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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

#301

Post by kyrra »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #277
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.

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

When did you use it last? It has had some large changes for the backend 1.5-2 years ago I believe.

I definitely had some syncing issues with in the past as well, but I understand it has improved.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#302

Post by jacques_chester »

danjac wrote: post #182
codesushi42 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you put other taco stands out of business, their assets are cheap to buy. Tada! You are now competing with someone whose cost base is lower than yours.

Value creation doesn't come from the absence of other value creators.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#303

Post by L_Rahman »

dirtyaura wrote: post #214
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…

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…

$100M in annual revenues isn't even much of a stretch.

1.6M knowledge workers paying an average $5 a month for their primary note taking app - apps on every platform: iOS, Android, iPad, Mac, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux, encrypted cloud sync, and integration with other apps - feels like a very plausible reality that gets the company to a $1B valuation.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#304

Post by StavrosK »

andrewl wrote: post #288
OBLIQUE_PILLAR wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The programmers who maintain MediaWiki, the programmers who write the backend and frontend of Wikipedia, and the people who run the organization that raises money to fund Wikipedia, are all seperate organizations. Giving users the tools to view and edit Wikipedia in every language and on a variety of mobile devices is actually a lot of work.

The Evernote page in Wikipedia says that Evernote has 251-500 employees.

Thanks, I had the same confusion as the GP.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#305

Post by cameronbrown »

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.

Keep has had many many changes the past few years, including being added as a core G Suite product, so it now has a deprecation policy. Won't get shut down out of the blue.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#306

Post by vaishaksuresh »

azinman2 wrote: post #256
vaishaksuresh wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know a lot of people use One Note, might be worth considering. My use-case is not that heavy right now, so just it is just notes for me at the moment.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#307

Post by tech_tuna »

lazyant wrote: post #248
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.

Google Keep updated itself and deleted all my data, everywhere, just saying.

Google Didn't Keep

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#308

Post by [deleted] »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #291
jwr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed. Natural selection at work, I'd say.

My problem with it was that I typed things and Evernote would just delete them on sync.

[deleted]

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#309

Post by dyarosla »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #291
jwr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed. Natural selection at work, I'd say.

My problem with it was that I typed things and Evernote would just delete them on sync.

Making it effectively... Nevernote?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#310

Post by tech_tuna »

stcredzero wrote: post #193
CPLX wrote: post #118

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it. It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping…

But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well. Evernote seems to have some sort of "reality distortion field" which is somewhat like Apple's, but somewhat mis-calibrated. (Apple's own "reality distortion field" originated with Steve Jobs, and has been losing its calibration ever since he departed this world.) They have a tendency to start with things which feel "magic" then have them fad…

This is how I feel about Slack. I use it, it's everywhere but it's pretty ordinary.

FFS, they still haven't implemented a dark theme yet. . . isn't that something you can just do in CSS?

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