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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

#251

Post by PeterStuer »

avip wrote: post #237
ljm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the issue of hypergrowth or ‘blitzscaling’. Plenty of companies will deliver just as much, if not more, with a 30 person strong team, as they would with 600, or 10,000. But a thirty person strong team isn’t going to get a multi-million cash injection unless they plug it all into a swanky office and an ever-growing wage bill. I greatly admire Basecamp and it’s founders, DHH and Jason Fried, for completely bucking…

Whatsapp, possibly the exception that makes the rule, had $1.5B valuation and $50M vc influx with a tiny team.

Because they had the user's phone numbers. This seemingly little thing is what made them valuable.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#252

Post by distances »

flerchin wrote: post #64
cntlzw wrote: post #4

paywall

Delete NYT cookie, refresh page. In Chrome and Firefox this is available in just a few clicks by clicking the area immediately to the left of the URL.

I just get "You're in private mode" notification even without cookies. Firefox Focus only has a private mode, and tbh I wouldn't turn it off even if I could.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#253

Post by nzealand »

tempestn wrote: post #229
dirtyaura wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

You don't think Microsoft Teams might do the same thing to Slack as Microsoft OneNote did to Evernote?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#254

Post by wstrange »

vbezhenar wrote: post #236
shakkhar wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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 is part of GSuite now - so it has a deprecation policy.

It is also very easy to save your notes as a google doc. I don't think there is a lot of risk...

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#255

Post by dasil003 »

briandear wrote: post #209
bobthepanda wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

Engineers are expensive. If you want to even launch, you need money to pay people (if even just yourself.) Boostrapping does work (see Basecamp,) but that business evolved out of a consulting business and wasn’t started from scratch, so they had advantages of paying clients subsidizing Basecamp development. A new kind of “micro-VC” where 10x returns weren’t the goal might be a start, but then it would be tough to rai…

They also came out of the golden era of blogging where you could develop a significant audience subscribed directly through RSS without requiring some middleman distribution or aggregator taking your eyeballs. I guess it can still be done today with social media, but there’s just so much content out there it’s much harder to develop a loyal user base like 37signals did back in the day.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#256

Post by azinman2 »

vaishaksuresh wrote: post #198
etairaz wrote: post #78

Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app ( https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind... ). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Ever…

I took all my grad school notes and audio recordings in Evernote. I even paid for additional storage. Then they decided to abandon loyal customers and charge subscription for just syncing additional devices. I've since moved to the notes app. One less subscription for me.

Same. Notes isn’t quite the same product — can’t easily clip webpages, create annotations, tags, etc, but largely I don’t have as much a need for that anymore!

I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#257

Post by mercwear »

rossdavidh wrote: post #226
bobthepanda wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real problem is that everything is focused on becoming a thousands-strong workforce and a valuation of billions. IMO lot of software could be small or medium sized businesses making a small but steady profit. But the whole VC/startup culture has made this fundamentally unsexy.

Bingo, right there. Once you have taken X bajillion dollars from a VC, you have to find some way of pretending that you can become worth that valuation (plus some profit for the VC's). Thus, a perfectly valid small-to-medium company becomes a moneypit big company.

You nailed it - Evernote is just trying to make their investors happy while doing there best to not piss off users TOO much. Having been in this situation myself I can tell you it's a not great for customers at all. But you do what you must to survive.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#259

Post by ghaff »

muro wrote: post #240
ghaff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have anything against a subscription if: - I use it regularly. (Which means I'll probably be upgrading to new versions anyway.) - The price is reasonable for the value - I can export my data in a form that's still useful/accessible once I cancel my subscription. The problem is that all those conditions are frequently not met.

And even if they are at the beginning, they can randomly be removed later. E.g. Adobe Lightroom, which I pay a subscription for, had the option of moving to a fully paid version (which was able to open data from the subscription). However now it's no longer possible and when (not if) I stop paying, I won't be able to migrate my catalog (=edits) anywhere, short of exporting all photos as tiffs.

But exporting as TIFFs seems a pretty reasonable option in that case. Your edits and catalog are all saved in a form you can import into another program.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#260

Post by cmroanirgo »

raverbashing wrote: post #216
muro wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I'm torn on this. I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example. At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.

It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.
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