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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

#331

Post by mathattack »

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…

Microsoft picked up much of the functionality in OneNote. Even if the cut and paste between other MSFT apps is awful, once you have Office it’s kind of hard to justify paying for something else. Seems like an old pattern resurfacing.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#332

Post by mandeepj »

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?

Have you tried this - https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf ?

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#334

Post by chrisyeh »

ljm wrote: post #210
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.

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…

Instagram reached 100 million users and sold for over $1 billion with a 6-person team (they had just hired a few more people when they sold). Investors don't care how many people you have; they care about how fast the business is growing.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#335

Post by chrisyeh »

ljm wrote: post #210
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.

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…

As one of the co-creators of blitzscaling, it's important to note that we're careful in the book to say that most businesses shouldn't blitzscale. Basecamp is a great example of how bootstrapping can work. You can also listen to the story of MailChimp on the Masters of Scale podcast.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#337

Post by rando444 »

jwr wrote: post #161
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…

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.

I think it's a problem of management not knowing what to do with developers once you have a solid stable product.

Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.

And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.

WinZip was a good example of this.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#338

Post by nicwolff »

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…

Evernote's real value was in expanding note-taking to digitize and OCR every document in your life, saving them all permanently and making them easily retrievable. They bundled and co-marketed with ScanSnap to provide an integrated solution that I think would have been attractive and valuable to almost anyone.

Then they stopped adding relevant features – why did I have to manually title a note that was being OCRed? – and started adding cruft. Even now, if they pivot back to perfecting the document storage product they can lead that market.

Or if they wait for Apple to add OCR to Notes they can lose it forever.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#340

Post by orthecreedence »

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've spent the last couple years trying to build an Evernote replacement. Sync for us is very tough

Agreed. I'm in the same boat as you, and a huge amount of engineering and architecture went just into syncing. And it still has problems. Being client-side encrypted also complicates things because the server can't just apply diffs, so whole objects are being passed around for small modifications.

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