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Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

evernote.com

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Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#241
This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play.

Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#242

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…

The thing I learned was that maybe a small successful app or service can just be a small successful app or service and not have to grow indefinitely. At some point it seemed like Evernote became obsessed with growing the revenue / business and not making a better product.

In other words, they took VC funding.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#243
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.

I dumped Evernote when they spontaneously deleted half my notes from my desktop and their backup server and couldn't recover them.

Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#244
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.

Not only decent, Evernote was great before they ditched their native apps.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#246
a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time!

b) Obsidian [1] simplified the zettelkasten [2], that anyone must give it a chance. Just like you must give Vim.

    1. https://obsidian.md/

    2. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#247
I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan.

I’m one of those whale customers that SaaS companies love because I’m fairly price insensitive and I often don’t have tons of usage or support needs. For a solid 5 or 6 years, I’d been giving Evernote $50 a year, even though I mostly used other services. But raising the price 40% (and neutering the free plan that was the only reason they had as many users as they did) was enough that even I took the time to cancel.

It’s a sad end to what was at one time such a good (if significantly overvalued) product, but the writing has been on the wall for 6 years.

OneNote is more than good enough for most people who want an Evernote sort of note system and for people who are more particular and want to pay, the new wave of single brain apps is just far, far better.

When Evernote tried expanding into food and all these other areas, that was a sign things were getting out of control.

I used to be mad about what happened to Skitch, but CleanShot has finally filled that void from me from back before Evernote neutered and abandoned it.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#248
post #143
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.

It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote operated in. The default model for software startups was to leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be fo…

> Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

How would it, and how would they?

The way I understand it, the growth model is pretty ultimately set in stone when a company takes VC money. It's a Faustian bargain - you get a big and cheap loan, at the price of aiming for "some fantasy growth", or dying in the attempt. Companies that want sustainable growth take loans from banks.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#249
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps. They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and des…

> Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices. They were maybe first company I experienced that blew…

Bingo. When they started to add every feature known to man because they had to live up to some $1b valuation that never made sense, the core product really suffered.

Not everything is meant to be a multi-billion dollar business and that’s ok!

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#250
post #63

The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app. I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them. From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it…

> The End of an Error not sure if that is autocorrect, or a joke, or autocorrect making a pun from "end of an era" with "error" given the sentiment. either way, it's funny!

Yeah, regardless of the two it is, I'm saving that for later.
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