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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#171
post #125

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#172

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…

None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but never spend an actual dollar on their services.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#173

Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?

Ex Evernote employee here. Someone else posted this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil... Employee shares are (apparently) being priced next to nothing. My understanding while working there was that if the company sold for $300m or less, we’d get nothing. So, $340m sounds about right. It’s a fire sale.

Seems unlikely they'd spend that whole round of funding on one app. I bet it was much, much less.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#174

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…

> 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. I've espoused this before, but I've come around to moderating my take on this. "Almost never" is an exaggeration. I agree that they "almost never" work, but that's not the same as there being no case (there's a difference between "should not have done" and "should have done differently". After many years of seeing…

> unlikely to have learnt enough

There is an important caveat here - sometimes the original is rough not because you didn't know how to do it better, but because you were emphasizing speed and flexibility e.g. very early stage startup and you don't really understand the product here.

[see also, ship the prototype problem]

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#175
post #172

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…

None of what you wrote makes them sound like a "bad actor". All of these are good things for a failing business. Why shouldn't a photo editing app be $10/week? If you don't think you are getting that much value out of it then don't subscribe. Yet there is probably a group of power users who will gladly pay that amount. Evernote needs to be catering to them, not the millions of users who will endlessly complain but ne…

> is $10 a WEEK.

Paxys. You probably don't have a clear idea of what kind apps he was referring to. There are no power users in this case.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#176

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…

I must admit it's not entirely obvious why that business model makes them "not a good actor". And what's with the snark about Italian banks?

> is $10 a WEEK.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#177
I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system.

Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out. Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#178
These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves:

* Multiple tags per note

* OCR/search on attachments

* Web clipping (full page and individual sections)

* Mail to Evernote (with attachments)

* Decent WYSIWYG

* Good scanning support ("scannable" app)

It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features, pls reply!

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#179

This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor: “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple: - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness) - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (…

Came here to write something similar, you did it better.

I will never accept that selling wallpaper apps or something with the same level of complexity for hundred of dollars every year is an acceptable business model.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#180

I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory: 1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it. 2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door. 3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build…

Was there any other company doing real time collaboration in 2008 (when Evernote launched)? IIRC that predates even Google docs, so I wouldn't consider that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
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