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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

51–60 of 354 posts

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#52
post #45
post #25

Article missed the MOST important part of Evernote's collapse, IMHO: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13979778/evernote-privac... That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without mentioning that.

Same reason I left after years of paying, they later backtracked but I’d moved on and don’t really trust they won’t do similar again.

> they later backtracked

Evernote never embraced privacy. On-device encrypted and analyzed notes would have made them a natural Apple acquisition, to boot.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#53
post #32
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make…

"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 convert…

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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#54
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes to a different machine without using iCloud?

Not really. You can export notes as a PDF.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#56
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

just curious, is it easy to export all the notes to a file, or migrate notes to a different machine without using iCloud?

I don't think there's a way to share Notes without iCloud, no.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#57
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make…

I'd like to read that; it sounds like a good story. Do you happen to have a link?

https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#58
post #36

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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#59
post #18
post #8

http://archive.is/yqb83 (Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)

Thank you so much, the ny times seems to have my number whatever i do but this works.

$ curl [nytimes article link] > article.html

Then open it.

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

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#60
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 make…

I'd like to read that; it sounds like a good story. Do you happen to have a link?

https://medium.com/s/story/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build...

Thanks to rutierut who remembered it better than I did ;)

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