Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app (https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind...). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Evernote 3, abandoned their original client base, and started charging a monthly fee in place of the perpetual license (that people already paid...).
All this, to say this wouldn't be the first time evernote disappoints loyal customers. I guess you do what you have to do to survive...
Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed.
I think it's a problem of management not knowing what to do with developers once you have a solid stable product.
Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.
And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.
I took all my grad school notes and audio recordings in Evernote. I even paid for additional storage. Then they decided to abandon loyal customers and charge subscription for just syncing additional devices. I've since moved to the notes app. One less subscription for me.
Same. Notes isn’t quite the same product — can’t easily clip webpages, create annotations, tags, etc, but largely I don’t have as much a need for that anymore!
I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?
I know a lot of people use One Note, might be worth considering. My use-case is not that heavy right now, so just it is just notes for me at the moment.
I was spooked away from OneNote. I mistakenly deleted an entire notebook on their iOS app with a single swipe and press. Bizarrely, the notebook was completely irrecoverable. Not only that, but the desktop version of OneNote, which previously had the same notebook, automatically synced the deletion. I laughed at how efficiently I was being screwed. This was a couple years ago. I reluctantly switched back to Evernote.
I’ve also had trouble with OneDrive. I like most Microsoft software, but MS needs to rework its schema for auto-save products. They’re seamless 99% of the time, but come with the black swan risk of catastrophic failure at the worst time. I’d rather just ctrl+s and email backup copies to myself.
In fact I am developing Sciter Notes to bring back that handy feel of EverNote.
For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser.
https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/
(or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).
Around 2010, I was chatting with a colleague about them. Even then, he was talking about how its "current incarnation." It sounded like back in the day, it was a bunch of Russian handwriting recognition experts, and they built a company around that.
Looking at how people are pissed at subscription apps, "pay forever" doesn't seem sustainable either.
If people ain't paying for newer release (as in old good charge-for-major-upgrades model), maybe that piece software can be considered "done" and it's time to go after another sector?
Yeah part of me wishes there was a better payoff model for this done, but supported software. I scorn subscriptions often because it often warps into products I don't want so they can justify the payment or force a SaaS that is just waiting to pop and break it.
I first used it when it was on Palm's WebOS on the Palm Pre. They very quickly supported a lot of devices, many operating systems that are gone now (WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc.)
I can't read the article due to paywall, but why does a note-taking app need to be a unicorn in the first place? It just seems so excessive.
Like couldn't 80% of the value of Evernote be written as a simple, intuitive piece of software that a middle-aged programmer in Boise could maintain in his free time?
While that may be a slight exaggeration, Wikipedia's numbers of 251-500 employees sounds quite massive. I'm not obviously privy to all things the company does but it makes one wonder.
The programmers who maintain MediaWiki, the programmers who write the backend and frontend of Wikipedia, and the people who run the organization that raises money to fund Wikipedia, are all seperate organizations. Giving users the tools to view and edit Wikipedia in every language and on a variety of mobile devices is actually a lot of work.
Microsoft picked up much of the functionality in OneNote. Even if the cut and paste between other MSFT apps is awful, once you have Office it’s kind of hard to justify paying for something else. Seems like an old pattern resurfacing.
oh wow i didn't know it started in 2004. i personally used it in high school to take notes at high school on my EEEPC back when those things were still all the rage, that was probably between 2007-2009 or so. i don't recall running it as a native application however, but hey my memory is spotty at best so i wouldn't trust it
The main problem with Evernote seems to be that their total-available-market is way too small to justify their valuation and expenses. It's core success is as a note-taking app - how big is the market for that really? They are competing against free alternatives like Emacs-org-mode, Apple Notes, and Google Keep. Sure, they can carve out a niche for themselves as a premium multi-device cloud-based no-ads app. But a $1B valuation? I don't think so.
Evernote sounds like a company that tried too hard to be something it wasn't. "Smart covers for your feet"? Really?? The founders of Evernote could have built a very successful low-expenses high-margin lifestyle business that would have made them very rich. "Unicorn or bust" isn't always a winning strategy. I hope the other startup featured in NYTimes today - Superhuman - learns from Evernote's failings
I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.
I use Google Keep every day. These are my requirements from my note taking app:
- simple plain text note-taking;
- available on android, iOS and web;
- available offline and syncs (more or less) reliably;
- full text search.
I do not want more features on my note-taking app. I do not want it to go on steroid. Google Keep is not trash. It is perfect for the intended audience. You are just not part of that audience.
I lost all of the notes I took while offline, reading on a plane flight, as soon as I connected to the internet again. I haven't trusted Google Keep since.
Anything destined for for that pit of despair I write in vi and excel, and copy/paste or import. Docs is not quite awful, but nowhere close to nice to use.
And "just search" as an organizing principle for docs from lots of people who aren't information nerds ends up leading to a bucket of ass. Newhires end up doing broken things because they found an outdated doc, you have to pick through multiple versions of other people's crap that never goes away, etc.
I keep all my docs to myself and render-to-Google when something needs to be shared. Reminds me a bit of blogging, really, with crappier tools.
Google keep does not sync reliably. I really tried to use it, but it's just terrible (unless it's improved recently). I've had it take days to sync before
I've heard about Google Keep first time. And that means that Google will shut down Keep soon, it happened few times already. Prepare to move your data.
Keep has had many many changes the past few years, including being added as a core G Suite product, so it now has a deprecation policy. Won't get shut down out of the blue.
Why wouldn’t ”note taking on steroids” be worth $1B? It is useful for any information work, and most of the higher income jobs are essentially or at least partly information work.
And if they are currently making close to $100M in annual revenues, then $1B valuation doesn’t seem far off.
Lock-in effect is quite substantial after you have a couple of years of tagged information.
As a user, I just wish they would have a smoother implementation of their current product-offering.
Absolutely agreed. Note taking done really well would be useful to almost everyone, and they could absolutely dominate that market just as Slack has for chat. IMO if they'd just kept focused on their core app, they could be that right now. Instead focus was diverted in myriad directions, and quality of the core experience suffered. I sincerely hope they manage to 'fail' into a stable company that manages to get bugs under control and then to focus on their core product.
My shorter term hope is that they fix the android app bug that cropped up a couple weeks ago, making notes take 10-30s to open...
$100M in annual revenues isn't even much of a stretch.
1.6M knowledge workers paying an average $5 a month for their primary note taking app - apps on every platform: iOS, Android, iPad, Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux, encrypted cloud sync, and integration with other apps - feels like a very plausible reality that gets the company to a $1B valuation.
If a personal productivity tool provides real value and costs $60 dollars per
year, it is a no-brainer buy even from personal budget. Most higher income information workers earn that in an hour or two.
99% of the population don't take notes with a fancy paid for application. In fact most people don't take notes at all.
Out of those that do there are perfectly good things like paper notepads that are fit for purpose. Then there is Notepad.exe in Windows that actually does it for some. I have met someone at the other extreme, using git and 'vi' for notes including 'must buy milk' type of things.
To most people who have some system - bookmarks in the browser, a paper notebook, emails to themselves or whatever, there is no seeking out of the superior Evernote solution. Or even OneNote. I used to work with a guy who was teased for using OneNote and wanting the company to pay for his special program (when there was a perfectly good stationary cupboard).
It is just a hard sell. And now people can just take pictures on their phones it is an even harder sell.
Some things are table stakes with an operating system. A clock. A calculator. A means of taking a screen shot. A web browser. An image viewer. A document viewer. But once upon a time people tried to make people pay for these things. As it turned out nobody needed the MS-DOS TSR calculator with as many memory stores as hotkeys. Evernote is a bit like that in that it has features most but not all don't want to pay for.
We probably would never have heard of them had they not taken the VC money and rammed the product down our throats with the marketing budget. To some extent it is a remnant of a product that never was going to happen - the handwriting input. This had been the dream in the 80's, 90's and 00's. Palm, Apple, Microsoft and everyone else with a dog in the game wanted it to happen. But it never did.
Note taking and search should be an operating system level thing. And it kind of is already.
I suspect free Microsoft OneNote continuing to improve and it becoming available on macOS and mobile took some of EverNotes marketshare.
https://www.onenote.com/
Emacs Org Mode is not even a competition, not many people apart from developers using Linux use it and its not cloud based. Instead One Note is a great competition to Evernote.
Evernote's real value was in expanding note-taking to digitize and OCR every document in your life, saving them all permanently and making them easily retrievable. They bundled and co-marketed with ScanSnap to provide an integrated solution that I think would have been attractive and valuable to almost anyone.
Then they stopped adding relevant features – why did I have to manually title a note that was being OCRed? – and started adding cruft. Even now, if they pivot back to perfecting the document storage product they can lead that market.
Or if they wait for Apple to add OCR to Notes they can lose it forever.
It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it.
It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping you find them later. I really really liked it for free form research, like when you spend a couple weeks looking into a business idea to write up a detailed report later and want to find the reference to that concept or statistic you remember.
Ten years ago that kind of thing was really hard to do reliably and they were good at it.
But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.
They transitioned that to a paid feature because they had to keep the lights on.
Small groups of engineers can do amazing things but in most companies amazing things worth doing run out and staff keeps growing. Salaries need to be paid and diminishing returns start.
I have been thinking about the economics of being done with a piece of commercial software. Shut down feature additions, lower the price in regular increments, and open source after a high bar of total revenue is reached.
Alternatively work out a company sale that doesn't include the name or the product. Sell the team, the office space, the experience, and a copy of the product which must be rebranded or reengineered into something else but leave the original product and name on the market with a maintenance staff and original copyright.
The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.
Plenty of companies will deliver just as much, if not more, with a 30 person strong team, as they would with 600, or 10,000.
But a thirty person strong team isn’t going to get a multi-million cash injection unless they plug it all into a swanky office and an ever-growing wage bill.
I greatly admire Basecamp and it’s founders, DHH and Jason Fried, for completely bucking this trend. And they’re as successful as ever.
Instagram reached 100 million users and sold for over $1 billion with a 6-person team (they had just hired a few more people when they sold). Investors don't care how many people you have; they care about how fast the business is growing.
As one of the co-creators of blitzscaling, it's important to note that we're careful in the book to say that most businesses shouldn't blitzscale. Basecamp is a great example of how bootstrapping can work. You can also listen to the story of MailChimp on the Masters of Scale podcast.
Bingo, right there. Once you have taken X bajillion dollars from a VC, you have to find some way of pretending that you can become worth that valuation (plus some profit for the VC's). Thus, a perfectly valid small-to-medium company becomes a moneypit big company.
You nailed it - Evernote is just trying to make their investors happy while doing there best to not piss off users TOO much. Having been in this situation myself I can tell you it's a not great for customers at all. But you do what you must to survive.
Engineers are expensive. If you want to even launch, you need money to pay people (if even just yourself.) Boostrapping does work (see Basecamp,) but that business evolved out of a consulting business and wasn’t started from scratch, so they had advantages of paying clients subsidizing Basecamp development. A new kind of “micro-VC” where 10x returns weren’t the goal might be a start, but then it would be tough to raise money without substantial validation first. So there is a chicken-egg problem.
They also came out of the golden era of blogging where you could develop a significant audience subscribed directly through RSS without requiring some middleman distribution or aggregator taking your eyeballs. I guess it can still be done today with social media, but there’s just so much content out there it’s much harder to develop a loyal user base like 37signals did back in the day.
That's a much more customer-friendly version of a common late stage strategy in enterprise software: shut down feature additions, keep the price high, milk support contracts and if all that's not enough, sue your customers!
I like your sunset strategy better as a customer, but it sounds like something you could only really do if you don't have investors.
But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.
Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start with things which feel "magic" then have them fade into "meh." I've tried Evernote a few times, but it just never stuck. It's in that category of, "It seems like it could be really cool, but for some reason, it isn't."
It can definitely solve problems that exist. I've been using it near religiously for the past 6-7 years as the home of my GTD system, as well as a general store for archived reference information, and the design of their product fits my needs perfectly. That said, the flexibility in use that's one of its main strengths is also one of its greatest challenges, since it can be very difficult to pick it up and get the most out of it.
I've heard that point of view a lot, but it's definitely not me. In fact, if I had to pick one word to describe it, it'd probably be "liberating". I don't have to hold anything in my brain anymore, so when I'm relaxing, I can relax 100%. Don't have to worry about forgetting anything, because I know it's all in there. And when I'm ready to 'get something done', as it were, some things to do are right there. I love it. That said, it did take a while to get set up and used to.
When I had a support engineering job it was pretty magical. Super easy to store notes and kept a lot of my life and browsing curated and organized. I took pictures of whiteboards and stored them. But like many others here the app became bloated because of the volume of notes I had. Add to that the premium features that didn't seem like they were worth the expense and I just stopped using it over time. I just write stuff in markdown now, or lastpass if I need a secure note.
I'm building something that does this. It lets you search text in images, video, local files, anything that comes across your screen. You can manually add e.g. web pages too.
It's at https://apse.io. It has been working really well for me. I'm happy to answer questions if that sounds interesting.
Failure, in this context could either mean product or company failure, and the "fail fast" adage is usually applied to product, not company. At least as this article presents the story (executive churn, etc), it sounds like company failure is the main part of it.
The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure, if it fails to live up to valuations.
So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind leads to others
As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote, but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations (we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.
I often think of the story of the guy who posted here about how his startup "failed" but in reality it just didn't bring in the massive cash flow that was hoped for.
IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there.
Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two options.
"Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business orotundities being lost if those are the only two options."
I think a lot of companies are doomed because of that attitude. Companies with high valuations like Slack, Github and others can't just keep a nice business going but they have to expand like crazy to justify their valuation. And most of them end up converting a very good core product into a big mess.
If you want to be bold, start your Slack replacement now. Do whatever you can to make it easy to transition to your product (API compatibility, integration compatibility, etc.). Be ready to pick up the people who will be disgruntled by Slack in two or three years.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.
There probably is but it’s really hard to compete with a company with deep pockets. That’s what I find pretty worrying about these unicorns. They kill a lot of potentially good smaller businesses just by being able to burn a lot of money.
I think they idea was to pick up the pieces when Slack implodes. Most of these businesses, looking for 10x growth, do so at some point.
gitlab and bitbucket ain't github, but as github started burning, they started picking up steam. github sold for $7.5 billion. If they can get 1% of that value, that's still $75 million. If they can do so on the cheap, maintaining control, that's not a bad return. I doubt something like gitlab requires more than 5 people to do well enough to achieve that, given patient, low-overhead investors. Done well, that's $75 million returns for a $10 million investment. If you toss the investor $50 mil, and each employee $5 mil, it's not bad.
On the other hand, as far as I know, patient low-overhead investors are a myth.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that GitLab could be five-person company, but it's much larger. I don't think they list the number of employees, but say 56 countries so I'd wager at least two or three times that.
I am saying, exactly, that it could be, waiting in github's wings with 5 employees. They were exactly that at some point. They started in 2011, and they went for Y Combinator in 2015. They waited, and waited, and then grew. The $100 mil raise was right after MS bought github.
How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)
I work in an industry that is a bit niche and weird SaaS world.
There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.
Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.
It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.
That's very true of niche businesses; one competitor price-warring can wipe our half your enterprise customers and they sometimes haven't got any way of growing except trying to pick up their customers. Not sure it's quite so true of general purpose SaaS sold to a market as big as "people that want to collaborate", especially not when the 800lb gorilla's pricing starts at $60/user/year and their apps aren't universally loved or difficult to replicate at smaller scales
It's much easier to develop a product if you don't need to make money for financing the development. Selling is also easier if you can afford marketing budgets and sales people. As long as they are losing money they are basically selling 1 dollar bills for 90 cents. Hard to compete with that.
It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.
You’d want to look at the market fundamentals carefully: if that company has high fixed costs and lacks strong customer lock-in, problems with satisfying customer needs, etc., you might reasonably think you could pick up customers with better pricing or support.
A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.
This also opens up the opportunity for a lot of lifestyle businesses. It may, at first, seem like a major downside having a venture backed startup competing directly with you. However, they are likely following an all or nothing strategy and there is a chance they go bust.
If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.
Investors want another Google, some people are perfectly happy with niche boutique product, and when all that investor money comes in it obscures what made that original product great. It's a shame that some great products only failed because of inflated expectations. If they had just stayed the course, they would've been fine.
The failure is that start up founders and investors fail to recognize that revenue is your KPI to optimize for in the long run, with a goal of making a profit in the not so distant future. Business is not a social network, and success isn't measured by how many friends/users/downloads you have. Money is the bottom line.
Of course if you give something away for free or sell it cheap enough at a loss, you'll get a lot of "customers". I could do the same by opening a free taco stand on the street. But it is in no way a sustainable business model.
What if your business model were to get a huge investment from some rich friends, give away free tacos, put all the other taco stands in your town out of business, become a taco stand monopoly, and then charge for tacos at any price you want?
If you put other taco stands out of business, their assets are cheap to buy. Tada! You are now competing with someone whose cost base is lower than yours.
Value creation doesn't come from the absence of other value creators.
I see what you're getting at, and that's the logic some VCs seem to be using. But rarely does it ever work, because you'll need to start charging sooner than later, even at a loss. And once you do, competition will show up.
See Uber vs Lyft.
You'd be better off investing in a real business with a real revenue plan. Still, yes, your model works in an environment where collusion can take place. Which is why collusion and the VC aristocracy is so damaging.
Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?
If the only thing a company achieves is wealth transfer from investor to founder (in the form of wages and/or a sub-valuation exit), then it's not a success but a failure. Unless you take founder economic gain as the sole success metric, but them it's not a company but a fraud scheme. The line between victim and perpetrator blur in interesting ways when a sub-valuation exit is a win for some investors and a loss for others.
It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.
The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.
The reason Evernote is dying is because it wasn't a good product. Nobody could fix the long-term tech debt they accumulated, which grew to become regular bugs in the product. And rampant feature bloat.
There are a slew of able replacements to Evernote now available. The landscape of note taking software in 2019 is a very different place than it had been when Evernote started. For them to beat back companies like Notion (and imho Amplenote) would have required heroics on par with what it took to build the company in the first place. Simply getting sync right is itself profoundly challenging for a company with their legacy [1]. It's years of infrastructure decisions, and a consistent dedication to an unpleasant development task. Newer competitors (incl free options like Google Docs/Keep) were ready and waiting to do better.
[1] I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough, but must be a pit of despair for companies liked Evernote who built their note content out of HTML
What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires?
It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far more modest than they realise.
But then again, the ones that remain reasonable don't get in the news I suppose.
In this case Evernote is far more than just CRUD and you can see that by comparing it to the CRUD self-hosted alternatives which exist and have sub-par syncing, editing, organization, and indexing. For all it's flaws, which caused them to lose me as a customer, it's definitely more complex than it appears at first glance.
Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.
And consider this: performing OCR on product labels is nothing like performing OCR on a neatly typed A4 paper that has been scanned. It is an enormously difficult feat that probably required at least a small team to accomplish.
I haven’t used Evernote to know enough, but at a 10,000 foot level, how trivial is it to scale any CRUD application to millions of customers? Considering scaling up and out, individual users, collaboration (if that’s a feature, I dunno), persistence and durability, i18n, personalization (if that exists in Evernote), and whatever metrics or information it captures about its users that might be sold to third parties.
Isn’t Google Docs CRUD to some extent? Any idea how much it is worth or even how many people support Google Docs?
Anyway, I’m not debating whether Evernote is actually worth whatever is it’s current valuation. I don’t agree with how can something be worth so much because its just CRUD.
> I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version
...
> it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.
Please don't conflate these entirely separate issues. You can charge a reasonable price for a product without use of the particularly destructive bait-and-switch Evernote pulled in 2016. I was a paying customer (having used Evernote since the early Time Band days), and quit my account in disgust.
I wanted two features to be a paying customer which should have been easy, the price was actually pretty reasonable.
Dark mode, or even just themes, as they would continuously break anyone who did client side decorations until they gave up. Their blistering white theme hurt my eyes to use and last I checked years later it's still one of the most requested features and still not done. You know what had themes? OneNote. I paid for it and even though I preferred Evernote in many ways, it didn't hurt my eyes to use it. Just in case I'm not being clear I'm not being figurative, the white themes in a lot of devices really hurts to look at. I switched back to Android from Apple for the same reason.
The second feature was a solid export option to text. Which frankly I could have waited for and still been happy paying.
I loved their inline images which still most apps don't do as well. They just refused to add the features and broke them if you added them yourself with every release.
> I've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough
Agreed. I'm in the same boat as you, and a huge amount of engineering and architecture went just into syncing. And it still has problems. Being client-side encrypted also complicates things because the server can't just apply diffs, so whole objects are being passed around for small modifications.
I used to love Evernote. The thing that killed my enthusiasm for them was the constant upselling, even for paid accounts.
I paid for a Plus monthly subscription (a lower tier) and there were constant advertisements within the app to upgrade to Premium. Upgrade buttons that would reappear even when I remove them, notices on the bottom of the note UI, etc.
I could understand the constant advertising for free accounts, but for paid accounts it was infuriating.
I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great ... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.
> isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.
I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.
Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.
The first order problem is that VCs are desperate and dumb, in a low interest rate economy everyone is looking for high yields and that desperation will lead you to believe that a note taking app is worth a billion dollars.
The second order effect is that the valley is still way too concentrated, there are billion dollar ideas out there that can really make a dent in the universe, and inspiring entrepreneurs across the globe -- but with such a myopic view, Sand Hill Road will never be able to reach out farther than suburban Redwood City.
Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap?
>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.
That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.
Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious.
I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility to outside money in your future ventures or interests.
Yeah there absolutely is a perverse incentive there.
Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.
YC’s own Sam Altman parlayed a failed startup into millions of dollars which he later turned into hundreds of millions with the mentorship of Paul Graham.
I stopped using Evernote after they started pushing their "sharing" features in the UI so hard that I struggled to use it to take notes. I just wanted a notepad that synced between devices and they wanted to be something else.
I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.
FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per year.
Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this:
Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far.
I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features lacking, namely no spell check (an issue that Joplin also has, although I believe this is being worked on). It also dosen't have a web clipper.
OneNote is ok, but I don't run Windows (I used it at work at one point). The killer feature it has is collaboration with other uses on the same domain, a la Google Docs. If that's not a use case you have, it's probably not worthwhile. Also no web clipper.
I briefly tried zim[3], but found that it lacked polish, and didn't have a mobile client or a web clipper, so I never fully moved on to it.
For a long time, I used Sphinx[4] plus several extensions and wrote everything in rst, with syncing accomplished via git. This turned out not to be very ergonomic to use, had no mobile client, and no web clipper.
Some other note taking apps that I've heard of but not tried personally:
* Turtl[5]
* TagSpaces[6] - tried the demo briefly, but didn't like the UI, also the iOS client was abandoned at that time
It also supports PDF documents as first-class objects. You can drag PDFs right into Devon and they get as PDFs, meaning that when you click on a note, you view the PDF.
The PDF support is top notch. The viewer is built into the UI, and also lets you open in tabs and new windows. Lots of markup tools right in the viewer. PDFs are indexed, of course.
Its rich text supports attachments, just like Evernote, but they're much nicer. Drag a GIF and movie into a text note and it becomes a live player.
You can drag URLs right into a folder and they'll come up as web pages or PDFs, depending. Then if you want to actually store the page/PDF, you can tell it to.
Its folder structure is much nicer than Evernote's. You just create folders and nested folders. None of this notebook nonsense.
It's got built-in iCloud syncing as well as syncing via other options (Dropbox, WebDAV, more).
You can run it local mode. Devon divides its data into "databases" which you can open and close. Databases can be encrypted. So, for example, you could store important private information (things like tax forms, government forms, 2FA recovery codes, etc.) in an encrypted database on a USB drive somewhere.
It has some weird features I don't use, but which some people might like. For example, "RSS feed" is a note type. Adding the feeds automatically ingests the RSS feed's items as new notes.
One neat feature is the inbox system that tracks what's read and unread. So you can just dump new stuff into the inbox for later categorization/deletion.
The search is great.
I also like that it's not opinionated about layout. You can change the layout a lot — to show the note editor or just the list of notes, for example.
Agree that Zim lacks polish, and that the Windows version is a few versions behind the Linux version. However it's really easy to import a bunch of plain text or markdown files (with .txt extension...just dump it in the data folder and restart)
Standard Notes puts a lot of emphasis on security but doesn't yet have native support for inline images.
Tagspaces seemed more like a file organizer that had word processing features tacked on.
OneNote...I wish they'd restore the ability to use notebooks locally, the newer version wants everything on OneDrive.
It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.
Ah, you know I just noticed that a couple of weeks ago. Alas, I use it only for work, and it still doesn’t work due to a OneDrive limit (can’t fetch my list of notebooks).
It’s still not as useful as the Evernote clipper, but it’s not as awful as I said it was.
My problem with Joplin is that it's not "true" Markdown (because of the metadata) - as such, I can't just use it as a "let's finish later properly this Markdown file" kind of solution.
How many of these companies will be around in 5 years? 10 years?
I am looking forward to iOS 13 Reminders and Notes. At least then my notes will not be on a platform that will probably dissolve within then next decade.
Well that's certainly fair. However in the case of both Joplin and Zim (and probably others), notes are either stored in or can be trivially exported to plain-text formats. Joplin's native, lossless backup format is just markdown in a tarball. Both are also open source.
Standard Notes might have a good chance of lasting that long. they seem very focused on the long term. can't remember the specifics now but I think there's a faq on their site where they explain their philosophy
I’ve been there a few times for sure. But searchability is hard to live without, and it’s hard to integrate links, code snippets, and images with dead tree based notes. A big part of this probably depends on what you’re taking notes about though.
It does seem like a problem that should have a solid, open source solution by now. Joplin is decent, but still lackin in a few areas.
OneNote is not bad. However, there is no way to export your notes from it and move them to another program. At least with Evernote I was able to export all my notes very easily and then import them to Bear.app.
Not on Linux. And last time I checked the macOS version was kinda hobbled compared to the Windows version. I know it has a web interface, but that isn't really a replacement for a native client.
a lot of what people wouldn't consider an outliner like Dynalist to be a replacement but i used to be a chronic Evernote user and somehow I am using only Dynalist now and nothing else.
it wasn't easy at first switching to something that didn't let you add images like Evernote does but the speed the at which you can jot down ideas in Dynalist made me forget about that problem
I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in
What I hate about the rush to subscriptions is the addition of cloud elements where they are not needed.
A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it.
Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail on Someone Else's Computer. That's a hard-no for me, and really too bad, but it did make me figure out that I can replicate the workflow I built around that with Mutt and a few shell scripts.
I don't know how common that is, but their attempt to extract regular revenue meant they lost revenue from me. I do sincerely hope it works out for them - I love indie devs! - but more and more, I find subscriptions lead me to substitute open source for whatever it is.
I had similar problem with 1Password. They wanted to move their model to subscriptions, so I decided to take another look at password managers and migrated to KeePass which turned out to be even better alternative (requires some manual setup, but I don't mind).
I also used to use 1Password and migrated to KeePass. The problem is that password management isn't a good fit as a service with the subscription model. It's completely unsexy (nothing wrong with that) and therefore doesn't have the "can't do without this" emotional factor that connects people to, say, their phone data plan, their gym membership, or even their Netflix habit. Password management is something that you set up once and hopefully forget about completely.
Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).
And even if they are at the beginning, they can randomly be removed later.
E.g. Adobe Lightroom, which I pay a subscription for, had the option of moving to a fully paid version (which was able to open data from the subscription). However now it's no longer possible and when (not if) I stop paying, I won't be able to migrate my catalog (=edits) anywhere, short of exporting all photos as tiffs.
But exporting as TIFFs seems a pretty reasonable option in that case. Your edits and catalog are all saved in a form you can import into another program.
Single purchase licenses are way better but a company with a cloud component can not be sustainable on that model. One option is to provide a way to offload the cloud storage to another company (such as Dropbox syncing).
Depends how much data users use. I have a feeling you could store and transfer a lot of data for a £40 fee.
A couple of alternatives:
1. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web platform to do this nowadays.
2. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature upgrades. Retro, I know.
3. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates. JetBeains works like this with their products.
Problem with single-purchase licenses is this: what if, after the short trial period, you decide that you don't like? Or what if you find a better alternative?
With SaaS, you can simply cancel your subscription. With a single-purchase license though, it's basically money you have flushed down the drain (unless the company is really generous with their refund policy).
I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example.
At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.
It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.
> It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.
I wonder if drilling into the whys of these choices would be useful. Like maybe password management is so crucial and with specific requirements that it makes no sense to pay someone else to take control of it.
I'm personally very willing to pay for smarter people than me to handle problems I have but maybe it's not always the case that they're smarter than me or maybe there is a really ergonomic solution I can retrofit to my needs.
Awesome for the company, but not so much for the customer.
As a customer who values his time I have to manage one more recurring payment, I have to interact with (up)sales-people disguised as customer service and I have to keep records of canceling the service n years (depending on jurisdiction) because I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
> I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
Is this a common practice? It sounds very unethical, but the cynic in me can imagine it happening.
The other side of that coin is subscription models are great for corporate software. Nobody wants to work at the company using ten year old broken software because corporate wants to delay the upgrade cost as long as possible and then roughing through the botched upgrade process.
Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.
Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people.
I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc.
Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.
I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.
The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)
I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the
There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.
So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.
> There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.
I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all."
Evernote stumbled and failed to execute so many times. The got hacked, had a clunky/yucky UI forever and lost people's notes. Plus, like a meal kit service or taxi app, they didn't have anything that was inherently defensible. That's why they failed.
Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up.
They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype
I've been enjoying Joplin[1] very much. I could criticize a few things about it, but it does have a web clipper (which was Evernote's killer feature for me), and supports cross-device sync. It even has a decent mobile client (I use it on iOS, I won't speak for the Android one), as well as a CLI (also haven't used it).
Code quality of the service they were offering:
It's improved a little recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.
Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.
In have 12k notes (stuck) in Evernote. Every now and then I look for alternatives and come across products like Notion [0], Bear, Apple Notes, Emacs+Org, Notability, and many more.
All of these tools have their strengths and use-cases. But none of them has the power of Evernote (API that lets me access my notes via Python, boolean search, ocr search, saved searches, folders and tags that I can jump to, local copy of my notes on my Mac). But Evernote is old. I would love to use markdown in my notes (see BearApp!), more flexible and nested folders (see Bear or Notion). Also my gut feeling tells me that this company won’t exist in a few years from now. So I need to move on someday.
There are a few companies that shouldn’t have pitched VCs that expect billion dollar valuations. Evernote is one of those companies. Soundcloud is another.
[0] Notion: too slow, does not keep a local copy of my notes, search is not comparable to Evernote‘s search capabilities)
Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit. Evernote's core functionality is extremely reliable and valuable to a lot of people, including myself. Maybe Apple should buy Evernote.
> Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit.
Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.
In the “classic” (non-iCloud, add an account via System Preferences → Internet Accounts) mode Notes.app does store notes on your e-mail server via IMAP.
Perhaps you haven't tried it recently, but Apple's notes app is excellent. I've certainly had less problems with Apple Notes than with Evernote's constant bloody sync conflicts.
I've also found Evernote's core functionality to be an unreliable piece of shit. Almost any time I edit a note on two devices (even hours apart, always online devices) I get a big nasty merge conflict.
Actually, no I don't. I get two copies of the file, with no merge helper.
Really? I think Notes is far superior to Evernote. Notes was shitty but the newer versions since the past 2 years allowed me to completely remove Evernote.
Why would you want to pay billions for a note-taking app when you can have a programmer, a PM and a UX guy make one for less than a rounding error in your budget?
It is time to tell the Pegasus from the Unicorns.
Unicorn is a magical creature horse with no wings. A Pegasus i a magical horse with wings. The macro economic policy that feeded Unicorns was ZIRP zero interest rate policy where magical unicorns pops up from central banks printing new money. Macro economic it could be that trade barriers read import taxes will feed inflation that will force central banks to raise interest rates.
Does it bother you that this mythical animal metaphor is being extended to yet another creature? But since we are here, I would consider Falkor the Luckdragon to be a better choice instead of a Pegasus.
Evernote is a great case study in lack of (or very poor) product management. They even have "The five percent problem" attributed to them. Their product lost any semblance of focus. What they sell obviously has _some_ value, or they'd be gone. But by making their software not particularly good at anything, they made it really hard to love.
Evernote lost me almost ten years ago. They somehow managed to lose about half of my data. Devices would sync and have merge conflicts, even when none of those files had updated (leading to an explosion of notes that were just duplicates). Search never seemed to produce relevant results. Google Keep came out and solved at least my most immediate needs, and I never went back.
At the end, I remember having real trouble trying to find features that I knew existed. The UI would change and I'd be lost. They had an explosion of features (like Office pre-ribbon) and nobody knew enough to (or had authority to) put their foot down and fix it. It's a real shame, but underscores the need for a smart product org and talented designers.
Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam".
I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to do like bringing an SD card with me when I head out instead of having to walk back into the house once I'm in the car and remember or bringing the new shampoo bottle into the shower before I get in it. Also useful would be repeatable checklists, for things like putting my xbox controller in my backback before heading out on a frequent long trip.
I love Google's Keep for this. It's very simple. Text notes or checklists, organized into major categories (labels). I have a set of shopping lists (grocery, hardware, office supply...), another set of bars and restaurants (by location/neighborhood), checklists for so many activities. Works seamlessly on my MBP and Android phone.
Although it's not purpose built for this, you can do this fairly well with Evernote itself. These guys describe a system that uses tags like @work @home etc. as part of a larger GTD setup: https://thesecretweapon.org/. (My own setup was originally based on their suggestions, and I've found it very handy over the years.)
One of those IFTT style projects, at the height of the Getting Things Done fad era had features like this. You could set locations or triggers (leave home wifi network as a proxy for "car" or "leaving the house") that would prompt you with reminders from that list.
I cannot remember anything else about it but the idea seemed really useful if you could make it reliable.
I've been playing around with a similar concept for the last year or so, with contexts like "On the go", "Have / Do not have internet connection", "Access to work intranet", etc., and whether a phone could do a good enough job of determining whether you're in a collection of those contexts.
Thanks for pointing me at OmniFocus, it looks really cool. Unfortunately, I'm an Android/Windows guy, and I doubt the Web version is going to be good enough at contexts for it to be worth it for me... :(
OneNote has several nested levels of tabs. You could make a tab at one level that says "Places" and then tabs under that for each location. Or, you can keep multiple lists with headers next to each other on a single page.
In Trello, you could have one list per location and just add items to the lists, then archive each item when you're done.
IOS built in reminders app should do the trick for the todos. Not sure about the checklists although you could hack that as a todo list you never tick off.
