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Evernote in trouble?
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Posted by Paul Korm
Sep 19, 2018 at 12:59 AM
225 million customers does not sound like a business on the edge of failure
The CEO’s report does not contain dire news
>As I discussed in All-Hands, Evernote grew over 20% in the first half this year and we are in a stable financial position. Our Q3 revenue numbers remain strong and we expect to end the quarter north of $27 million. We have over $30 million in cash on our balance sheet and will exit 2018 generating more cash than we spend.
Perhaps the anticipated death of Evernote is an exaggeration?
Posted by NickG
Sep 19, 2018 at 09:09 AM
I think Evernote’s problems are:
- Uncertainty among users created by EN’s unpredictable shifts in strategy and pricing.
- Unclear USP - they started as a zero-friction, any-platform info capture app. Very simple, nothing to learn, just sign up and go. Having decided some time back to go heavier into note-taking and information management, it’s not clear where they’re unique against all the competition. They still do zero-friction capture well, but they’ve obscured that behind the other stuff they’ve added.
- Security/privacy is an issue for many people and corporations - I don’t think EN have convinced enough people they can be trusted in this area. When there are trustable alternatives, corps especially will take the low-risk “safe” route (quotes, because who knows what’s safe in future).
- The free tier gives plenty of people enough of the capture/note-taking features to satisfy their needs. Those who want more and might go premium included a significant number who are savvy enough to think out the alternatives - workflows and apps. When I went premium (around 2009), there was no alternative. I didn’t have to install anything on the PC I had to work with, and I could access the info on that and all my own (Apple) devices seamlessly. Lovely. Now I have other options.
- A frustrated user base who have been looking fir basic functional improvements for years and got everything but that.
I don’t believe EN is in urgent rouble, but I do believe they need to take a serious look at their business strategy, or face a long decline. Or maybe a takeover.
Posted by Amontillado
Sep 19, 2018 at 11:49 AM
More Evernote worry. Devonthink has features that leverage Evernote, so there may be a little baked-in bias. My experience with Devonthink has been entirely positive.
https://blog.devontechnologies.com/2018/09/backup-your-valuable-data-from-evernote/
Regarding earlier posts about complexity and DT’s syncing, I haven’t noticed any of that, nor do I pay any attention to which device a DT database resides on. I work on an iMac, a Macbook Air, and an iPad. I’ve got an iPhone, but I haven’t ever used DT from there.
I can find no example of data being lost. Create a database, turn on sync to iCloud if I care about it on my iPad, otherwise I sync to an encrypted thumb drive. It just works.
For a while, I didn’t use DT for writing projects. At most, I might have four or five files in a project. The work, a mindmap, an outline or two, and not much else. Now, I’ve started using DT as a way of making a nice little bucket for a project, and I’ve found myself making more little “post-it” style notes about what I’m writing. I think that’s a good thing. Still not finding anything I wrote on the Walmart shelves, but I think I’m doing better.
Come to think of it, not finding myself at Walmart might be a good sign, too, no offense intended to the James Pattersons of the world.
Posted by satis
Sep 19, 2018 at 01:02 PM
Paul Korm wrote:
>225 million customers does not sound like a business on the edge of
>failure
That’s a good argument for the distortions of VC money propping up unprofitable businesses, not strength of a company as a going concern. Evernote reminds me of Soundcloud, which has vast user numbers, and a tiny percentage of paying users, and is a slow-motion trainwreck with little chance of recovery. Subscription conversion rate for Evernote has never never been publicly announced, as far as I know. At 1%-10% that’s 2-23 million paying users on the platform, supporting the free users. That’s clearly not enough, as sales have been flat for six years, while $290 million in (increasingly impatient) VC money has been pumped into the company. The fact that its CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel and head of HR Michelle Wagner all departed in the last few weeks and the company slashed its workforce and made a major subscription offer cut indicates that the remaining management intends to try to buy time by cutting costs and giving themselves a temporary cash flow cushion. This pushes the ball down the road but generally doesn’t end well.
Posted by 22111
Sep 19, 2018 at 03:12 PM
Mr. Korm’s citation: “Together, we have built a product that serves over 225 million people around the world who trust us with more than 9 billion notes containing their most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations.”
Same EN CEO in the very lines before that: “Together, we have built a product that serves over 225 million people around the world who trust us with more than 9 billion notes containing their most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations.”
Dissecting the blah-blah, 9 bill / 225 mill = 40 “their most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations” per capita.
Assuming 100 mill dormant accounts - once tried, or several times even, then let alone, between 0 and 40 “most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations”, deleted (0) or left there since not “important” anymore, that’d make around 2 bill “most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations” from 9 bill, 7 bill / 125 mill = 56 “most important thoughts, ideas, and inspirations” per active user, paying or not.
Now that ridiculous qualification makes sense: The CEO’s trying to hound possible reasons why there’s so little stuff of theirs users bring into his mobile PIM, discarding any logic, then if it’s not EN which’d be a generic input box and repository-by-search-and-tagging-for-all-of-non-physical-things, which other tool would it be, by EN’s original claim? And they do NOT tout EN’s availability as a transient-only tool afaik, but then, that’s what I think: Some paying users use it to that effect, for initial input processing (OCR), and then they shove it into professional software (DevonThink?); others will certainly store some hundreds of items in EN indeed.
Cf. OneNote: There again, it’s an input processing device for many, incl. - as is EN, too, presumably - some group work (professional MS group software being VERY expensive), and then, (surviving) items probably get into some real software, the common paradigm of both EN and ON being to deny (even paying) customers depth of categorization: just imagine NTFS just 1-, 2- or at most 3-levelled.
EN just offers a pittance without payment, and with it it doesn’t offer persistent AND WORKABLE storage, just some info-entry tool, implying LOTS of problems later on in the IM processes, by way of more or less bumpy transpositions of all sorts - too labor-intensive, after all.
Years ago, I asked here for the possible reasons of their then 156 developers, i.e. for the possible tasks they could have been deployed on. No answer here, and indeed, even today I’d be asking myself how they’d even succeed in keeping busy 15.6 developers 8 hours a day; certainly no need for midnight pizze over their premises. (Don’t know of the quality of their OCR which, if done in-house, would certainly have cost some person-years, but for a very limited time only.)
Today on bits, similar problems but seen from the opposite end of the work flow: UR as a moderately good data repository but without mobile access, thus treating the customers the very same way EN does.
At least UR’s stable, whilst EN’s said (see the various forum links in this thread further up) to bristle with even more bugs than does FinalDraft, and that’s really and definitely a piece of utter crap.