating around in my brain, but I was unable to materialize any confident answers. I didn’t do too hot.

On the drive home, I kept circling around a single thought:

How much of the knowledge that passes through my brain actually sticks?

I think about the years spent in elementary, middle, high school, and university in addition to the countless books, articles, podcasts, and more I’ve consumed. How much have I retained? 0.1%? Probably less even. Have you ever read an informative article, felt genuinely smarter for a moment, and then two weeks later when chatting with someone about that very topic, you’re unable to recall anything beyond the article headline?

That harmless night of trivia was a turning point — I decided I was going to memorize every country’s location and capital.

In that quest, I discovered Anki. I read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. I went down the rabbit hole of spaced repetition learning, the Ebbinghaus curve, SuperMemo, and so much more. And here’s a fun fact I learned: the annual U.S.A. Memory Championship takes place 10 minutes away from me.

I returned to that bar for trivia night every week for the next month, and I started crushing the geography rounds. Embarrasingly, I still recall the satisfaction of answering some niche question about Eritrea.

While I felt empowered, I also felt...frustrated.

Empowered, because I discovered I can memorize anything for life. Frustrated, because it raised an even bigger question: what had I been doing for the past two decades? Why did no one teach me this? Why does our education system demand rote memorization, yet the techniques that actually work are treated like some niche study hack?

I’m not exaggerating when I say, fundamentally, human memorization is a solved problem. Anki has been around since 2006. Since then, communities of med students, polyglots, and more all formed to use Anki every day to unforgettably memorize tremendous volumes of knowledge.

While Anki assists me with geography knowledge to this day, what I soon desired was a way to remember the data I naturally encounter day-to-day across X posts, books, podcasts, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, Claude, etc. When I tried to use Anki for that, I discovered that it was, well, a lot of work.

Capturing what I learned entailed running over to my laptop, transforming that bit of knowledge into a well-formed prompt and answer, and repeating that process over and over. It requires discipline and consistent effort. And when life gets busy, it's one of the first habits to be thrown out the window.

Now, what if the tedious translation from knowledge → flashcard could be automated?

That’s what Soma solves.

Soma packages an AI workflow that turns what you care about into well-formed cards designed for spaced repetition. Instead of being forced to become a meticulous flashcard author, you stay in learning mode while a continuous knowledge base grows in the background. Just flag what you want you to memorize, and Soma does the rest.

I built Soma because I kept forgetting things I cared about. Now, I’m a daily user of Soma, and I don’t see myself stopping. I feel smarter. I feel more productive. I feel less frustrated. Soma is my attempt to improve the way we learn, not just for language hobbyists or students, but for anyone who wants to remember anything, forever.