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 Newhires end up doing broken things because they found an outdated doc, you have to pick through multiple versions of other people's crap that never goes away, etc.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.
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