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Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

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Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Retrospective laws like that would face stiff opposition.

Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.

Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#202

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

Also Obsidian is a small team (< 5 people IIRC?) and they don't have to monetize as aggressively to make back the money that VCs have funded them with.

I think this is the key issue here. There are a lot of VC funded start ups that have a good product and a solid market fit, but they were never supposed to become 500+ employee companies.

If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.

In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#204

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side.

I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app.

Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work.

For some reason, Evernote (both android app and windows client) just seemed to get worse every year.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#205

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

I would like to pick your brain about Notion for the reasoning you mentioned. Do you think Notion would be the next Evernote - in both the good and the bad way? Both the services are serving the same segment of the consumer market & both started out with generous offerings for free. I could be wrong how I see it but it would be nice to hear something interesting.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#206
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Evernote CEO Phil Libin announced at the recent Le Web London conference that the company will soon set up a protected fund and include a legally binding guaratee that users’ data will be maintained for 100 years That almost sounds like a threat to commit a crime in certain jurisdictions. A lot has changed regarding how we talk about data in the last decade.

GDPR was not designed to target service providers providing a data service storing and processing data that the customer explicitly contracted for. That would be under data processing which has different rules. Unless the guarantee was for Evernote to hold this data for 100 years irrespective of what the customer wishes and for example after the customer has ended their contract for the service, this angle doesn't ap…

Many companies are purging data associated with inactive accounts as part of data minimization. If the user specifically asked for indefinite retention before going inactive, that might be one thing, but as a general practice it could be risky.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#208

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#209

I feel like Evernote is a prime example of the pains of trying to convert free users to paying users for the same features, something we see in many VC funded software from its era. Once you give something away, it's damn near impossible to take it back, even if you plead your case as honestly as Evernote did. Evernote was great. Honestly, it was worth paying for. But they gave away the farm too early, and folks feel…

For me, it's an example of a company messing up the technical side. I was a happy customer in the beginning. Until I didn't have an important note that I had prepared for a meeting, because it didn't sync to my phone. A few weeks later, it happened again. I lost trust in the app. Then the Android App got worse and worse. It sometimes didn't sync at all. Notes would conflict all the time, and I'd lose work. For some r…

Exactly. I would have happily paid them 10 bucks a month in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars forever if they'd just maintained the apps and kept them up to date. Instead they focused on adding features few people wanted, and then completely rewrote the apps in Electron, resulting in a slow experience that was (and still is, years later) missing multiple core note-taking features, and is increasingly unreliable.

I kept hoping, as theoretically Evernote is absolutely perfect for my needs, if it would just work. But clearly the writing is on the wall at this point and I need to find an alternative.

Re: Tell HN: Nearly all of Evernote’s remaining staff has been laid off

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ex post facto laws should be prohibited in any civilized country.

Every privacy policy and terms of service document is an ex post facto "law" if it was changed even once.

Public laws and private contracts are two different things.

For one, you can typically opt out of the latter, but not the former.

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