5 ms·

Evernote is in deep trouble

128 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

xname2 11y ago
All I need is a good web clipper like evernote's Clearly, so that I can directly save cleaned webpage to a .doc file in a Dropbox folder. Still can't find one. Also, why dropbox does not create a simple note taking app, just save notes to a dropbox folder?
- on_ 11y ago
  If you don't need it to be a .doc, Google chrome allows you to save webpages to PDFs just by going to file > print[0] and it works quite well. The Evernote clipper worked pretty well IIRC, but either way you will have to edit the markup a bit to get the results on a very cluttered page. In a pinch though, chrome does a great job if you don't want to have evernote simply to clip pages. [0]http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/ http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/
  - arethuza 11y ago
    Word allows you to open PDFs - so it can be edited and saved as anything you want.
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    I generally avoid Chrome, but I'll give that a try. I hope it works better than my experiences with both Safari and Firefox on OS X. Those browsers have long supported what is mentioned in your linked article: File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF However, it's very hit-and-miss of what results you'll get. About 80% of pages come out fine, but the remainder can be quite awful. And it's unpredictable which browser will do better on any given page. At the least, you'd expect results to match printing to paper, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. Safari has a Reader View that produces good results, but I don't think very many websites support it. Unfortunately, certain websites go out of they way to prevent us from saving them to PDF.
- blumkvist 11y ago
  MS Edge does this and saves to onedrive.
  - xname2 11y ago
    It saves webpage / clip as a picture. Really not what I want.
- rsl7 11y ago
  because there are plenty of note taking / writing apps that use dropbox directly?
drinchev 11y ago
Products like this come and go. I don't know what the value of Evernote is. I've never been a power user. I prefer using Kippt ( sadly, also shut down ) + OS X Notes + Chrome's bookmarks + Google docs + Dropbox. Doesn't feel like a company doing something so specialised can expect a real growth out of a product that isn't remarkably well done.
- notvladputin 11y ago
  While it sounds like your solution works for you, don't you think there's room in the market for one app that does all that? One of the ways of providing value is to do nothing particularly unique, but to combine several things into a unique workflow. The fact that you use 4 different services plus one that's been shutdown suggests to me someone else might want that functionality without the trial and error of figuring it all out and setting it all up...
  - lampa 11y ago
    There's an app for that http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY
- veidr 11y ago
  I hate Evernote for the same reasons as must people (because the software quality is garbage, and they just let it languish for years, as they roll out unwanted features). But, it is not true that there are many other products like Evernote. There actually aren't any products like Evernote. There may be products like the subset of Evernote that you use and the subset of Evernote that this other person uses, but there is nothing directly competing with it on all (or even most) facets of what it does. SimpleNote, Google Keep, OneNote, Apple's newly-updated Notes, Paperwork, Yojimbo, etc are often cited as potential replacements, but they all do only a small subset of what Evernote actually does. A lot of people just need to take notes -- and yep, Evernote is a terrible app for that. But I don't know any other product that lets you, wherever you are, instantly capture computer-based notes, scanned paper documents, contracts, billing statements, photos of napkins and whiteboards and trade show booths, etc. and makes all that content delegatable/shareable to different co-workers, searchable via OCR in multiple languages, and available in both the cloud and via native app across most platforms. I am pretty sure there isn't such a product, because Evernote is so bad in terms of software quality that I google for one every month or so, and we are still on Evernote two years later.
jseliger 11y ago
It's interesting to me that EN is apparently in deep trouble partially because of buggy feature releases. Three days ago I wrote this comment in response to the last article about EN: I wonder if they're experiencing feature creep because they've satisfied users of the core features. I use a program called Devonthink Pro according to this method: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... and in some respects my use hasn't changed that much. I use syncing features and some other pieces, and maybe the engine has gotten a little better over time, but mostly I do what I did with it 10 years ago. I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-with-a-side-of-james-joyces-ulysses-2/ http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP. Mostly it seems to me that DTP is very close to "feature complete," for lack of a better term.
- driverdan 11y ago
  DTP is Mac and iOS only which makes it far less useful. I use Evernote on nearly every major OS: OS X, Windows, Android, iOS and web. DTP isn't an option.
- sbuk 11y ago
  Point of semantics - DTP already means something; DeskTop Publishing. Using it to describe another piece of software is confusing.
- veidr 11y ago
  How does the sync between machines work, in your experience? I know it wouldn't work for a lot of people, but I myself keep looking at switching from Evernote to "DevonThink Pro Office" because I would be OK with going Mac-only to get reliability. (I know Devon has an iOS app, but my understanding from their own forums is that the iOS app is basically garbage, and the users are all basically waiting for Devon's rewrite that has been in progress for years; is that right?) I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though, even if they are all Mac. Last time I checked, that didn't really work, the sync was a hack built on top of Dropbox and it had tons of problems. Do you use that and has it improved?
stevoski 11y ago
From this article, I have some of my software business beliefs validated: - don't be afraid to charge money - release frequent, small updates. Users tolerate this much better than infrequent big updates with major changes - focus on quality. Every update should include several bug fixes. As much as possible, fix bugs before adding new features - focus. Put all your eggs in one basket, to some extent. - watch costs like a hawk. Operating in 10 locations sounds like Evernote let their costs get out of control.
- curiousjorge 11y ago
  I feel like this should be engraved in stone and delivered to anyone who is thinking of getting into this game but try telling that to a hot headed under 30 founder who is worried about burning that cash as fast as possible to 'grow big and sell the company'. I almost feel like SV is all about exits and not enough focus on meaningful products that arise out of genuine passion to solve a real problem.
  - api 11y ago
    Those kinds of founders need a dose of reality. That path is usually more like "burn lots of investor cash and your reputation, then fail." For the very few who sort of pull the pump and dump burn to exit thing off there are dozens who just crash.
    - curiousjorge 11y ago
      doesn't seem to happen. people who raise ridiculous amount of money seems to do it again and again and investors are happy to keep shoveling piles of money around. vast amount of money is moved around and evaporated. that kind of money if distributed to single founders who have a working product, generating revenues would have a far more benefit to society and consumers instead of one giant company that bullies it's way into the markets by splashing money around.
      - api 11y ago
staunch 11y ago
Evernote is only a weird bloated SaaS company (with hundreds of employees) because they followed the wrong business model. Evernote should be more like Minecraft (Mojang). A cool piece of software that a handful of people develop but a billion people use. They would be wildly profitable and worth many billions to Microsoft and others.
- lalos 11y ago
  True. Like Sunrise (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquires-sunrise-creator-innovative-calendar-app-mobile-devices/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquire...) and Acompli (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquires-acompli-provider-innovative-mobile-email-apps/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquire...)
archildress 11y ago
Evernote is such a great idea and in its early stage, it showed a lot of promise as the "trapper keeper" of all things digital. But as time went on, the client became bloated and there were weird products like Evernote Food that were pushed on users. I'm still using it for certain parts of my work, and I'm increasingly frustrated with the pop ups in the application every few days to upgrade to Evernote Premium. Someone is going to make a product that looks a lot like Evernote that's going to succeed. But I think Evernote's best days are behind it.
- pwelch 11y ago
  Yep! Between syncing issues on previous versions and the latest pops every time I open the app I'm trying new things. Most things are going in Jrnl. I think I'm going to give OneNote a try for everything else. Friends swear by it and the latest version seems to work pretty good on OS X.
- yabatopia 11y ago
  Don't forget Evernote Market, where you can buy - for unknown reasons - light purple business socks from Evernote. Talk about losing focus if you have too much VC money.
shughes 11y ago
Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had only submitted that one review. When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a little over the top.
- Dystopian 11y ago
  Wasn't really suspicious - there was a call-to-action at the top of the app to help Evernote by leaving a review (the reviews help their app store optimization). There are a lot of die hard Evernote advocates out there that'd be happy to.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Holy hell. Today I learned that "appstore optimization" is a real thing...
    - jakeva 11y ago
      It's not just a real thing… it's big business. Entire companies exist around it.
paulsutter 11y ago
Evernote has me hooked on cross device persistent notes. And I will change to the first quality alternative that lets me import my existing notes from Evernote. Evernote still can't handle even simple non-overlapping changes on two devices. Every time I close my laptop I have to wonder if changes were synched. Especially embarrassing because superb open source code is already available for conflict resolution (git, for example). EDIT: someone should write a notekeeping app built on github.
- teach 11y ago
  As a Linux user I have never used Evernote, but Google Keep has cross-device persistent notes and I've never had even the tiniest glitch with synchronization.
  - sbuk 11y ago
    As a Mac and Windows user I've never used google keep as there is no native app.
    - aviraldg 11y ago
      There's a Chrome app, which is "native" enough for me.
      - sbuk 11y ago
        That's great and I genuinely hope that it works for you. The point I was making was that there was no point. Text files and an ftp server are arguably as good, but ultimately meaningless in relation to the article.
        teach 11y ago
        I don't think I understand your point. Google Keep works offline, it has seamless syncing when it is online and I can access it from all my devices (including my phone). I guess you don't consider a Chrome App to be a "real" native app and that somehow makes it different for you, but I don't see any meaningful distinction.
tdumitrescu 11y ago
From the article: "last year, TechCrunch pegged the company's revenue at around $36 million, and while revenue has increased, we've heard the numbers are still short of internal expectations" So Evernote is valued at more than 27x revenue??
- tdylan 11y ago
  Not a big multiple for a supposed growing company. Phil Libin said it takes on average of 40ish months to convert a free to paid user, that's harsh.
erebus_rex 11y ago
I was a longtime user of evernote but recently gave up. The webclipping tool was phenomenal but the notetaking interface was so and so (their desktop app was also poorly built which made things worse). After awhile, onenote took care of my notetaking needs and pocket of my linksaving needs. I think this was a great part of why evernote faltered. They just became a repo/dump of user crap. People didn't care to engage with the platform and therefore did not care to find out what extra value it could give them, thus preventing them from converting to paid users.
- tdylan 11y ago
  Were you able to import your Evernote notes?
curiousjorge 11y ago
what's evernote again? I installed it once in 2012 out of curiosity, never used it or seen it again. Some type of note taking app?
- scosman 11y ago
  http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote
r721 11y ago
Big recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642 (448 comments)
pyrrhotech 11y ago
A great example of why the "number of users" metric is being overvalued. Until there is a solid, proven and scalable business plan to translate usage to revenue the $100 per user standard valuation shouldn't apply.
- scosman 11y ago
  Maybe for late stage investors, but if you applied that strategy as an early stage consumer investor you would have missed almost much every big hit (FB, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc).
  - nine_k 11y ago
    Twitter is a dubious hit. It's wildly popular, but its profits are very unimpressive, to say the least.
    - scosman 11y ago
      $20B market cap. You could argue it should be $10B, but 'dubious hit' for an early stage investor is ridiculous.
- tajen 11y ago
  OTOH, Many companies provide B2C services to million users for free as a side effect of raising awareness for their B2B paid offers. I wonder whether society should value this benevolent side effect to the point of reclassifying their primary purpose to "Providing a benevolent service". Yes, I'm almost being ironic because it's a failure of a business model, and I'm afraid of whether GitHub will maintain its public free service for long.
- username223 11y ago
  > $100 per user standard valuation Is that actually a thing? If so, I can retire on the valuation of my obscure vanity blog, but I'm also worth a few million to websites I've accessed.
fredfoobar42 11y ago
The Evernote Mac client is the one of the worst piece of software on the Mac platform. I've actually been using a $5 replacement app, Alternate, and moving my Evernote text notes back to nvALT synced through Dropbox. Evernote, please, I do not want: - Work Chat - Headlines from Business Insider - To be CONSTANTLY BUGGED TO UPGRADE That's the biggest thing. I'd love to give Evernote money, if I knew I was going to get left alone. Instead, all the Evernote Premium members I know are _still_ bugged to upgrade and get all these stupid, useless features thrown at them that they don't want.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I agree with you. I am a middle tier ($25/year) user and I eschue the Mac app and just use the web interface. I filed a bug report last week on getting too many nags to use new features. On my Android phone, saying NO to using a new feature did not prevent many new nags about the same feature. It is this nagging that might convince me to not renew my yearly service when it expires.
- lampa 11y ago
  If you like nvALT, have you try voogla? http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY
- extc 11y ago
  I assume you mean Alternote (not Alternate) which says it's just an alternative GUI to the Evernote backend. So you still seem to be at the mercy of Evernote?
minikites 11y ago
If you need note syncing, use Simplenote. Evernote is almost certainly overkill for what most people want.
pbreit 11y ago
Actual headline: "The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble" Current: "Evernote is in deep trouble" (overly strong, imo). Also, I don't think the article supports very well the "deep trouble" description. It sounds like the company has plenty of money and continues to grow.
- ScottWhigham 11y ago
  That doesn't seem like that big of a difference to me. In fact, I'd say the actual headline is more hyperbolic. The inside story of how $1 billion is specifically written to cause people to click the link.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    I Guess that's true. "Deep trouble" to me suggests the company is running out of money and in somewhat dire straits. Which I don't believe to be the case at all.
gaze 11y ago
Surprise. Evernote is just such a shockingly low quality product. First of all, as a note taking company, you CAN NOT LOSE DATA. EVER. I use my notebook for keeping data and derivations and lecture notes. Data is the most valuable thing in my profession, insights sometimes don't come twice, and lectures are often never given twice. So, the service already sucks. The client is buggy and bloated with features... Which I find somehow insulting since they're developing new useless features and selling merchandise that nobody needs while they're ignoring crucial flaws in their software. Finally, and maybe this is something only scientists people care about, their pen input support is abysmal... AFTER acquiring one of the best note taking products for the iPad! How have they managed to screw this up so bad? OneNote gets all these things dead on correct, and that's why it's the standard in labs that keep digital notes. Evernote does not seem to understand the role their product takes in people's lives. I really hope they either shape up or go away so they can stop distracting people from what they actually want.
arikrak 11y ago
I switched to evernote when I switched to a Mac, but I never liked it much and it crashes frequently. Due to the 'switching hassle', I never got around to switching back to Onenote when it came out on Mac.
crudbug 11y ago
They missed the ship without dead simple bookmark service a.k.a Pocket !
visarga 11y ago
I tried to use EverNote to study scanned books in TIFF format. It was painful, it wasn't able to import 50,000 pages and apply OCR. I eventually wrote script using Tesseract and a web app similar to Google Books. I could take notes on the sides of the pages and the collect them by tags. Now I use Skim for Mac to take notes form PDF files.
edwinnathaniel 11y ago
I heard this a lot: Evernote sync-ing is buggy. Could someone point to me how to implement a good cross-device sync-ing algorithms? Or is it perhaps just as simple as using object version based on timestamp? I've never done this before so I have no clue how easy/hard it is to implement one.
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  why not libgit2 with a decent diff/merge UI?
- snaily 11y ago
  Here's a set of slides on how Spotify does it with playlists: http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JimmyMrdell/playlists-at-spotify-cassandra-summit-london-2013 http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JimmyMrdell/playlists-at-sp...
- twic 11y ago
  The gold standard right now is operational transformation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation But this requires that you capture every edit, which (I think) makes it more complicated than classical merging techniques which just work on whole documents as input.
lips 11y ago
It's striking to me that here on HN, where there's rarely anything approaching consensus on software user satisfaction (IMHO), evernote is being roundly blasted. These feelings weren't formed in 2015 (I've been disappointed by it for years), and yet they continued to let it fester. (Shruggy guy)
brucefancher 11y ago
I've tried Evernote a bunch of times over the years and always been disappointed. I really wish there was something that worked more like Circus Ponies Notebook, but synced data w/ multiple clients like Evernote does. Oh well, I guess I just need to keep waiting.
captn3m0 11y ago
Don't know if these recent articles will turn out to be the death toll for Evernote. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this point, Evernote could pretty much do anything and still nobody on this thread would be convinced they are doing it right. Another thing that I never liked about evernote is their API is perhaps the worst API I have ever encountered. Thrift should never be used for external APIs, period. [0] [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-APIs/answer/Abhay-Rana?shared=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-APIs/answ...
nakodari 11y ago
I lost my entire Evernote notebook once. After that, I've been exporting notes manually once every month. Dropbox focused on making their "sync" and app rock solid, Evernote didn't. It's that simple.
barendt 11y ago
What alternatives are people using for Evernote that support more than just text? The main draw Evernote has for me is the ability to attach an arbitrary number of files to a note, add some additional text or a useful title, and then search on those notes across iOS and OS X devices. I've been increasingly frustrated by how buggy and complicated Evernote has gotten so I'd be happy to try alternatives that might be out there.
- douche 11y ago
  I use OneNote, it seems to be pretty decent. Mostly I use it for bookmarking web pages and writing quick notes across devices. I'm not in the Apple club, but I have heard that it has decent clients for OSX, and the web interface in Office365 is not bad.
ergest 11y ago
Wrong motives (trying to be a cool company) plus wrong incentives (billion dollar evaluation and lots of cash to burn) leads to wrong focus and feelings of invincibility.

128 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

All I need is a good web clipper like evernote's Clearly, so that I can directly save cleaned webpage to a .doc file in a Dropbox folder. Still can't find one. Also, why dropbox does not create a simple note taking app, just save notes to a dropbox folder?

on_ 11y ago
If you don't need it to be a .doc, Google chrome allows you to save webpages to PDFs just by going to file > print[0] and it works quite well. The Evernote clipper worked pretty well IIRC, but either way you will have to edit the markup a bit to get the results on a very cluttered page. In a pinch though, chrome does a great job if you don't want to have evernote simply to clip pages. [0]http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/ http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/
- arethuza 11y ago
  Word allows you to open PDFs - so it can be edited and saved as anything you want.
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  I generally avoid Chrome, but I'll give that a try. I hope it works better than my experiences with both Safari and Firefox on OS X. Those browsers have long supported what is mentioned in your linked article: File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF However, it's very hit-and-miss of what results you'll get. About 80% of pages come out fine, but the remainder can be quite awful. And it's unpredictable which browser will do better on any given page. At the least, you'd expect results to match printing to paper, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. Safari has a Reader View that produces good results, but I don't think very many websites support it. Unfortunately, certain websites go out of they way to prevent us from saving them to PDF.
blumkvist 11y ago
MS Edge does this and saves to onedrive.
- xname2 11y ago
  It saves webpage / clip as a picture. Really not what I want.
rsl7 11y ago
because there are plenty of note taking / writing apps that use dropbox directly?

drinchev 11y ago

Products like this come and go. I don't know what the value of Evernote is. I've never been a power user. I prefer using Kippt ( sadly, also shut down ) + OS X Notes + Chrome's bookmarks + Google docs + Dropbox. Doesn't feel like a company doing something so specialised can expect a real growth out of a product that isn't remarkably well done.

notvladputin 11y ago
While it sounds like your solution works for you, don't you think there's room in the market for one app that does all that? One of the ways of providing value is to do nothing particularly unique, but to combine several things into a unique workflow. The fact that you use 4 different services plus one that's been shutdown suggests to me someone else might want that functionality without the trial and error of figuring it all out and setting it all up...
- lampa 11y ago
  There's an app for that http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY
veidr 11y ago
I hate Evernote for the same reasons as must people (because the software quality is garbage, and they just let it languish for years, as they roll out unwanted features). But, it is not true that there are many other products like Evernote. There actually aren't any products like Evernote. There may be products like the subset of Evernote that you use and the subset of Evernote that this other person uses, but there is nothing directly competing with it on all (or even most) facets of what it does. SimpleNote, Google Keep, OneNote, Apple's newly-updated Notes, Paperwork, Yojimbo, etc are often cited as potential replacements, but they all do only a small subset of what Evernote actually does. A lot of people just need to take notes -- and yep, Evernote is a terrible app for that. But I don't know any other product that lets you, wherever you are, instantly capture computer-based notes, scanned paper documents, contracts, billing statements, photos of napkins and whiteboards and trade show booths, etc. and makes all that content delegatable/shareable to different co-workers, searchable via OCR in multiple languages, and available in both the cloud and via native app across most platforms. I am pretty sure there isn't such a product, because Evernote is so bad in terms of software quality that I google for one every month or so, and we are still on Evernote two years later.

jseliger 11y ago

It's interesting to me that EN is apparently in deep trouble partially because of buggy feature releases. Three days ago I wrote this comment in response to the last article about EN: I wonder if they're experiencing feature creep because they've satisfied users of the core features. I use a program called Devonthink Pro according to this method: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000230.html http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... and in some respects my use hasn't changed that much. I use syncing features and some other pieces, and maybe the engine has gotten a little better over time, but mostly I do what I did with it 10 years ago. I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pro-with-a-side-of-james-joyces-ulysses-2/ http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP. Mostly it seems to me that DTP is very close to "feature complete," for lack of a better term.

driverdan 11y ago
DTP is Mac and iOS only which makes it far less useful. I use Evernote on nearly every major OS: OS X, Windows, Android, iOS and web. DTP isn't an option.
sbuk 11y ago
Point of semantics - DTP already means something; DeskTop Publishing. Using it to describe another piece of software is confusing.
veidr 11y ago
How does the sync between machines work, in your experience? I know it wouldn't work for a lot of people, but I myself keep looking at switching from Evernote to "DevonThink Pro Office" because I would be OK with going Mac-only to get reliability. (I know Devon has an iOS app, but my understanding from their own forums is that the iOS app is basically garbage, and the users are all basically waiting for Devon's rewrite that has been in progress for years; is that right?) I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though, even if they are all Mac. Last time I checked, that didn't really work, the sync was a hack built on top of Dropbox and it had tons of problems. Do you use that and has it improved?

stevoski 11y ago

From this article, I have some of my software business beliefs validated: - don't be afraid to charge money - release frequent, small updates. Users tolerate this much better than infrequent big updates with major changes - focus on quality. Every update should include several bug fixes. As much as possible, fix bugs before adding new features - focus. Put all your eggs in one basket, to some extent. - watch costs like a hawk. Operating in 10 locations sounds like Evernote let their costs get out of control.

curiousjorge 11y ago
I feel like this should be engraved in stone and delivered to anyone who is thinking of getting into this game but try telling that to a hot headed under 30 founder who is worried about burning that cash as fast as possible to 'grow big and sell the company'. I almost feel like SV is all about exits and not enough focus on meaningful products that arise out of genuine passion to solve a real problem.
- api 11y ago
  Those kinds of founders need a dose of reality. That path is usually more like "burn lots of investor cash and your reputation, then fail." For the very few who sort of pull the pump and dump burn to exit thing off there are dozens who just crash.
  - curiousjorge 11y ago
    doesn't seem to happen. people who raise ridiculous amount of money seems to do it again and again and investors are happy to keep shoveling piles of money around. vast amount of money is moved around and evaporated. that kind of money if distributed to single founders who have a working product, generating revenues would have a far more benefit to society and consumers instead of one giant company that bullies it's way into the markets by splashing money around.
    - api 11y ago

staunch 11y ago

Evernote is only a weird bloated SaaS company (with hundreds of employees) because they followed the wrong business model. Evernote should be more like Minecraft (Mojang). A cool piece of software that a handful of people develop but a billion people use. They would be wildly profitable and worth many billions to Microsoft and others.

lalos 11y ago
True. Like Sunrise (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquires-sunrise-creator-innovative-calendar-app-mobile-devices/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquire...) and Acompli (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquires-acompli-provider-innovative-mobile-email-apps/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquire...)

archildress 11y ago

Evernote is such a great idea and in its early stage, it showed a lot of promise as the "trapper keeper" of all things digital. But as time went on, the client became bloated and there were weird products like Evernote Food that were pushed on users. I'm still using it for certain parts of my work, and I'm increasingly frustrated with the pop ups in the application every few days to upgrade to Evernote Premium. Someone is going to make a product that looks a lot like Evernote that's going to succeed. But I think Evernote's best days are behind it.

pwelch 11y ago
Yep! Between syncing issues on previous versions and the latest pops every time I open the app I'm trying new things. Most things are going in Jrnl. I think I'm going to give OneNote a try for everything else. Friends swear by it and the latest version seems to work pretty good on OS X.
yabatopia 11y ago
Don't forget Evernote Market, where you can buy - for unknown reasons - light purple business socks from Evernote. Talk about losing focus if you have too much VC money.

shughes 11y ago

Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had only submitted that one review. When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a little over the top.

Dystopian 11y ago
Wasn't really suspicious - there was a call-to-action at the top of the app to help Evernote by leaving a review (the reviews help their app store optimization). There are a lot of die hard Evernote advocates out there that'd be happy to.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Holy hell. Today I learned that "appstore optimization" is a real thing...
  - jakeva 11y ago
    It's not just a real thing… it's big business. Entire companies exist around it.

paulsutter 11y ago

Evernote has me hooked on cross device persistent notes. And I will change to the first quality alternative that lets me import my existing notes from Evernote. Evernote still can't handle even simple non-overlapping changes on two devices. Every time I close my laptop I have to wonder if changes were synched. Especially embarrassing because superb open source code is already available for conflict resolution (git, for example). EDIT: someone should write a notekeeping app built on github.

teach 11y ago
As a Linux user I have never used Evernote, but Google Keep has cross-device persistent notes and I've never had even the tiniest glitch with synchronization.
- sbuk 11y ago
  As a Mac and Windows user I've never used google keep as there is no native app.
  - aviraldg 11y ago
    There's a Chrome app, which is "native" enough for me.
    - sbuk 11y ago
      That's great and I genuinely hope that it works for you. The point I was making was that there was no point. Text files and an ftp server are arguably as good, but ultimately meaningless in relation to the article.
      - teach 11y ago
        I don't think I understand your point. Google Keep works offline, it has seamless syncing when it is online and I can access it from all my devices (including my phone). I guess you don't consider a Chrome App to be a "real" native app and that somehow makes it different for you, but I don't see any meaningful distinction.

tdumitrescu 11y ago

From the article: "last year, TechCrunch pegged the company's revenue at around $36 million, and while revenue has increased, we've heard the numbers are still short of internal expectations" So Evernote is valued at more than 27x revenue??

tdylan 11y ago
Not a big multiple for a supposed growing company. Phil Libin said it takes on average of 40ish months to convert a free to paid user, that's harsh.

erebus_rex 11y ago

I was a longtime user of evernote but recently gave up. The webclipping tool was phenomenal but the notetaking interface was so and so (their desktop app was also poorly built which made things worse). After awhile, onenote took care of my notetaking needs and pocket of my linksaving needs. I think this was a great part of why evernote faltered. They just became a repo/dump of user crap. People didn't care to engage with the platform and therefore did not care to find out what extra value it could give them, thus preventing them from converting to paid users.

tdylan 11y ago
Were you able to import your Evernote notes?

curiousjorge 11y ago

what's evernote again? I installed it once in 2012 out of curiosity, never used it or seen it again. Some type of note taking app?

scosman 11y ago
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote

r721 11y ago

Big recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299642 (448 comments)

pyrrhotech 11y ago

A great example of why the "number of users" metric is being overvalued. Until there is a solid, proven and scalable business plan to translate usage to revenue the $100 per user standard valuation shouldn't apply.

scosman 11y ago
Maybe for late stage investors, but if you applied that strategy as an early stage consumer investor you would have missed almost much every big hit (FB, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc).
- nine_k 11y ago
  Twitter is a dubious hit. It's wildly popular, but its profits are very unimpressive, to say the least.
  - scosman 11y ago
    $20B market cap. You could argue it should be $10B, but 'dubious hit' for an early stage investor is ridiculous.
tajen 11y ago
OTOH, Many companies provide B2C services to million users for free as a side effect of raising awareness for their B2B paid offers. I wonder whether society should value this benevolent side effect to the point of reclassifying their primary purpose to "Providing a benevolent service". Yes, I'm almost being ironic because it's a failure of a business model, and I'm afraid of whether GitHub will maintain its public free service for long.
username223 11y ago
> $100 per user standard valuation Is that actually a thing? If so, I can retire on the valuation of my obscure vanity blog, but I'm also worth a few million to websites I've accessed.

fredfoobar42 11y ago

The Evernote Mac client is the one of the worst piece of software on the Mac platform. I've actually been using a $5 replacement app, Alternate, and moving my Evernote text notes back to nvALT synced through Dropbox. Evernote, please, I do not want: - Work Chat - Headlines from Business Insider - To be CONSTANTLY BUGGED TO UPGRADE That's the biggest thing. I'd love to give Evernote money, if I knew I was going to get left alone. Instead, all the Evernote Premium members I know are _still_ bugged to upgrade and get all these stupid, useless features thrown at them that they don't want.

mark_l_watson 11y ago
I agree with you. I am a middle tier ($25/year) user and I eschue the Mac app and just use the web interface. I filed a bug report last week on getting too many nags to use new features. On my Android phone, saying NO to using a new feature did not prevent many new nags about the same feature. It is this nagging that might convince me to not renew my yearly service when it expires.
lampa 11y ago
If you like nvALT, have you try voogla? http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY http://youtu.be/u-pBvs3PNIY
extc 11y ago
I assume you mean Alternote (not Alternate) which says it's just an alternative GUI to the Evernote backend. So you still seem to be at the mercy of Evernote?

minikites 11y ago

If you need note syncing, use Simplenote. Evernote is almost certainly overkill for what most people want.

pbreit 11y ago

Actual headline: "The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble" Current: "Evernote is in deep trouble" (overly strong, imo). Also, I don't think the article supports very well the "deep trouble" description. It sounds like the company has plenty of money and continues to grow.

ScottWhigham 11y ago
That doesn't seem like that big of a difference to me. In fact, I'd say the actual headline is more hyperbolic. The inside story of how $1 billion is specifically written to cause people to click the link.
- pbreit 11y ago
  I Guess that's true. "Deep trouble" to me suggests the company is running out of money and in somewhat dire straits. Which I don't believe to be the case at all.

gaze 11y ago

Surprise. Evernote is just such a shockingly low quality product. First of all, as a note taking company, you CAN NOT LOSE DATA. EVER. I use my notebook for keeping data and derivations and lecture notes. Data is the most valuable thing in my profession, insights sometimes don't come twice, and lectures are often never given twice. So, the service already sucks. The client is buggy and bloated with features... Which I find somehow insulting since they're developing new useless features and selling merchandise that nobody needs while they're ignoring crucial flaws in their software. Finally, and maybe this is something only scientists people care about, their pen input support is abysmal... AFTER acquiring one of the best note taking products for the iPad! How have they managed to screw this up so bad? OneNote gets all these things dead on correct, and that's why it's the standard in labs that keep digital notes. Evernote does not seem to understand the role their product takes in people's lives. I really hope they either shape up or go away so they can stop distracting people from what they actually want.

arikrak 11y ago

I switched to evernote when I switched to a Mac, but I never liked it much and it crashes frequently. Due to the 'switching hassle', I never got around to switching back to Onenote when it came out on Mac.

crudbug 11y ago

They missed the ship without dead simple bookmark service a.k.a Pocket !

visarga 11y ago

I tried to use EverNote to study scanned books in TIFF format. It was painful, it wasn't able to import 50,000 pages and apply OCR. I eventually wrote script using Tesseract and a web app similar to Google Books. I could take notes on the sides of the pages and the collect them by tags. Now I use Skim for Mac to take notes form PDF files.

edwinnathaniel 11y ago

I heard this a lot: Evernote sync-ing is buggy. Could someone point to me how to implement a good cross-device sync-ing algorithms? Or is it perhaps just as simple as using object version based on timestamp? I've never done this before so I have no clue how easy/hard it is to implement one.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
why not libgit2 with a decent diff/merge UI?
snaily 11y ago
Here's a set of slides on how Spotify does it with playlists: http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JimmyMrdell/playlists-at-spotify-cassandra-summit-london-2013 http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JimmyMrdell/playlists-at-sp...
twic 11y ago
The gold standard right now is operational transformation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation But this requires that you capture every edit, which (I think) makes it more complicated than classical merging techniques which just work on whole documents as input.

lips 11y ago

It's striking to me that here on HN, where there's rarely anything approaching consensus on software user satisfaction (IMHO), evernote is being roundly blasted. These feelings weren't formed in 2015 (I've been disappointed by it for years), and yet they continued to let it fester. (Shruggy guy)

brucefancher 11y ago

I've tried Evernote a bunch of times over the years and always been disappointed. I really wish there was something that worked more like Circus Ponies Notebook, but synced data w/ multiple clients like Evernote does. Oh well, I guess I just need to keep waiting.

captn3m0 11y ago

Don't know if these recent articles will turn out to be the death toll for Evernote. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this point, Evernote could pretty much do anything and still nobody on this thread would be convinced they are doing it right. Another thing that I never liked about evernote is their API is perhaps the worst API I have ever encountered. Thrift should never be used for external APIs, period. [0] [0]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-APIs/answer/Abhay-Rana?shared=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-APIs/answ...

nakodari 11y ago

I lost my entire Evernote notebook once. After that, I've been exporting notes manually once every month. Dropbox focused on making their "sync" and app rock solid, Evernote didn't. It's that simple.

barendt 11y ago

What alternatives are people using for Evernote that support more than just text? The main draw Evernote has for me is the ability to attach an arbitrary number of files to a note, add some additional text or a useful title, and then search on those notes across iOS and OS X devices. I've been increasingly frustrated by how buggy and complicated Evernote has gotten so I'd be happy to try alternatives that might be out there.

douche 11y ago
I use OneNote, it seems to be pretty decent. Mostly I use it for bookmarking web pages and writing quick notes across devices. I'm not in the Apple club, but I have heard that it has decent clients for OSX, and the web interface in Office365 is not bad.

ergest 11y ago

Wrong motives (trying to be a cool company) plus wrong incentives (billion dollar evaluation and lots of cash to burn) leads to wrong focus and feelings of invincibility.