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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

#811

Post by nicbou »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #286
bakuninsbart wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.

What would be the caveats of that approach?

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

#812

Post by da5is »

nullandvoid wrote: post #356
DeathArrow wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you can sync your Obsidian notes for free if you use free Dropbox or OneDrive accounts.

This isn't trivial when you start syncing mobile (now you need an extra app, as onedrive doesn't support local), or onto a work device (where I don't want onedrive installed) There's work arounds (for example I forgot the name, but one plugin allows you to setup onedrive to share just one folder via logging in on each device), but the syncing story wasn't great. Quite a bit of extra setup across all devices, more poi…

There's an Obisidian plugin for direct syncing to OneDrive that works on both mobile and desktop - this keeps you from having to deal with either triggered syncs through github or the various other, painful syncing processes.

https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save

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

#813

Post by da5is »

bosie wrote: post #327
DeathArrow wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors. You can sync for free using Syncthing or OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox free accounts.

On ios you can only do icloud though

There's a plugin that resolves this (https://github.com/remotely-save/remotely-save) and you can also use pre-launch shortcuts using WorkingCopy if you want to sync via git.

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

#814

Post by virtue3 »

derefr wrote: post #537
TheKarateKid wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out. This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these compan…

> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both t…

I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.

Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.

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

#816

Post by gaws »

bayindirh wrote: post #290
kpw94 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Obsidian? 3 days ago one of the obsidian makers posted this: https://twitter.com/kepano/status/1675626836821409792 Key quote: "These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last." Seems to align with your philosophy

Obsidian's problem is Sync + Publish costs way too much, esp. when compared with competitors. Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing. Notion provides more features, incl. publishing and syncing plus the kitchen sink and its factory, yet it doesn't have offline access. For sync + publish, I have to pay 1.5x what Dropbox wants for 2TB of storage, or what T…

> Notesnook provides almost everything Evernote provides, with encryption, better publishing and syncing.

In the two years I've used Notesnook, my biggest issue is the slow syncing between devices: A change I make on the mobile app takes minutes to update on the desktop app, whereas a similar change on the Obsidian mobile app is nearly instantaneous. Additionally, Notesnook doesn't allow external editors, like vim or emacs, to edit files. Sure, you can extort files to Markdown, but those do not get synced anywhere. Obsidian gives a user the flexibility by editing files directly without the app.

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

#817

Post by Euphorbium »

prepend wrote: post #332
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 think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost. Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap. It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user. When Evernote started charging for dumb features and loc…

Apple notes does exactly the same and free.

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

#818

Post by Kaibeezy »

nicbou wrote: post #811
Kaibeezy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.

What would be the caveats of that approach?

You’ve go to know your unicorn. If it’s tiny, it’s tiny, and no use dreaming of a majestic stallion rampant when its natural environment is scuttling under the clover.

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

#819

Post by gardenhedge »

gnz11 wrote: post #803
TheKarateKid wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out. This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these compan…

> You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”

That is repeatedly said about twitter and reddit

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

#820

Post by nicbou »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #818
nicbou wrote: post #811

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be the caveats of that approach?

You’ve go to know your unicorn. If it’s tiny, it’s tiny, and no use dreaming of a majestic stallion rampant when its natural environment is scuttling under the clover.

Great answer! I shall ride this pony until the wheels fall off then.
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