Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#181

Post by secabeen » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

colechristensen wrote: post #145

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.

The other side of that coin is subscription models are great for corporate software. Nobody wants to work at the company using ten year old broken software because corporate wants to delay the upgrade cost as long as possible and then roughing through the botched upgrade process.

Nobody wants to work at that company, but that behavior is ubiquitous at non-profits, and it works okay.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#182

Post by danjac » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:54 PM UTC

codesushi42 wrote: post #107

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,…

The failure is that start up founders and investors fail to recognize that revenue is your KPI to optimize for in the long run, with a goal of making a profit in the not so distant future. Business is not a social network, and success isn't measured by how many friends/users/downloads you have. Money is the bottom line. Of course if you give something away for free or sell it cheap enough at a loss, you'll get a lot…

What if your business model were to get a huge investment from some rich friends, give away free tacos, put all the other taco stands in your town out of business, become a taco stand monopoly, and then charge for tacos at any price you want?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#183

Post by freshhawk » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:55 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #163

Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam". I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to…

One of those IFTT style projects, at the height of the Getting Things Done fad era had features like this. You could set locations or triggers (leave home wifi network as a proxy for "car" or "leaving the house") that would prompt you with reminders from that list.

I cannot remember anything else about it but the idea seemed really useful if you could make it reliable.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#184

Post by larrywright » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #168

charlesdaniels wrote: post #144

Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this: Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far. I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features…

OneNote does have a web clipper: https://www.onenote.com/clipper

It’s nearly useless. It embeds a screenshot of the page into a note. I don’t think anyone who works on OneNote has used a real web clipper before. Certainly not one as good as Evernote’s is.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#185

Post by ndiscussion » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

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.

I've also found Evernote's core functionality to be an unreliable piece of shit. Almost any time I edit a note on two devices (even hours apart, always online devices) I get a big nasty merge conflict.

Actually, no I don't. I get two copies of the file, with no merge helper.

https://jasonkincaid.net/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#186

Post by cefstat » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #169

charlesdaniels wrote: post #144

Lots of people here mentioned they are looking for Evernote replacements. Here is my experience with this: Joplin[1] seems to be the best in my view. It's cross-platform, has decent sync capabilities, plus a web clipper. I've been using this for a while and have liked it a lot so far. I used Quiver[2] for a while when I used to run macOS, but moved away from it because it was macOS specific. It also had some features…

OneNote works great on every platform. Really!

OneNote is not bad. However, there is no way to export your notes from it and move them to another program. At least with Evernote I was able to export all my notes very easily and then import them to Bear.app.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#187

Post by lloydde » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:56 PM UTC

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.

This is still my workflow today on iPhone and macOS. Works as well as it ever has for me.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#188

Post by sp332 » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 5:58 PM UTC

jimmaswell wrote: post #163

Tangentially, what I want in a note/todo app is that the first screen will be a list of categories, like "car" and "shower". Under "car" would be a note I made that says "bring new SD card for dash cam". I'd look in "car" before heading out to the car, and see that note and remember to bring the SD card out to it. I'd habitually check all of these before doing anything, so I didn't keep forgetting things I needed to…

OneNote has several nested levels of tabs. You could make a tab at one level that says "Places" and then tabs under that for each location. Or, you can keep multiple lists with headers next to each other on a single page.

In Trello, you could have one list per location and just add items to the lists, then archive each item when you're done.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#189

Post by billfruit » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

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.

I think Microsoft's OneNote is the more feature comparable competitor to Evernote.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#190

Post by egypturnash » Fri, Jun 28, 2019, 6:01 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #94

gaze wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred.…

The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)

I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the

There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.

So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.