Anyone who’s laced up their sneakers to go on a run—your casual Res runner and the marathon devotee alike—can tell you what Strava is. The app, many a runner’s holy grail, tracks a variety of athletic activities and allows users to share and compare their accomplishments with others.
But what if you’re looking to track your midterm study session instead of miles? Or compete with your friends over hours spent in O’Neill instead of time spent on the treadmill?
Enter Smata.
“It’s the Strava of studying,” said Jack Devine, one of Smata’s co-founders and MCAS ’27. “You go in, press record. It blocks you out of your distracting apps, and then you can input your session details—so how long you’re studying, where you are, and the subject you’re studying—onto a live map, so your friends can see where you are, live, while you’re studying.”
Devine co-founded the app with his hometown friend and current Boston University student, Joseph Marotta. The app’s leadership team also features two Boston College alumni—Cameron Smith, BC ’25, and Matthew Smallhouse, BC ’24.
Smata became available in the App Store on Sept. 8, and the team has big goals for its future.
“I think anyone who is studying or whatever, if they are doing [something and] they want to track their time of what they’re working on, they’re going to be using Smata,” Smith said. “That is going to be the platform that they use.”
“It Was Just Like A Light Bulb Went Off”
Devine said inspiration for Smata struck the summer after his sophomore year of college. He was training a lot and using Strava regularly.
“I was like, ‘Why do I like Strava so much?’” Devine said. “And it’s because it gives you that positive affirmation for investing time and energy into yourself in real life, and just uses that social positive affirmation for real life progress.”
Devine began to wonder how that concept could be applied to other areas of life. As a busy college student, studying topped the list, and Smata—originally called Reap—was born.
Devine reached out to Marotta, his best friend from high school and a computer science student at BU. The two spent the entire summer working on an early prototype of Smata—Devine, who studies political science and finance, worked on the front-end design, while Marotta tackled the code.
After returning to school that fall, Devine mentioned his prototype to Smith, who immediately wanted to get involved.
“When [Devine] showed me the prototype, it was just like a light bulb went off,” Smith said. “I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, he is onto something here.’”
Soon after, Smith brought Smallhouse onto the team.
“Matt’s just a, like, a killer coder and just one of the smartest dudes I know,” Smith said. “So I was like, ‘Dude, we gotta bring Matt on.’”
As the app’s development progressed, its leadership team expanded, too. Ruby Chen, a BU student, came on board as the app’s graphic designer. The team also brought in Azra Ozgur, a freshman at the University of Massachusetts, to design Smata’s mascot—a dinosaur named Marty.
“It was very strategic because we all have different gifts, and it’s been a blessing to watch everybody use their gifts behind a shared mission and bring their talents to the table,” Devine said. “And that process just looked like a lot of patience, and also trust because, obviously, when you’re working with five other people, you have to trust them, and it’s a long-term thing.”
“Making Studying Fun”
From the ever-popular Quizlet and Anki to more niche tools like Forest or Brainscape, there are countless productivity-focused study apps for students to download.
So what makes Smata stand out? According to its leadership team, it boils down to three key values: competition, community, and fun.
The app’s early prototype focused primarily on productivity and focus. While this remains a main component—users can temporarily block distracting apps while the Smata study timer runs—it soon became apparent to the leadership team that something more was there.
For Smallhouse, the competitive nature of studying was an element often overlooked by other study apps.
“One of the huge parts that stood out to me was the competition of studying that really motivates people,” Smallhouse said. “I feel like whenever you show up to a test at school, like, you know, [you] show up a couple minutes early, everyone’s all nervous for the test, sitting around like, ‘Oh, how many hours did you study?’”
To address this competitive facet of studying, Smata offers individuals the chance to compete against other users via Strava-esque leaderboards.
“We have a friends-wide leaderboard, a campus-wide leaderboard, then a global leaderboard, and then a few study metrics of your own,” Devine said. “So you can track your study sessions, see how long you’re studying for the week.”
According to Devine, if users log in with their university email address, they are able to access the campus-specific leaderboard that includes all other users from their school.
But the app doesn’t intend to pit users against each other—at least not too intensely. At its core, Devine said, Smata provides a community-centered approach to studying.
“There’s hundreds of focus apps out there that are very solitary, but this one brings a community into it, and it takes the isolation out of it,” Devine said. “You might be studying alone, but then when you see how many other people are also studying alone, it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m not actually going through this process alone.’”
The competition and community aspects contribute to another of the app’s goals: minimizing the boredom and frustration that can often accompany studying.
“It’s also making studying fun,” Smith said, comparing the app’s feel to that of Duolingo.
That emphasis on fun extends to Marty, Smata’s dinosaur mascot, who Devine said was designed to make the app feel more engaging.
“We just wanted a guy that would invite you into the app and would make studying more fun, more approachable,” Devine said.
“This Thing’s Gonna Be Pretty Badass In A Few Years”
For now, Smata is focusing on gaining traction and increasing its users at BC and BU, Devine said.
“The plan right now is to try to master BC, master BU, and then learn what marketing techniques worked at those two campuses, and try to replicate that amongst the Boston cohort,” Devine said.
From there, the team hopes to expand even further.
“And then once we kind of have a decent population of students at each campus, that’ll be time to expand,” Devine said. “But we really want to learn how to master a replicable marketing plan at each campus, and then use that plan everywhere.”
Already, Smata boasts users at a few different schools across the US, and even beyond.
“We have a bunch of people at Bucknell using it, and I have a friend at the University of Minnesota,” Devine said. “There’s pockets of people all over the country. We’ve got a few in Europe.”
In addition to growing its user base, the team has a number of other goals to work toward, including making Smata available on Android.
Other plans for Smata, though, are still under wraps, Devine said.
Though the app is still in its early stages, the leadership team has already felt a sense of fulfillment from its growing success.
“I did a short hour, two-hour-long session or something like that, and then I posted it and looked at the leaderboard, and I landed like 60th for the week,” Smallhouse said. “ I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a bunch of other people out here. This is pretty cool.’”
And the team believes Smata is just getting started.
“That process is pretty, pretty exciting to see—what we started at, to where the product is now, and where it’s gonna be,” Smith said. “It’s just like, ‘Oh my gosh, this thing’s gonna be pretty badass in a few years.’ It already is pretty badass, but getting where we’re going is pretty cool too.”
Devine said that the app has logged more than 1000 hours of studying each week—but that metric is just a piece of Smata’s impact, he said.
“If we can give people a chance to wonder and a chance to reflect about how they’re spending their time, where they want to be, and where their dreams are—and take them away from the noise of Reels and TikTok so they have that opportunity to find out who they are—that’s it,” Devine said. “That would be a win.”
