Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons • Hacker News Board

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#251

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:05 AM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #150

awill wrote: 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.

Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service. If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose? I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value fo…

> Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service.

That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules.

> If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose?

A user, and a potential source of future users.

For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us").

Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering").

In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#252

Post by another-reader » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:08 AM UTC

I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late.

To this day, the one thing I truly truly miss from Evernote was the web archive. They had the best at the time, and I have yet to see it matched.

So, it seems from the thread that I should give it a try again?

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#253

Post by squarefoot » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

CastFX wrote: post #117

squarefoot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They became sorta famous over here for developing the Covid19 contact tracing app "Immuni" that was then adopted by the Italian Ministry of Health. Being a government project, they probably got a life-changing amount of money because of that. I can't comment on the quality of the app as i never used it. https://github.com/immuni-app

Actually this is wrong. They did not receive any funds from the Government. There is an article in Italian with the words of one of the founders. https://www.corriere.it/tecnologia/20_aprile_22/luca-ferrari...

I stand corrected, thanks for the link.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#254

Post by sharkweek » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:33 AM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #240

codalan wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous issues were bad enough for me to drop Evernote as a paying customer. I would get notes that would not sync correctly, forcing me to resolve it by hand. Even after doing that, it would still have sync conflicts. This was core functionality that just didn't work. During this time, they were busy jamming in features I definitely didn't want or need. Every release would be a slower, buggier version of its pr…

I really, really want to know what kind of person sees a pair of socks with a productivity app logo on them and thinks "I need these in my life."

I worked at a startup that gave “store credits” away as, try not to laugh, morale boosters so employees could buy company swag.

It was pretty hilarious.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#255

Post by teepo » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:40 AM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #31

vxNsr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got the reference. Bending spoons, doing the impossible, like in the matrix. At least the name makes sense now.

Isn't spoon-bending a "hoaxy" magic trick? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending

It's also a heroin usage trope.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#256

Post by lmm » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:48 AM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #254

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really, really want to know what kind of person sees a pair of socks with a productivity app logo on them and thinks "I need these in my life."

I worked at a startup that gave “store credits” away as, try not to laugh, morale boosters so employees could buy company swag. It was pretty hilarious.

That seems like a less bad version of handing out specific items of company swag ("woo, a t-shirt in the wrong size"). At least you can pick something that's useful to you.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#257

Post by ghuntley » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:52 AM UTC

awill wrote: 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.

> 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.

Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then.

See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#258

Post by imwillofficial » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:52 AM UTC

Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#259

Post by QuarterReptile » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:52 AM UTC

renewiltord wrote: post #145

boh wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What does leverage mean here?

The leverage is the difference between valuation at most recent round and what a more boring company performing the same role in the market would have as a public market cap.

The difference between those two values represents a gap that has to be closed before you're on steady ground, and the gap widens at a higher-than-normal rate because of the growth expectations of the VC money.

Anyway, that's what it looks like to this complete outsider. Companies full of very capable people, pushed to do desperate things, and to do those things quickly. And, like the churn of leveraged Wall Street finance, there are plenty of people who live for the froth of it all.

Re: Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

#260

Post by offtotheraces » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:59 AM UTC

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…

This is a common response. unfortunately it doesn’t hold water: the average lifetime of a paid user of Splice is somewhere in the 7-10 week range (source is confidential).

What super users of editing products do you know that only stay 10 weeks?

None. What’s actually happening is Bending Spoons is exploiting the App Store’s ease of payment and dark patterns to trick unsuspecting users into enrolling in a super high priced subscription without their knowledge.