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.
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.