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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

#131

Post by woofie11 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #66
jerf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#132

Post by criddell »

sp332 wrote: post #46
hirundo wrote: post #41

I'd like to leave Evernote (I moved to Linux, which they don't support, and their web app is insufficient). But for me the killer feature is doing OCR on PDFs and images you post and including it in search. I haven't found that elsewhere. Does anyone else do that?

Dropbox just added this at the end of last year. https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/09/dropbox-finally-adds-autom...

Dropbox feels like they are in the same shitty spot that Evernote is in. They took way too much cash from investors and can't run a great little file-syncing-and-sharing business.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#133

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

duxup wrote: post #21
dalbasal wrote: post #12

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,…

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…

Gumroad?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#134

Post by greesil »

acd wrote: post #127

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 int…

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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#135

Post by 40acres »

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.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#137

Post by charlesdaniels »

olivermarks wrote: post #90

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

> there isn't anything better i'm aware of

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).

1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#138

Post by jimktrains2 »

andybak wrote: post #100
yumraj wrote: post #99

That is all fine, but there fundamental question still remains as to why anyone would think, or thought, that a note taking app would be worth billions in valuation.

Yeah. I remember thinking the same thing about microblogging and photo sharing. :-(

And chat, e.g. whatsapp and alack

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#140

Post by yoz-y »

muro wrote: post #124
achillesheels wrote: post #91

SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity. However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.

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).

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).
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