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Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

nytimes.com

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Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#111

Post by notahacker »

duxup wrote: post #85
tru3_power wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)

I work in an industry that is a bit niche and weird SaaS world. There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits. Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absur…

That's very true of niche businesses; one competitor price-warring can wipe our half your enterprise customers and they sometimes haven't got any way of growing except trying to pick up their customers. Not sure it's quite so true of general purpose SaaS sold to a market as big as "people that want to collaborate", especially not when the 800lb gorilla's pricing starts at $60/user/year and their apps aren't universally loved or difficult to replicate at smaller scales

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#112

Post by SirensOfTitan »

polskibus wrote: post #109

I use Evernote to store mostly bookmarks, tag them, sometimes I take a note with it. I'm mostly reliant on the search by tag feature. I use Evernote on multiple devices that sync. What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?

I've heard great things about Notion.

Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#113

Post by dehrmann »

olivermarks wrote: post #101
par wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how did they spectacularly screw up? honestly asking.

Code quality of the service they were offering: It's improved a little recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.

> search is still bad

Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#114

Post by marcosdumay »

achillesheels wrote: post #91

SaaS subscriptions are magical when they work; they provide much needed regularity to cash flow forecasting which assuages investor timidity. However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.

I know I have refused to contract many suppliers at work because of their subscription-only licensing.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#115

Post by duxup »

zanny wrote: post #72
duxup wrote: post #2

Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap? >Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie. That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.

Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious. I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitel…

Yeah there absolutely is a perverse incentive there.

Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#116

Post by anbop »

zanny wrote: post #72
duxup wrote: post #2

Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap? >Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie. That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.

Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious. I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitel…

YC’s own Sam Altman parlayed a failed startup into millions of dollars which he later turned into hundreds of millions with the mentorship of Paul Graham.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#117

Post by whoisjuan »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #112
polskibus wrote: post #109

I use Evernote to store mostly bookmarks, tag them, sometimes I take a note with it. I'm mostly reliant on the search by tag feature. I use Evernote on multiple devices that sync. What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?

I've heard great things about Notion. Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.

I tried Notion but there's something I don't like about it. It's also kind of slow. I have been using Bear and I like its simplicity and features a lot!

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#118

Post by CPLX »

It used to be fantastic. The killer app for me was that it was actually impressively good at searching text in images which at the time felt like magic. Like you could take a picture of a whiteboard or your handwritten notes from a meeting or slide on a screen at a conference and then do a free text search of the keywords in it a few months later and find it.

It was also really good at clipping web pages and helping you find them later. I really really liked it for free form research, like when you spend a couple weeks looking into a business idea to write up a detailed report later and want to find the reference to that concept or statistic you remember.

Ten years ago that kind of thing was really hard to do reliably and they were good at it.

But then instead of building on that success the product got worse. Oh well.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#119

Post by usrusr »

tempodox wrote: post #23
dalbasal wrote: post #12

Failure, in this context could either mean product or company failure, and the "fail fast" adage is usually applied to product, not company. At least as this article presents the story (executive churn, etc), it sounds like company failure is the main part of it. The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure,…

> ...if it fails to live up to valuations. Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?

If the only thing a company achieves is wealth transfer from investor to founder (in the form of wages and/or a sub-valuation exit), then it's not a success but a failure. Unless you take founder economic gain as the sole success metric, but them it's not a company but a fraud scheme. The line between victim and perpetrator blur in interesting ways when a sub-valuation exit is a win for some investors and a loss for others.

It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.

Re: Evernote Blows Up the ‘Fail Fast’ Gospel

#120

Post by criddell »

ummonk wrote: post #97
etairaz wrote: post #78

Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app ( https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind... ). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Ever…

Did the original license for Evernote 2 stop working? It seems perfectly reasonable to create a new subscription license for a new cloud product.

I guess it depends on if the perpetual license was for Evernote or Evernote 2.
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