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The first dead Unicorn will be Evernote
- friednslip 11y agoI was afraid of this, I've spent years optimizing my workflow to store stuff in Evernote, because I love it's search feature. (IFTTT recipes to save everything from twitter/reddit/etc into it). I'm extremely ADD, and even have audio recordings from years ago that I'm hesitant to jettison. anyone know the quickest way to push everything (audio+pdf's) to an alternative? Also, do One Note/ any other alternative do search within PDF?
- msellout 11y agoSad, if so. I'm a paying user of Evernote. I have noticed that it hasn't really gained new features lately.
- dylanjermiah 11y agoUsed to use Evernote 10+ times per day. Now it's a few times a week at most. Seems the product has stayed stagnant for a while now.
- arghbleargh 11y agoInteresting that engagement seems to be waning from a lot of Evernote users (based on this anecdatum and the article). Is it because the product has gotten actively worse, or do you find less need to use it these days (e.g. you realized it was more hassle than it was worth)?
- dylanjermiah 11y agoNot worse, just not any better. The use case was, for me, fragmented into many other services. Evernote was sort of my second brain before, not any more.
- fsloth 11y agoWhat services do use instead of Evernote?
- zero-rated 11y agoI switched to Nimbus Note: https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoFor me, it's definitely gotten worse. They've gone from a relatively tightly-focused product to one that does a million different things badly. That, and they lost a bunch of my data, and then waited three goddamn weeks before responding to my ticket. I submitted it on New Year's Eve, so I would have understood if it took a couple of days, but January 20th is completely unacceptable.
- smsm42 11y agoI'm using it daily for several years now and I don't mind it doesn't have tons of new features. I don't need tons of new features, I need it doing what I use it for - organizing and storing random bits of information.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoIt does have tons of new features. That's the problem for me. They keep adding chat and sharing and geotagging and collaboration and all kinds of crap that is completely unrelated to actually storing notes.
- smsm42 11y agoI agree, that sounds like a loss of focus and annoying. I usually ignore such things as chats, etc.
- Animats 11y agoEvernote: "Bring your life's work together in one digital workspace. Evernote is the place to collect inspirational ideas, write meaningful words, and move your important ..." And they're going down. Not good. How to export your data from Evernote.[1] [1] http://jasonfrasca.com/deconstructing-everyday-blog/evernote-how-to-backup-notes-import/ http://jasonfrasca.com/deconstructing-everyday-blog/evernote...
- xseparator 11y agoAs a paying customer, I see Evernote as awesome and terrible at the same time. I've enjoyed using Alternote on OSX as an Evernote client to get what I really want out of Evernote...a place to store, umm, notes. No chats. No web clippings and highlights. It's just notes I write, and associated attached media like document scans or images, in a clean interface. One of my favorite Evernote features is automatic OCR of images within notes. They do an excellent job at it. I only use Evernote for my personal note-taking, and as much as I shake my fist at the massive clutter that has always existed in their first party apps, I can't live without it. (Notebooks AND Tags AND Search AND a map? Why?) It has never once occurred to me to use it as a collaboration tool. It boggles my mind why they would think this is something their customers want from them. I've been using Evernote for so long the thought of having to move dozens of notebooks and hundreds of notes to another platform does not sound appealing!
- cheshire137 11y agoI switched from Evernote to OneNote earlier this year using http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/Evernote2Onenote.html http://stefanstools.sourceforge.net/Evernote2Onenote.html to do it. I had to manually organize the tabs that were created based on my Evernote labels, but it only took about an hour after the tool had copied all my notes for me. I'm glad I made the switch.
- lynchdt 11y agoWe tried Evernote for business in our office for around 6 months. The sharing and communication feature-set was really bad. In a shared notebook we ended up with 'conflicted copies' of lots of important notes that really needed to be an authority on things. The 'Work Chat' feature is spectacularly bad and unusable - to the point of comedy. Most of us flipped way to using Google Apps and Keep Notes, which just really nails collaboration and keeps everything nice and simple. In my opinion Google doesn't get enough credit for it's Apps offering. I see lots of articles on here and elsewhere that deride it as a 'search company' that 'can't build product' - but I really think they're quietly building an excellent product suite.
- kalleboo 11y agoI'm amazed they still haven't fixed the syncing/conflicted copy issues. We switched to OneNote pretty much right after they Mac/iOS versions came out and the "just works" live collaboration was a breath of fresh air.
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoWait, Mac? ...Holy shit. OneNote has Mac and Android versions now? I only stuck with Evernote this long because it was the only thing that would sync across all my devices. I don't need collaboration, just an external memory store. How is OneNote for taking structured/organized, rich-text notes for a single user? I'll check it out tomorrow, and I might switch immediately.
- DevKoala 11y agoIt is great. I use it across my iOS devices. It also comes with free cloud storage.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- keerthiko 11y ago...I just use Dropbox and .txt or .rtf files for this? And Dropbox has had syncing across every platform ever, is good for collaboration as well but stellar for single-user usage. I manage all my personal drafts and notes and paperwork using my Dropbox personal folder, especially since it supports offline availability on my mobile devices too for files I use regularly.
- welly 11y agoI use Evernote purely as a tool to store bookmarks. I could probably use anything else but Evernote generally suits my needs for that. Rarely, if ever, use it for taking notes or anything that isn't a bookmark. Best export my bookmarks if the story is correct.
- mintplant 11y agoSo what's the alternative to Evernote? The article lists Google Docs, which doesn't really seem equivalent, and OneNote. I'm using OneNote right now to organize planning for a media/writing project, and the experience leaves a lot to be desired. The writing interface in particular is clunky, in the web client and on Android -- on my phone, I have to pop open a menu and then a drawer just to switch bold text on or off. And the Office365/OneDrive setup just isn't well integrated overall -- navigating OneDrive is confusing, and you can't, for example, insert a picture stored in OneDrive into a note. Google Keep doesn't fit my needs, as it's missing support for any sort of real organization. It seems more geared toward quick digital post-its and todo lists. Is Dropbox's Notes product any good? That seems to be in closed beta still...
- zero-rated 11y agoNimbus Note is a fantastic alternative: https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php https://nimbus.everhelper.me/note.php
- ryanmarsh 11y agoIt's kind of strange to me that you think OneNote is clunky. I might have agreed with you about the iOS app six months ago but it has improved quite a bit since then.
- mintplant 11y agoAh, sorry, I should have specified that I'm referring to the Android app. I've updated my comment accordingly. Not only is the interface a pain to work with, it has frequent syncing issues as well. On the desktop, I'm forced to use the web client for OneNote and OneDrive, due to the lack of Linux support. I would definitely describe both as "clunky", though OneDrive is decidedly the worse offender of the two.
- ryanmarsh 11y agoAh, well I must tell you the Mac and iOS apps are first rate. The iOS app is easily one of the top 10 apps (in terms of polish) on my phone.
- hkmurakami 11y agoWell technically, Fab had a $1B valuation and has died, so that's the first dead Unicorn right? ;)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- yid 11y ago> As an user of Evernote, my guess was that it was a small operation with may be 50 people tops, may be with 10-20 million dollars of funding. Evernote has had a very large, prominent building on highway 101 from SF to the valley for quite a few years now. The building has no other signage on it, so I assume Evernote occupies a large part of it. Is that the norm for 10-20 million funded startups, or is your estimate way under?
- coolandsmartrr 11y agoI find Evernote quite useful for specific domains, namely interviews. When preparing to give interviews, I gather all the info online using clipper. I can then categorise information based on the interviewee. After publishing interviews, I probably won’t access that information again until relevant information appears when researching about my next interviewee, e.g. a statement or an allusion to the previous person. The latest significant development I saw from Evernote is its tie-up with the Nikkei newspaper, which was still a meager addition of the “Clip” button to the online version. (It’s well-known that Phil is a fan of Japan; Evernote even tied up with the Nagatanien bottled tea.) Perhaps, Evernote can expand its offerings into paperback books, in which annotations are not yet effectively digitised. I’d also appreciate if they could release a suite for members of the press, who need to research, organise, and release information.
- harrygold 11y agoI used to use Evernote back in 2012. I found the ui confusing and not very useful for my needs. I then adopted Workflowy for simple to do lists, organizing info, and that works great for my style; have not gone back to Evernote ever since.
- inopinatus 11y agoIf the original author reads this; I found the combination of webkit anti-aliasing with a thin body weight to be instantly eye-strain-inducing, and the deliberate hiding of scroll bars even on non-mobile viewports made for a persistent sense of unease.
- muglug 11y agoIt's not the author's fault, directly – it's a problem with the platform (syrah.co). I upped the font-weight from 300 to 400 in Chrome dev tools, and everything was instantly better.
- hollerith 11y agoWish I had a browser extension that changed any font weight lower than 400 to 400, any foreground color lighter than #e8e8e8 or so to #e8e8e8 and any background color darker than #101010 to #101010.
- joshdickson 11y agoI'm the author of the post and I wrote the entire site's codebase (syrah.co), and I did all the design, so it's all on me. You're right, we will be fixing this in an update soon. Syrah is still in beta and we weren't quite expecting this to get as widely read as it's becoming, so hopefully you'll forgive the crappy formatting :) Appreciate the feedback.
- npunt 11y agoReader View / RSS also cuts off right before the tweet FYI. EDIT: I was under the presumption that reader view used RSS, which it turns out it may not. Anyway, very good article with a lot of good facts, forgot to mention that in my slight rant about styling on the web above :)
- joshdickson 11y agoDidn't know RSS worked at all, actually, as I definitely haven't written any code to support it. Thanks for the info.
- sharkweek 11y agoFab is already a "dead unicorn" in most people's eyes. During their Series D in 2013, they had a post-val of 1.17B, only to be acquired earlier this year for 15M. I think the biggest problem these current VC-backed unicorns will face is when "venture tourism" comes to an end sometime in the future and all this available cash becomes harder and harder to raise as mutual/hedge funds back slowly away from the private markets: http://blog.pitchbook.com/if-winter-is-coming-how-well-are-unicorns-prepared/ http://blog.pitchbook.com/if-winter-is-coming-how-well-are-u... I hear a lot of chatter about how IPO is the new down round in tech, and it seems to make sense to me. I don't foresee the high quantity of venture-backed companies worth over 1BN being able to keep up with such valuations ESPECIALLY if they try and hit the public market anytime soon. I also don't see how they're going to be able to maintain increases in valuations thus making it pretty safe to assume an impending "down round" period for those unable to find sustainable revenue. And lastly, there isn't a huge M&A market for companies with a price tag north of 1BN.
- joshdickson 11y agoHey, author here. You're right, there's some question about Fab, and I could have added that to the post. I tend to believe the later story, which was that they didn't get there, but didn't mind all the press thinking they did and it was just never corrected (i.e. this story(1) in Fortune cites a valuation that happens to be under $900M). Either way, there's definitely no way to know for sure, and I've seen it left off of plenty of 'unicorn' lists. (1) http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/fab-billion-dollar-valuation/ http://fortune.com/2015/01/22/fab-billion-dollar-valuation/
- cft 11y agoI ported all my writings from Evernote to Google Docs the day when I read that their CEO said that he was building a "corporation for the next 100 years" a couple of years ago. There's nothing wrong with such desire, but I thought that the lack of realism/humility of this CEO would run this company into the ground.
- carrja99 11y agoI use evernote every day, multiple times a day. I don't care... I find it damn handy.
- ryanmarsh 11y agoEvernote lost some of my data, which is like a money market fund breaking the buck. You just can't allow that to happen. If you do you'll get carried out. Twitter could lose a few of my tweets and it wouldn't matter, you lose my valuable notes? GTFO I should add that I was a paying customer. I was already struggling with the crappy UI and looking for an alternative when the data loss happened. For a while I tried different apps, then Microsoft released OneNote for iOS. OneNote works great for me but now I'm snake-bitten and worried about Microsoft losing my data.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI was a heavy user of Evernote until I tried using it across multiple platforms. I'm not sure if things have changed since then but a while back my notes on my laptop and iOS and Android would all render differently, I couldn't control or edit as easily on any of my mobile phones and the syncing was never consistent. I constantly found myself reopening the app and forcing a sync to make sure I could access a note on another device. While I do like OneNote better in some ways its organization style is very old fashioned (at least with Evernote it was easier to stuff tons of things into it, tag it properly and get it back easily). Once you get past 10 or so notes in a single section (depending on screen size) you have to scroll in OneNote and it just makes things a pain. Google docs is awesome for documents but for notes? No thanks, it's too much of a pain in the ass to navigate. At least with Evernote or OneNote I can quickly access a note within the same interface. Honestly I feel like there is room for a killer note taking app here that can go cross platform. But it would quire so much effort to build something even to parity that I don't know when or if that would happen.
- Ayaz 11y agoThe only thing I use, and pay, Evernote for is digitising printed receipts and similar documents, managing which otherwise I find troublesome. The document photo taking features which make taking pictures of receipts easier is pretty nice, as well as the ability to search for text through saved images.
- chandika 11y agoI was a heavy evernote user a few years ago and then migrated to OneNote. I think one of the challenges that is causing evernote users to drain off is as its organization model for notes is broken unless you are highly disciplined in using tags. As your usage grows the product becomes worse for you for non-search navigation and discovery. MS OneNote on the other hand feels like an upgrade from evernote in terms of its ability to provide a simple hierarchy for organising and navigating between notes and notebooks. A key thing for any productivity tool is to balance between it being easy to adopt for new users and continue to improve its utility as usage grows over time. Very few companies have managed to do this effectively.
- favadi 11y agoLast time I tried OneNote, its text editor allows click and type anywhere. I found this behavior is weird and there is no option to turn it off. I know it makes sense if we use touch pen, but not for typing with keyboard.
- insulanian 11y agoThis! I use OneNote, but I hate that "click and type anywhere" feature. I'd like to have something like Markdown, but with easy tables and embedded images.
- jpatokal 11y agoWhat on earth is this trying to say? Evernote, located in Redwood City, CA, and directly on the 101, is a bit north of the tech companies that dot Silicon Valley and far south of those that have headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent.
- hkmurakami 11y agoThey should have just said, "just South of Oracle".
- jpatokal 11y agoAnd this is a problem because devs in SF don't want to commute south and devs in the Valley don't want to commute north? I really doubt this is in the top 10 reasons Evernote is (apparently) failing.
- joshdickson 11y agoYeah, weird wording - apologies. I'm trying to make the exact opposite point, in that you can go 10 mins in any direction and be at another large tech co. If you check Glassdoor, though, you actually will see people complaining about the commute to Redwood City! (Though this is not factored into my post at all, I just find it an amusing anecdote as someone who has never had a < 60 min commute)
- kalleboo 11y agoI thought what it was saying was the talent pool they're competing for is sapped both by SF-based companies and Valley-based companies. But rereading it that doesn't make sense either...
- GBond 11y agoSame. I Thought the implication being that EverNote doesn't need to care about competing employers because of the distance.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoDoesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business? Just the claim can hurt their business. Evernote is fairly useful. I pay the minimum amount above the free tier. I enjoy the product but I only use it perhaps 10 minutes a day, on average.
- joshdickson 11y agoThe post is not about them going out of business; in fact, numerous times I suggest that that is not likely to happen. The post concerns the $1B valuation's validity. It's possible to have a very nice, profitable company making a note taking application and also not be a unicorn.
- mark_l_watson 11y agoThanks for the clarification Josh! I just went back to re-read the article. It is an interesting scenario of a company receiving a lot of funding, having a huge paper valuation, but in the end just being a mildly profitable company with little return on investment.
- gaius 11y agoAnyone can claim anything, even selling a stock is a claim of sorts.
- greenyoda 11y ago"Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business?" I'm not sure how you can consider a company that's still dependent on VC funding for survival to be an "established" company. During that phase, a company is still in a precarious state, and its survival beyond the current funding round is hardly guaranteed. The investors, management, employees and customers are all aware of that (or should be). And even companies that have been self-sufficient for a long time die on a regular basis. Technologies come and go, new competitors enter markets, management screws up, etc. The business press writes about companies in trouble all the time. Potential investors and customers need to know what the downsides are before investing in or adopting a company's technology. Journalists who just write happy stories about companies are doing their readers a disservice.
- dafrankenstein2 11y agoi'm using evernote with the web-browser extension Clearly, this way its useful to me..(as for example, if i want to clip an article for later reading etc..)
- raspasov 11y agoWith the risk of sounding bitter, I am truly not, I always wondered why does it take close to 300M and 400 employees according to Crunchbase to build a note taking app, even at scale.
- joshdickson 11y agoThe money was not raised to build a note taking app, they had already done that (in the US at least). Much of it was for international expansion (which they've done, particularly in China) and new things. Some of those new things (like Work Chat) were built and haven't seem to have gone anywhere. But just because a product seems DOA doesn't mean it was dumb to try. Slack raised $250mm and locked it away for a rainy day, I'm sure Evernote did much of the same.
- xerophyte12932 11y agoI like Evernote. I like how its available across devices. The Web UI is really nice, though the Desktop Native app needs a facelift. I use it to write "private blogs" on my tablet. I used to use Svtble for this as I love the simplicity and the UI but they dont seem to have a native android app, so Evernote is how I do things now and would be sad to see them go. Does anyone know of any better apps for my usecase (writing loads of text on tablet and have them easily available across devices. Preferably native Desktop app as well)? Ps: I love OneNote but... it does't feel like its meant for dumping loads of text into it and the Android app has horrible reviews so i haven't risked downloading it yet
- amolsarva 11y agoWe make a better more collaborative app that centers on really simple notes as the core thing. You can jot some Knotes but you can also share them natively like slack and put lots of content from other services into them. Knotable.com Feedback welcome. Still beta But the Chrome extension is 1.0 and doing really well! Knotable.com/chrome/note