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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

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Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#12

Post by dalbasal »

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 know people who like Evernote.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#15

Post by acdha »

duxup wrote: post #10
hartator wrote: post #7

The thing is - what made Evernote great at some point - take a picture of anything and forget it doesn't work anymore. You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.

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. There's a lot of gee whiz out there.

> 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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#16

Post by levythe »

duxup wrote: post #11
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #9

Basing a business on a notepad app seems unwise...

It did fill a serious need though. Other people followed including Microsoft making their own product as well.

Microsoft OneNote was released in 2003, while Evernote was founded in 2007. There were changes Microsoft made to allow OneNote to better compete with Evernote, but they did not make the product itself in response to Evernote.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#17

Post by mattferderer »

duxup wrote: post #11
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #9

Basing a business on a notepad app seems unwise...

It did fill a serious need though. Other people followed including Microsoft making their own product as well.

Evernote came a decade or so after Microsoft's OneNote. Evernote did make Microsoft improve their product though. It seemed as Microsoft was improving OneNote, Evernote started to go backwards.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#19

Post by matwood »

slantaclaus wrote: post #14

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.

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