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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

#271

Post by xvector »

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…

How many of these companies will be around in 5 years? 10 years?

I am looking forward to iOS 13 Reminders and Notes. At least then my notes will not be on a platform that will probably dissolve within then next decade.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#272

Post by slantyyz »

e40 wrote: post #206
whack wrote: post #165

The main problem with Evernote seems to be that their total-available-market is way too small to justify their valuation and expenses. It's core success is as a note-taking app - how big is the market for that really? They are competing against free alternatives like Emacs-org-mode, Apple Notes, and Google Keep. Sure, they can carve out a niche for themselves as a premium multi-device cloud-based no-ads app. But a $1…

I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

I haven't seen the name Remember the Milk mentioned in years. I had to google them and was a little surprised to see that they're still around.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#273

Post by lloydde »

hartator wrote: post #244
lloydde wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.

It might be that I’m a paying customer. I get enough value out of iOS Scannable into Evernote with OCR to warrant the $35/year.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#274

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

IOS built in reminders app should do the trick for the todos. Not sure about the checklists although you could hack that as a todo list you never tick off.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#275

Post by idlewords »

taberiand wrote: post #247
wbharding wrote: post #243

The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for th…

What confuses me about products like Evernote and other CRUD services is - it's just a notebook app. How is it truly worthy of the army of coders, or the millions or billions in valuation that similar CRUD acquires? It feels like there is a tendency of projects like this to grow too far, too fast, until they fail - dollar signs in their eyes obscuring a reasonable vision of their scale and potential, which is far mor…

Evernote had a lot of odd tech bits in it, it wasn't just a CRUD app. At one point you could take a picture of a beer bottle and it would OCR the label for you automatically. I'm sympathetic to your argument (since that's how Pinboard competitors have died) but Evernote was a universe of its own.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#276

Post by crispinb »

wbharding wrote: post #243

The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for th…

> I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version

...

> it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for their use.

Please don't conflate these entirely separate issues. You can charge a reasonable price for a product without use of the particularly destructive bait-and-switch Evernote pulled in 2016. I was a paying customer (having used Evernote since the early Time Band days), and quit my account in disgust.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#277

Post by shawabawa3 »

shakkhar wrote: post #220
e40 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Keep because I had sync issues with Remember The Milk on Android and wasn't about to continue paying them, but Keep is trash. It's a typical side project from a Googler. It's exactly what it was like when they rolled it out. Maybe a tiny feature here or there was added (I haven't noticed any), but it's a static service that is barely usable.

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.

Google keep does not sync reliably. I really tried to use it, but it's just terrible (unless it's improved recently). I've had it take days to sync before

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#278

Post by cannonedhamster »

wbharding wrote: post #243

The Evernote detractors camp has grown to epic proportions in the past year, which is warranted, but I strongly disagree with the contingent of detractors who claim that Evernote's downfall was having the audacity to raise their prices, or limit the scope of their free version. So many of the customer rants I read are focused on this aspect, and it misses the point. Good products are entitled to charge a price for th…

I wanted two features to be a paying customer which should have been easy, the price was actually pretty reasonable.

Dark mode, or even just themes, as they would continuously break anyone who did client side decorations until they gave up. Their blistering white theme hurt my eyes to use and last I checked years later it's still one of the most requested features and still not done. You know what had themes? OneNote. I paid for it and even though I preferred Evernote in many ways, it didn't hurt my eyes to use it. Just in case I'm not being clear I'm not being figurative, the white themes in a lot of devices really hurts to look at. I switched back to Android from Apple for the same reason.

The second feature was a solid export option to text. Which frankly I could have waited for and still been happy paying.

I loved their inline images which still most apps don't do as well. They just refused to add the features and broke them if you added them yourself with every release.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#279

Post by charlesdaniels »

xvector wrote: post #271
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…

How many of these companies will be around in 5 years? 10 years? I am looking forward to iOS 13 Reminders and Notes. At least then my notes will not be on a platform that will probably dissolve within then next decade.

Well that's certainly fair. However in the case of both Joplin and Zim (and probably others), notes are either stored in or can be trivially exported to plain-text formats. Joplin's native, lossless backup format is just markdown in a tarball. Both are also open source.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#280

Post by zizee »

distances wrote: post #207
woofie11 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

I'm not sure if you're trying to say that GitLab could be five-person company, but it's much larger. I don't think they list the number of employees, but say 56 countries so I'd wager at least two or three times that.

Gitlab also raised 100 mil on a 1.1 billion valuation fairly recently: https://www.businessinsider.com/gitlab-valuation-microsoft-g...
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