13 ms·

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describ

by awill 4y ago

They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

w0m 4y ago
I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.
ddbb33 4y ago
Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)
riffic 4y ago
roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.
sedatk 4y ago
I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.
bigtones 4y ago
I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.
bayindirh 4y ago
Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps. They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian. Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity. They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  A "Relative utilitarian take" is not how it would describe a product that tried to incorporate an entire chat app into it. They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    They tried to be “everything and the kitchen sink for the enterprise”, and failed, not because of the features they added, but feature disparity between platforms, and some reliability problems. I was doing my Ph.D. when they debuted chat, and it was useful. Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too. However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really found themselves. I’m a pro subscriber, and the value they add into my life is immeasurable.
- rurp 4y ago
  > Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices. They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.
  - johnmw 4y ago
    I hope you are taking notes, Dropbox.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    I’m talking about their current iteration and roadmap so far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I concur.
boh 4y ago
It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote operated in. The default model for software startups was to leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be forced on them. Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  What does leverage mean here?
  - oblio 4y ago
    Debt.
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it? SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK.
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's growth expectations make your average loan shark's interest rates look downright reasonable.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it (liquidation preferences, etc.). Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.
oblio 4y ago
> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those. How do you define success? Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008. I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  Bear was Apple’s number one app for 2016 - it’s Mac/iOS only.
  - mkasu 4y ago
    Well to be fair, three of the four apps are Apple ecosystem apps (although Craft now expanding to other platforms). Maybe Roam, Obsidian, Logseq would be better examples of booming apps note-takers jump ship to? But then, I think all of these apps are rather niche compared to Evernote.
- pqs 4y ago
  Will Evernote be around in 14 years?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    Why not?
    - awill 4y ago
      Selling to Bending Spoons isn't a success story
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        I think jury is out on that one until we see the effects. Trello's acquisition was not as disastrous as I thought yet, for example. Wunderlist became Microsoft To Do. As a result, they are burrowed deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and got forgotten on the other hand. Let's see where it goes and what's gonna happen to the ecosystem. I like Evernote at its current state, hope they won't turn it upside down.
tomjen3 4y ago
Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service. If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose? I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service. That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules. > If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose? A user, and a potential source of future users. For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us"). Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering"). In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.
d--b 4y ago
Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they just don't give a s** anymore.
grammers 4y ago
Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well.
smcleod 4y ago
Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.
- pbowyer 4y ago
  In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not. On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that complaint about other Electron apps.
  - smcleod 4y ago
    Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good.
- _lqaf 4y ago
  Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant. I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head. If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional. Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    Yup. This is actually why I dropped Evernote so many years ago -- the distance from "thought" to "blank screen to start writing in" was too much. I just use Google Keep. It has some weaknesses, but it's good enough for my use case and is snappy.
  - ponkipo 4y ago
    Notion seems to be planning to add some kind of AI-based tool for their app, by the way - https://www.notion.so/product/ai https://www.notion.so/product/ai
eastbound 4y ago
France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were blowing money and adding features like there’s no tomorrow. When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel, which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who themselves were publicly funded. Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone. Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.
jmathai 4y ago
Evernote has been in business (albiet, not growing) for 22 years! I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.
PhasmaFelis 4y ago
I dumped Evernote when they spontaneously deleted half my notes from my desktop and their backup server and couldn't recover them. Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.
ghuntley 4y ago
> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then. See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1593059936506089472 https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...
kritiko 4y ago
I just read a DHH blog on this that seems relevant because it mentions Notion: > Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation. >These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due. https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofitable-software-companies-2a0a5f57 https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...
scumola 4y ago
Maybe the acquisition will change the nummber of devices to > 2??

by awill 4y ago

w0m 4y ago

I loved evernote ~10-15 years ago; used it for ~all personal stuff. Eventually it became more metered/locked down (I don't remember specifics anymore) and i moved to OneNote.

ddbb33 4y ago

Still upset when Evernote lost my lecture notes when I synced after turning off WiFi to save laptop battery (back in 2010)

riffic 4y ago

roam, obsidian, logseq, etc so many new or really interesting players in this space.

sedatk 4y ago

I'd stopped using Evernote involuntarily because their 2FA recovery scenario was broken and I got locked out of my account despite that I still had access to my email. I moved on. I checked it again years later, and they fixed it, but never went back. Such small omissions can create a whole chain of losses.

bigtones 4y ago

I don't know that Evernote the company or it's management would be jealous - Evernote probably has more annual revenue than all of those app combined.

bayindirh 4y ago

Actually, their experience is pretty pleasant and the product works very well after they have rebuilt their apps. They don’t need to be jealous. Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Yes, I love markdown, and Evernote just provides a slightly more powerful, WYSIWYG version of it. I neither want “everything and the kitchen sink” vision of Notion, and desktop centric view of Obsidian. Ulysses and Bear are Apple first systems, and while I use Apple mobile devices, my ecosystem is much more varied, and Evernote accommodates all, with feature parity. They are good and understated. Hope that I won’t need to move out after that acquisition.

throwaway675309 4y ago
A "Relative utilitarian take" is not how it would describe a product that tried to incorporate an entire chat app into it. They had a relatively good product around v5X series and I left because they just started to fragment and add more and more non-notetaking related things at the expense of the entire product stability and core functionality.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  They tried to be “everything and the kitchen sink for the enterprise”, and failed, not because of the features they added, but feature disparity between platforms, and some reliability problems. I was doing my Ph.D. when they debuted chat, and it was useful. Similarly, I miss their presentation mode for the notes. It was extremely useful, and the output was very pretty, too. However, after the CEO change and rebuild, they really found themselves. I’m a pro subscriber, and the value they add into my life is immeasurable.
rurp 4y ago
> Their relative utilitarian take on the matter is what makes them so unique and powerful in the market. Man this was not my experience at all. Granted I dropped Evernote quite a while ago, but for years they kept adding a kitchen sink of features that I didn't care about, while regressing at the basics like syncing and merging text notes across multiple devices. They were maybe first company I experienced that blew up a really solid app I liked after raising a truck load of VC money and trying to take over the world.
- johnmw 4y ago
  I hope you are taking notes, Dropbox.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  I’m talking about their current iteration and roadmap so far. Previous iteration had its fair share of issues, I concur.

boh 4y ago

It's impossible to not "blow it" in the environment Evernote operated in. The default model for software startups was to leverage yourself to the hilt so can achieve some fantasy growth expectation VCs had for you. The growth requirements overextended the realities of a note taking app and so the product gets bloated in a desperate grasping for growth of any kind and the user gets pinched for every fee that can be forced on them. Hopefully recent economic events will change the culture and more companies will actually factor in reality into their growth models.

renewiltord 4y ago
What does leverage mean here?
- oblio 4y ago
  Debt.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Right, that's the usual meaning, but it's quite unusual for software companies to be debt financed, isn't it? SaaS companies usually go the venture route AFAIK.
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      Leverage is probably the wrong choice of word, but VC's growth expectations make your average loan shark's interest rates look downright reasonable.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        Leverage is a fine choice of words. In financial terms, debt and equity are not that different. Particularly VC equity, which can have some debt-like qualities to it (liquidation preferences, etc.). Also, many startup investments use debt instruments like convertible notes instead of direct equity purchases.

oblio 4y ago

> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). One point of anecdata: I haven't heard of any of those. How do you define success? Keep in mind Evernote was created in 2000 and the web version was launched in 2008. I doubt any of the stuff in your list will be around in 14 years.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
Bear was Apple’s number one app for 2016 - it’s Mac/iOS only.
- mkasu 4y ago
  Well to be fair, three of the four apps are Apple ecosystem apps (although Craft now expanding to other platforms). Maybe Roam, Obsidian, Logseq would be better examples of booming apps note-takers jump ship to? But then, I think all of these apps are rather niche compared to Evernote.
pqs 4y ago
Will Evernote be around in 14 years?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bayindirh 4y ago
  Why not?
  - awill 4y ago
    Selling to Bending Spoons isn't a success story
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      I think jury is out on that one until we see the effects. Trello's acquisition was not as disastrous as I thought yet, for example. Wunderlist became Microsoft To Do. As a result, they are burrowed deep into the Microsoft ecosystem and got forgotten on the other hand. Let's see where it goes and what's gonna happen to the ecosystem. I like Evernote at its current state, hope they won't turn it upside down.

tomjen3 4y ago

Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service. If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose? I pay for todoist because I love using it and the free account doesn't have a must-have feature (reminders). I could dump them and find something else, but I get plenty of value for the money I spend with them.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Honestly, the goal with a free account should be to convert users into paying users or by making the platform more useful for paying users of the service. That's true for normal companies. Startups operate by a different set of rules. > If you cancel an account that didn't pay them any money, what exactly did they lose? A user, and a potential source of future users. For many startups, userbase growth matters much more than revenue, to the point they'll happily go negative on per-user profitability just to get more people on-board. Particularly those that aggressively pursue further funding ("actually making us profitable is something we'll consider after the next round") or an exit ("it'll be a problem for the sucker that buys us"). Yes, it is a source of a lot of pathology you see with today's software products, like products getting bloated with irrelevant pseudo-features ("oh shit, we can't actually make this sustainable; quick, let's try to extract all value we can from the userbase, and hopefully have something left after paying off the investors"), or getting acquired and shut down ("ha ha, we knew it was never going to be sustainable; we bought it to cheaply acquire talent and/or get you out of the way so you don't compete with our offering"). In every case, VCs and founders win, users lose.

d--b 4y ago

Don't know... These guys already made a fortune. Maybe they just don't give a s** anymore.

grammers 4y ago

Ulysses is great, I'm glad I found them as well.

smcleod 4y ago

Evernote was still decent enough before the ditched the native app for a dreadful Electron webframe.

pbowyer 4y ago
In some ways the Electron app is better because there's more formatting options (code blocks, finally!) but most ways not. On my systems it's so slow to startup, and I don't have that complaint about other Electron apps.
- smcleod 4y ago
  Yeah I completely brought my quite powerful machine to a halt at the time, it would eat up resources like all Electron apps do - and I'd hate to think of the potential security exploits with a Electron / unsandboxed chrome that formats clipped websites and attachments etc... - not good.
_lqaf 4y ago
Ugh. Note taking apps need to be instant. I care far less about the feature set than I do getting the whatever written down and out of my head. If you make we wait while you load a website's worth of js or phone home with surveillance data or whatever, I'm just going to delete you. I'd rather use a 1995-era Textedit or Notepad - they're instantly functional. Just to make sure I maintain my curmudgeon's rep, I'll add - advertise AI and I'm also gone. I have zero need for assistance from a tripping robot to type in my work life.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Yup. This is actually why I dropped Evernote so many years ago -- the distance from "thought" to "blank screen to start writing in" was too much. I just use Google Keep. It has some weaknesses, but it's good enough for my use case and is snappy.
- ponkipo 4y ago
  Notion seems to be planning to add some kind of AI-based tool for their app, by the way - https://www.notion.so/product/ai https://www.notion.so/product/ai

eastbound 4y ago

France here. I knew some Evernote developers and PO. They were blowing money and adding features like there’s no tomorrow. When there was indeed no tomorrow at Evernote, they used their unemployment benefits from our state and worked in parallel, which was legally dodgy and ethically out of the line. They created a consultancy which almost exclusively works on state-derived funding, a bit like half of science projects in USA depend on Darpa, except it was education money which they used to invent some AI model to find at-risk pupils that every teacher could qualify anyway, but you know, AI+education makes a sexy startup. They only got public funding and customers who themselves were publicly funded. Such people are a dead weight on our society, sucking at education funds, not weighing the cost they have, and giving lessons to everyone. Those guys will never understand how to provide a service that customers are willing to pay for.

jmathai 4y ago

Evernote has been in business (albiet, not growing) for 22 years! I think we need to fast forward 10 more years to see how Notion is doing to make the comparison.

PhasmaFelis 4y ago

I dumped Evernote when they spontaneously deleted half my notes from my desktop and their backup server and couldn't recover them. Thank God I happened to have my most important note open on my laptop, which was closed at the time. I opened it, shut down the wifi as quick as I could so it couldn't update, and copied that note into OneNote, which frankly works better anyway. I will never trust Evernote again.

ghuntley 4y ago

> They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it. Yup they did. Blew it when they didn't add 2FA. I emailed them repeatedly in the early years asking for them to add it citing risks of having all my information in a note taking application with poor security -> no replies. Then they got p0wned hard. Luckily I had my data out of their systems by then. See screenshot of emails at https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/1593059936506089472 https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/15930599365060894...

kritiko 4y ago

I just read a DHH blog on this that seems relevant because it mentions Notion: > Same deal with Notion. They raised a $343M Series C on Oct 8, 2021 at $10 billion in valuation. >These are all crazy numbers from a crazy time, and now the economic hangover is due. https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofitable-software-companies-2a0a5f57 https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...

scumola 4y ago

Maybe the acquisition will change the nummber of devices to > 2??