Read the hit essay that started it all

“ A service I loved was sold and became unbearable, so I built my own”

The other app that helped me with my essays was RefME.

Writing essays was the part I liked most about my time at University. Mainly because it meant I got to use iA Writer. The clean, sophisticated look of the app filled me with joy and made writing a truly fun experience. I pitied my friends struggling away with Word, their screen filled with toolbars. While they fiddled around with settings and strange copy-paste behaviour and tried to figure out how to add footnotes, I was happily typing away into a screen filled with beautiful typography and the best kind of interface there is: one that doesn’t demand your attention, shining the spotlight to where your focus should ultimately be — your work.I would paste a link, or an ISBN, or the title of an article, and it generated the citation for it automatically. It wasn’t always perfect, but it worked most of the time. When I was done with my essay I’d grab all the references, and paste them into my document.To this day I have no idea how to write a reference by hand in a specific style format, because I shouldn’t have to.They even had an app that would let me scan the barcodes on the back of books to add them to my project. I was even more delighted when I discovered that they were based in London (European Startups for the win!) and founded the company when they themselves were students. It felt good to be using something made by people just a couple years older than me who were doing their best to solve a problem in an elegant way. Fast forward 3 years and I’m done with my Bachelor’s degree and have moved to Stockholm to work at a startup. One day, an email from RefME lands in my inbox. RefME becoming CiteThisForMe on February 28th.Apparently, RefME had been sold to an American text-book company and was being folded into CiteThisForMe, an existing web tool for reference creation.