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Evernote makes $800,000 per Month
- kondro 16y agoI guess something is working out for them. But for that $800k/month they have to support 5 million users. I wonder how profitable that actually is for them?
- richardw 16y agoThat calc is just from paying users. It has ads bottom-left as well so it's likely they get extra ad income in proportion to the number of non-paying users.
- tnorthcutt 16y agoNot to mention "a series of confidential, revenue-generating partnerships."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- sedachv 16y agoAnyone have any clue what those might be? Bundling agreements with PC manufacturers?
- kondro 16y agoDo you really think that either of these would be higher than paying users? There really isn't that much money in ad revenue these days unless you can control the market and have truly massive (ala Google's 400+ million searches a day).
- muhfuhkuh 16y ago"There really isn't that much money in ad revenue these days unless you can control the market and have truly massive (ala Google's 400+ million searches a day)" Backflip studios makes really popular games like Ragdoll Blaster and Paper Toss, and according to their CEO, they have anywhere from 15 million active monthly users. They say in-game ads make them about a half-million a month. Granted, thats is a gigantic install base, but it could scale down nicely to 5 million evernote users, if that is an active monthly number for them. Perhaps they hit the six figures monthly from ads, which is nothing to scoff at, by any means.
- richardw 16y agoNot higher, otherwise they wouldn't try convert you to a paying customer. But it's extra money, and a user could easily click a few ads in a year before buying.
- wccrawford 16y agoLittle bit of a terminology issue there. They bring in $800k gross. No clue what their net (aka profit) is.
- dhyasama 16y agoAlso of note, Evernote has a $45/year option in addition to the $5/month option. That is a 25% discount so the number must be less than $800k.
- maxklein 16y agoWhen I see news like this, all I think is that a proportion of Evernotes users must be quite dissatisfied with their services and would switch if there were a better alternative. Then I think - perhaps I should make a better alternative. I store some of my stuff in Evernote, but it's not convenient for writing. It's too cluttered and distracting for that. I'd like to make something with the storage facilities of evernote, but a much less distracting writing interface.
- paraschopra 16y agoI don't follow your train of thought. Why would a stat $800k revenues per month make you conclude that users must be quite dissatisfied?
- maxklein 16y agoBecause an app with that many users always has a chunk of dissatisfied users.
- paraschopra 16y agoI must admit I would have never got to that conclusion without this clarification :) Though it is an interesting perspective. It just says that market is large and like in all large markets there is a niche of users who are dissatisfied because top solution doesn't fit their specific needs. So yes for a startup looking to enter the market, it is great to solve that specific need and then grow from there.
- mattculbreth 16y agoI've actually had a note (in Evernote) for a while now to "find replacement for Evernote or write my own." Every time they release a new version I see item after item that's of no interest to me. I really just want a simple place to store to-do lists, notes, etc. and have it available on every machine and phone I use. They do a lot more than that now, but yet you still can't edit a to-do list with checkboxes on the iPhone!
- sadiq 16y agoCrunchbase seems to think they've raised $45.5m so far which strikes me as an awful lot. http://www.crunchbase.com/company/evernote http://www.crunchbase.com/company/evernote I wonder what their growth is like.
- duck 16y agoGrowth in term of users? http://blog.evernote.com/2010/11/10/5-million-evernote-users/ http://blog.evernote.com/2010/11/10/5-million-evernote-users...
- arturadib 16y agoA corollary from these stats is that their active user base is about 1/3 of the total. That's pretty darn impressive, if it's accurate.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoI don't come out with the same numbers. Seems to me: Just over 3% of total are paying (160,000 / 5,000,000) 7.5% of total users are active users (that's in the article) Still, they've built a $10,000,000 business (in regards to turnover, not profit or valuation of course) and that's darn impressive as well.
- arturadib 16y agoHa, I guess one of us misinterpreted the statement: "approximately 20% of active users (7.5% of total users) are paying users by month 29" Is it "20% of active = 7.5% of total", or is it "active = 7.5% of total" ? It seems a little ambiguous. But to be honest, I think a more reasonable number is 7.5% indeed!!
- Multiplayer 16y agoEvernote is a genius utility that was not completely obvious to me until a few months ago. Here's my take: You can store anything in it, and does text recognition on photos for later searching. My scanner is hooked up to it - I scan everything and dump it in there. Receipts, statements, bills, correspondence, contracts, whatever. You can dump any document into it, tag it, put in a notebook, whatever. It works across my complete tech stack: Iphone, Ipad, MacBook, Imac and web when needed. Switching to a new computer/device is completely painless. Install the app, login, your environment is duplicated from the cloud. Perfect every time. I have tried every task and todo system under the sun, as well as note takers, folder sync systems, etc. Instead of worrying about where all the files are, whether they are syncing or backed up, blah blah blah, whether they can connect to another pc to get the sync, etc. This is a really strong blend of all of the above. You can implement a GTD system if you wish, etc. etc. etc. All my "stuff" is with me wherever I go now. I also use omnifocus for project stuff, fwiw. Works across my entire tech stack and syncs really well too.
- trotsky 16y agoyou don't worry about having such a large cache of personal information in such a weakly protected storage location? Would you even be able to detect any ongoing intrusion?
- jemfinch 16y agoI doubt his home computers are any less weakly protected than Evernote's servers.
- trotsky 16y agoYou think his computers accept logins from anyone on the internet that types in his url, with a password that can be reset using his email and/or a security question?
- Multiplayer 16y agoI crossed that chasm a long time ago with gmail.
- joebananas 16y agoOTOH, $800K/month gross is probably less than what your grocery store does.
- ahi 16y agoWalmart Stores U.S. averages $5.7m/month gross per store. Years ago I worked at a tiny CVS that routinely hit 50k in a week.
- wallflower 16y agoRevenue figure comparisons are not meaningful if the gross margins are not similar. For most grocery stores, the profit margin is around 2-3%. In other words, if someone steals a pack of cigarettes they have to sell $200 of groceries to make up the loss.
- coliveira 16y agoSoftware revenue margins (particularly web services) is much higher than the margins enjoyed by your local supermarket.
- theBobMcCormick 16y agoThis part jumped out at me: "The longer you stay, the more likely you are to become a premium user. While less than 1% of active users sign up for premium content in the first month, approximately 20% of active users (7.5% of total users) are paying users by month 29" There's a lot of discussion on HN about whether "Freemium" is good or bad, for Evernote at least it sounds like it's a win if their best route to getting paying customers is to entice you to use the product for an extended period of time.
- gleb 16y agoThis kind of survivor bias will be true for mostly any subscription business. Users that weren't getting much value from your business will drop off. Given a reasonable segmentation of free and paid users that will mean a larger percentage of active users will be paid.
- jan_c 16y agofor all the noise that evernote makes about its numbers, 800k sounds a bit paltry... sure, most startups don't even come close to a 10m run rate, but I'd expect better given how proudly and frequently they boast their stats publicly. evernote is as old as groupon and doing <1/100th the revenue - overhyped much?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bobf 16y agoGroupon is far and away the exception, not the standard to measure against.
- jwcacces 16y agoMy problem with Evernote is that it came as shovel-ware on a new netbook I bought. Don't know much else about it, but that part defiantly turned me off.
- LiveTheDream 16y agoEvernote is one of the first apps I install when upgrading to a new system or reinstalling the OS, so I would actually be pleasantly surprised to find it on a new netbook.
- mkramlich 16y agoI'm always amazed when something that feels like a solution to a non-problem is earning big bucks. I mean, note-taking, really?! That's had a wealth of overlapping solutions, both free, cheap and otherwise, going back ... well, thousands of years at least. But props to the folks behind it for getting $800k/mo revenue out of it. Wow.
- petercooper 16y agoThey'd be making a bit more if they didn't spontaneously downgrade my account when it expired without encouraging me to upgrade. I got an email saying it had expired, been downgraded, and please could I could renew? I noticed, though, my account continued to work great on the free level and I wasn't using the quota at all, so I never renewed. If, though, they'd e-mailed a week or two before expiry, I'd have just blindly renewed for fear of the downgrade. The business lesson here: give people an opportunity to avoid perceived pain in advance, in case it turns out that the pain, when inflicted, isn't a pain at all ;-)
- plnewman 16y agoThere are indeed a ton of Evernote books in Japan.