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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#201

Post by kjs3 »

fairity wrote: post #110

Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base? It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out. Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an inves…

Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we didn't get around to fixing all the boring issues with the core product you're paying for"; that's just insulting. The only thing I imagine worse, if I'm already paying you money for the product, is for you come to me with "Oh...you want it to work? Fix the bugs and the performance? That'll be a $50 'investment'.". That guarantees I'm going to look elsewhere real fast, because fixing bugs and improving performance isn't a one-time thing and you'll be back to extract more from me at some random time in the future where your business decisions don't cover the next shortfall.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#202

Post by underwater »

bighi wrote: post #115
jef_leppard wrote: post #35

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…

I think number 1 could be done, but not like Evernote did. It's been what? 3 years since they released their javascript app, and they still didn't rewrite some important old features. Just last week we got back the option to start writing a note in the title instead of the body. 3 years! I could write an entire Evernote competitor from scratch in 3 years, as a single developer (as a javascript app, not as multiple na…

A rewrite is not the same as a writing a similar app from scratch.

You need to worry about deciding what functionality to preserve, what to change, and what to throw away. Most rebuilds either fail because they skip this step and the result is inadequate for the job, or they do this step and get bogged down in the minutiae of locking down requirements, digging into edge cases, and stakeholder management.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#203

Post by mehrzad »

thefourthchime wrote: post #49
egypturnash wrote: post #18

At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription…

I tried a few alternatives and landed on Apple Notes. It's blinding fast, and while it's not exactly feature-rich, it does everything I need while being seamlessly synced to the cloud and my devices.

If you put multiple images in an Apple Notes note, it’s insanely slow and also it only exports as txt files so no images afaicr

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#204

Post by kevinmgranger »

bkishan wrote: post #84
hirundo wrote: post #54

The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball. Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

If you port over those images to Apple photos, you can literally search the for the text right inside the photos app. It works pretty accurately for all printed text ime.

Is there some way to link to those photos via URL, or something like that?

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#205

Post by Manjuuu »

paxys wrote: post #199
Manjuuu wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different type of applications, I remember an old thread on twitter about one useless wallpapers app being sold for that kind of money. And it was not the only one. It's a business model.

Not sure what "useless wallpaper" app you are talking about but I just took a look at https://bendingspoons.com/products and everything there seems pretty useful and well designed.

That minuscule subset is well designed, yes, the rest decent BUT some of them with in my opinion predatory pricing in many cases, $9/wk to download some wallpaper or some sleep noises app. But yes, they are not the only ones doing it. If you are interested search on the appstore among the boatload of apps they have.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#206

Post by Karunamon »

paxys wrote: post #172
offtotheraces wrote: post #65

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…

I see this complaint a lot and it never really made any sense to me. If something is a scam it has to do with the delivery or the advertisement of the product. But the pricing? No. It is not possible for the price of something by itself to render something a scam. If it costs too much it costs too much, this does not imply malfeasance on the part of the seller.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#207

Post by MrZongle2 »

etempleton wrote: post #66

on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.

I switched to Joplin a couple of years back and don't regret the move. Was able to import all my Evernote stuff as well, which was one deciding factor.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#209

Post by fairity »

kjs3 wrote: post #201
fairity wrote: post #110

Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base? It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out. Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an inves…

Paying recurring for an app should make this problem non-existent. If $5/mo or whatever doesn't allow you to deliver a stable, performant product, then you need to reconsider your pricing or your business model. Evernote isn't a startup and they should have this figured out by now. And do not do a release that amounts to "look at this whizzy, non-core feature we've been working hard to add (see: chat) which means we…

I'm imagining that $50 raised from 10 million people ($500m raised) would allow for an outright recap of the entire company, including bringing in new management that serves the users' best interests.

I agree it isn't ideal, but as a user, it's far better than allowing Evernote to get sold to someone whose goal is to raise prices and squeeze profits. Many Evernote users like me are in a situation where the switchover cost is several orders of magnitude larger than $50. So, the dynamics might look more like 1% of the user base investing $5000 each.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#210

Post by pclmulqdq »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #167
renewiltord wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it? SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK.

Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's growth expectations make your average loan shark's interest rates look downright reasonable.

Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it (liquidation preferences, etc.).

Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.

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