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Evernote: Company of the Year

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Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#41

Post by alain94040 »

jpdoctor wrote: post #19
hemancuso wrote: post #14

So Evernote is doing $18M a year on 750K paid users with 20 million free users. It has just turned profitable - company of the year? Let's not forget they've taken nearly $100M of investment at a nearly billion dollar valuation. Perhaps this is my east coast conservatism, but in the average case I just can't see how this works out well for the investors. To get a respectable exit of perhaps $4B in a few years they wo…

> assuming you gave them a generous valuation on 20x revenue and completely neglect profitability. The fact that this is a fashionable valuation tells me everything I need to know about the market.

The ratio between revenue and valuation changes over time, based on your growth. I actually tried to draw a kindergarten explanation here: http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/10/27/how-to-compute-the-valuat...

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#42

Post by lix2333 »

damptrousers wrote: post #38
libraryatnight wrote: post #25

I have to ask, I suppose I could just go try it again, but I'll ask. Has Evernote changed significantly over the last year+ or so? I signed up for Evernote some time ago, and while I enjoyed the concept it was clunky and kind of ugly and I was overall just indifferent to the product. I tried Springpad some time after quitting Evernote and found it to be more fluid and easier to use. So, has there been significant cha…

No, it's still the same. Ugly, slow, and bloated.

This is what's really killing it for me. If it wasn't so slow and bloated, I'd use it much more. Instead, I usually just pull out something quick like AstridTasks or another note program. Only the big stuff I save on evernote.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#43

Post by GiraffeNecktie »

damptrousers wrote: post #34
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #24

I looked at Evernote a couple of times and it just seemed like overkill for my needs. But a couple of months ago I got one of those tiny portable Fujitsu Scansnap duplex scanners and started scanning and shredding every scrap of paper that passes my way. Now I get it.

Yep, great concept. You can do this without evernote, and you can do this with apps that do a much better job of allowing you to get stuff out. Evernote did not create the ability to do this. You are very confused.

Confused in what way? Evernote didn't create the ability to do this but they offer an excellent cloud service which is seamless across multiple platforms including Android and iPhone. Their applications are stable, thoughtfully designed and constantly improving. The paid service is very reasonably priced and opens great possibilities for collaboration. If there's something better out there, please tell me.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#44

Post by Skeletor »

lupatus wrote: post #15
hemancuso wrote: post #14

So Evernote is doing $18M a year on 750K paid users with 20 million free users. It has just turned profitable - company of the year? Let's not forget they've taken nearly $100M of investment at a nearly billion dollar valuation. Perhaps this is my east coast conservatism, but in the average case I just can't see how this works out well for the investors. To get a respectable exit of perhaps $4B in a few years they wo…

"Evernote primarily makes money by paying customers" How exactly is this business model profitable for them?

Evernote primarily makes money from paying customers (by charging paying customers. I don't think they give money to their customers.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#45

Post by stinkytaco »

rumblestrut wrote: post #37
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #24

I looked at Evernote a couple of times and it just seemed like overkill for my needs. But a couple of months ago I got one of those tiny portable Fujitsu Scansnap duplex scanners and started scanning and shredding every scrap of paper that passes my way. Now I get it.

I have no idea what options there are for a non-iOS user, but ... There's an excellent iOS app called TurboScan. It's fantastic. Take a picture of your receipts and it'll convert the image to low file size, but high-quality, PDFs. You can then send those PDFs to your Evernote email and have them stored neatly in a notebook. It's a fantastic solution for portable document scanning. And with the iPhone 4s camera being…

Droid Scan and Cam Scanner are decent Android alternatives. For reciepts it's ok, but for OCR it doesn't work well, which I was kind of hoping for. I'll just have to wait for camera's to improve.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#46

Post by jpark »

webwright wrote: post #18
hemancuso wrote: post #14

So Evernote is doing $18M a year on 750K paid users with 20 million free users. It has just turned profitable - company of the year? Let's not forget they've taken nearly $100M of investment at a nearly billion dollar valuation. Perhaps this is my east coast conservatism, but in the average case I just can't see how this works out well for the investors. To get a respectable exit of perhaps $4B in a few years they wo…

I think a big part of the "company of the year" bit is because they've done something most people thought wasn't possible-- build a big business charging consumers. It's refreshing! I don't know much about their business, but I'm guessing they are sacrificing a lot of revenue/profit for growth. They could probably double their conversion by slowly dialing down the awesomeness of the free version in favor of the paid…

Shouldn't you narrow down "build a big business charging consumers"?

Even in just digital goods, there are general software companies (Microsoft, Intuit, McAfee), gaming companies (Zynga, EA, Valve), online dating companies (Match, Eharmony), geneology (Ancestry), health (Weight Watchers Online) that make 1+ orders of magnitude more money than Evernote.

Most of them also have freemium models. What's special here?

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#47

Post by veidr »

freehunter wrote: post #33
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #24

I looked at Evernote a couple of times and it just seemed like overkill for my needs. But a couple of months ago I got one of those tiny portable Fujitsu Scansnap duplex scanners and started scanning and shredding every scrap of paper that passes my way. Now I get it.

I wish I could do that, but unfortunately I just can't bring myself to trust their security. I use Evernote for my classes because I use a Asus EeeNote tablet that syncs things to Evernote exclusively, but there are so many things I can't trust in the cloud. If Evernote offered a "host it yourself" option that worked with existing Evernote clients, I'd be all over it.

Although I use Evernote every single day, and it has really improved my life overall, I agree--I can't trust it with the most important of data.

I doubt they will ever offer a 'host it yourself' plan, but if only they would implement encrypted notes, it would solve this problem. Data blobs that are only decrypted on the client side, with searching possible only on the metadata (note title, tag, etc) and not the encrypted contents.

They do allow this for text--you can select text and encrypt it--but not for documents.

My workflow with Evernote is that every single piece of paper and mail (along with tons of web pages, etc) goes into it. ScanSnap is awesome, an administrative assistant feeding your paper mail through the ScanSnap even more awesome.

It is unfortunate that there isn't a real facility to keep thos most sensitive of documents safe, though. IMO this is the most significant failure of the service.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#48

Post by nl »

hemancuso wrote: post #14

So Evernote is doing $18M a year on 750K paid users with 20 million free users. It has just turned profitable - company of the year? Let's not forget they've taken nearly $100M of investment at a nearly billion dollar valuation. Perhaps this is my east coast conservatism, but in the average case I just can't see how this works out well for the investors. To get a respectable exit of perhaps $4B in a few years they wo…

or somehow figure how to get 10x more users

Not only are they currently growing quickly, their rate of growth is increasing.

They grew from ~2M at the start of 2010 to ~6M at the start of 2011 to ~20M at the end of 2011[1]. Growth in paid customer looks to be similar.

In September they stated they are getting 40,000 new users a day[2].

200 million users strikes me as unlikely, and doubling conversion while also getting 100 million users does too. It's not to say it can't happen, but I just don't see it for a paid consumer service.

Why do you think this? The market of "everyone who has a smartphone and needs to remember things" seems pretty large to me.

[1] http://blog.evernote.com/2011/01/04/evernote-2010-a-year-in-...

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/09/us-evernote-idUSTR...

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#49

Post by nl »

jpdoctor wrote: post #22
hemancuso wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would hope nobody would value a company like that. I pulled that multipier out of the air for what seems both absurd and reasonable.

I got the absurd part but missed the reasonable part.

missed the reasonable part

GOOG floated at 100x earnings, and that was really, really good value.

20x revenue seems more-than-reasonable for a high-growth company with a contained cost structure and a clear path to profitability.

Re: Evernote: Company of the Year

#50

Post by nl »

libraryatnight wrote: post #25

I have to ask, I suppose I could just go try it again, but I'll ask. Has Evernote changed significantly over the last year+ or so? I signed up for Evernote some time ago, and while I enjoyed the concept it was clunky and kind of ugly and I was overall just indifferent to the product. I tried Springpad some time after quitting Evernote and found it to be more fluid and easier to use. So, has there been significant cha…

The phone apps are pretty good (I use the iOS app on an iPhone 4, and the Android app on a Galaxy and Transformer), but the desktop apps still needs improvement (on Windows anyway).
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