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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

#361

Post by seanhunter »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #202
PhoenixReborn wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fou…

This is super-important. Sometimes the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.

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

#362

Post by seanhunter »

belthesar wrote: post #79

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 have to say changing to obsidian has been great.

1. there are opensource tools to convert from evernote to obsidian so it Just Works [tm] and you don't lose anything.

2. My docs are now in markdown in a normal filesystem so it's easy for me to back them up, sync them, have everything work on different OSs etc

3. I choose to pay for obsidian sync because I want to fund them but you don't have to

4. Community plugins are awesome. For example I just got done editing my "Linear Algebra Cheat sheet" which is full of Latex equations. It looks beautiful, if I want to jump into vim to edit I can but editing in obsidian works fine also.

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

#363

Post by hu3 »

Zetobal wrote: post #231
hu3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I use https://github.com/laurent22/joplin It's markdown, open-source, free. With desktop and mobile support. Syncs notes to any cloud of your choice for free. (I use One Drive) Optionaly you can pay them to sync your data on their cloud. So they even have a compelling business model!

Joplin will be unusable until they give up on obfuscating the md files.

Sorry I don't understand. It allows to export to many formats, including markdown:

https://i.imgur.com/dK6trmN.png

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

#364

Post by jrm4 »

emodendroket wrote: post #95
jrm4 wrote: post #17

At the risk of I told you so, it was always a stupid idea. Any service like this that "requires the cloud," but is personal or individual and could be replaced by completely non-cloud software WILL go obsolete. Obsidian, et al understand this.

Services that rely on local storage are vulnerable to their own data loss scenarios as well as being much less convenient.

It's so odd that comments like this actually still get made on Hacker News; this is SUCH a solved problem, and yet people still make it likely because it pays someones bills, despite being trivially easy to solve.

Anyway, syncthing, among others.

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

#365

Post by Groxx »

Krisjohn wrote: post #157
xvilka wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source. If migrate from Evernote, at least it's better to migrate to FOSS. Sadly, most FOSS solutions lack mobile app support.

The data store is just a folder tree of .md text files. You don't even need Obsidian to view them, it just makes navigating the links a little easier.

Yeah, ^ this is what convinced me to switch to it. It just produces reasonable, compliant markdown files, and displays them. Most markdown-folder apps handle its output just fine, it's just a better experience.

I like open source a lot, but for my data I much prefer interoperable. I've watched too many projects and companies die and take my stuff with them.

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

#366

Post by eddieroger »

thathndude wrote: post #285
jsiepkes wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this eroding trust with startups and companies will become a real problem for them. I mean by now things like "lifetime subscription" have little meaning coming a commercial entity. Well, I'm off enjoying the last few weeks of my lifetime HBO cheap subscription.

I’ve been delighted with my “lifetime” Plex pass, but I worry the day will soon come when I discover the end of the lifetime. Marco Arment has occasionally complained about lifetime, one-time Overcast premium subscriptions and how he’d really like to rug pull those. But, to his credit, has no present plans to do so. However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right th…

> However, it’s more because he doesn’t want to deal with the backlash, rather than because the right thing to do is honor “lifetime.”

Yeah, it's that. He mentioned once that Apple had a rule where you can't remove functionality bought through in-app purchases, probably around the same time he was lamenting one-time subscriptions. He definitely would pull the rug (to use the phrase) if he could, and I wonder if he limits adding features to Overcast because of it.

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

#368

Post by johnwalkr »

mukundesh wrote: post #225

Have been using notes on macOS, works great. I do worry that notes are stored in a proprietary format, would love to have a backup in markdown...

It's my concern too, Apple only makes it easy to export as PDFs. There is a third party tool that can export to markdown[1].

I wanted to point out as well that notes works really well in the browser these days. Good enough to use it on windows, not sure about android though.

[1]http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter/

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

#369

Post by dkarl »

This was my impetus to finally close my account and delete my data.

I was holding on to it because Notion's import sucks and would only import a few notes at a time, so I had to do a lot of different imports to get all the notes in all the notebooks, and I wouldn't be surprised if I still missed a few. (I have lots of notes — virtually everything I wanted to remember and keep forever, I put in Evernote.)

I'm a bit sad because Notion is a fundamentally different product and sucks on mobile. It has all the features I'm used to from Evernote, and notes with attached images imported well. I had a lot of notes with a scanned document attached and a brief explanation of what the document was, so that was vital for me.

RIP Evernote. It was an amazing tool, and it served me well for over a decade.

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