Evernote has almost 500 employees? How is that even possible? There must be at least 350 product managers. (Ok, that was a joke, but if you look at all their employees on linkedin like 2/3 have job titles that are in the 'overhead' bucket. Tons of 'People Ops', 'Brand and Communications', 'Marketing Manager', 'Product Designer', 'Producer'. 37 have a job title that includes 'marketing'.
391 appear to be non-engineering titles, out of 538 employees in the linkedin results. They have full time Agile coaches!!)
500+ employees with an annual revenue estimated to be below $10MM. That's $20k of revenue per employee! I mean I can just imagine what it's like there, insane meetings about metrics where 15 marketing managers show the powerpoint slides they spent the last week emailing back and forth to highlight the 2% growth last quarter, while they need to grow by 2000% in the next 48 months just to stay alive. Then in 3 months they have the same meeting.
Evernote has been severely mismanaged (I've been saying this since 2012, links below). I wonder how they feel about all the VC money they spent developing ports for WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone?
Not working at Evernote, but that definitely sounds like way too close to home.
The issue with Product Manager, Marketing managers etc is that those people are usually really good at marketing THEMSELVES and creating a mess of internal politics by doing so. They are needed but if you have too many of them pass a certain threshold and the whole company will never recover.
This seems to be unfortunately what is happening at Evernote.
1. Optimize going to lots of conferences which always happen to be at great locations
2. Cant provide more detailed "what did you learn at the conference" responses than useless boilerplate "customers are excited about xyz and there is huge growth there"
3. Create "partnerships" that sounds great with nice press releases but there is almost never any retrospective on how much sales $ these partnerships brought
4. Usually know very little about actual platform constraints and push cool-sounding ideas which incur massive technical debt
5. Love to create one-off demonstrations products that conveniently avoid hard questions about the technical platform and nicely shine to the c-suite and stick the ugliness of technical debt they bring to the engineers
6. Spend most of their day on Linked In hunting for the next sucker company
Mostly its symbiosis. When you have that much waste in the management layers, there is high degree of mutual political co-operation. This is even more easy in a 'Product Manager' position, you have quite literally no deliverables and almost nothing to report to your immediate manager(Who themselves have no deliverables). Often the thing they have to show are some metrics, which are generated by engineers, even the information that goes into the slides comes from engineers. So they basically 'own' the product, in the sense they get to make go-nogo calls during product launches.
Product managers are also insanely famous for killing features just to assert authority(This apparently comes while trying to appear like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said no to features, so we say no.).
The people managers don't put up a fight because they too are probably over staffed. The Managers/Real-Contributor ratio is high, and they know if they open their mouths and protest, their jobs are on the line next. So they let things go on.
A while back 'Program Managers' were in a similar state in most companies. I know places where they fired the entire Program management org and didn't notice any change, not even a faint pain. That was how contribution-less the whole hierarchy was.
The other part is obvious. These companies are full of VC money. They didn't earn it. The founders didn't earn it. Its free. After all its not like a loan you pay back, if the company falters, the founders or anybody of authority doesn't owe a dime to the investors. So they splurge. They spend on people. Most importantly they spend on their friends, who can help them get jobs else where.
All people are more susceptible to charismatic others than we'd like to admit I think.
People will tend to believe and trust them more, and so they can spin the narrative however they'd like (and often they're the layer of separation between devs and the higher-level management that precludes the higher-ups even getting first-hand exposure to some issues).
Edit: I also think charismatic others can do this without always knowing it i.e. in a self-interest sort of sense.
This isn’t how it should be but damn, it does exist. I switched into a product role after being in engineering after 5 years and it amazes me how many decisions are made without any consideration for the technical implications.
Even with my engineering background (full stack, leaning closer to front-end) I still pair with my engineering team lead for all planning activities for the quarter.
I’m not sure what org/comapny you work for, but in my experience (little over a year) I’ve had engineers tell me I make their lives a lot easier b/c I’m the umbrella that keeps them out of meetings, always dedicate some of the quarter to tech debt, and try to get them involved in early meetings as needed around the larger “moon shot” type of product features.
So maybe n=1, but I’ve also had zero attrition on my team of 10 engineers and hiring has been easier but most engineers haven’t had a product manager who used to be an engineer (I’ll always claim to be one heart) so maybe the issue is lack of technical awareness around the product they’re owning.
I really don't agree. The person in charge needs to have enough technical insight to have a good sense of the overall health of the team and whether reasonable progress is being made. They also need to have a sense of what is a 'good' product and what about the product needs to be improved.
Lets say the person in charge is not technical. The first thing that will happen is someone will get behind on what they are working on, and they will make some excuse (the database was reindexing or some nonsense), and the boss will believe them. From then on everyone knows they can slack off and get away with it, so productivity drops to almost 0.
Next the boss brings in technical managers to supervise the programmers, because he knows nothing is getting done but he doesn't know enough to call anybody out. This makes things much worse, since each manager is primarily motivated to be promoted, and the best way to be promoted is to demonstrate your ability to manage a large team. To get a larger team managers will deliver everything just a little too slow but hold out the carrot that if they had another person things could get done more quickly. In reality the managers are even less technically capable than the Boss, because they were interviewed and hired by the Boss. Boss's love throwing money at a problem, and team size grows and grows but managers can't actually push the team to get more done because they don't have any idea what is going on. The managers basically don't care about that anyway, since increasing productivity wouldn't help them and they can get favors in return by hiring someone's cousin.
Now there are hundreds of programmers and a dozen managers getting less done than the original 5 programmers. Lots of the programmers are extremely incompetent, hired due to nepotism or by mistake. They will never be fired because the manager would be admitting they made a mistake, or worse they might not get to hire a replacement if they fire this person, and this conflicts with their main goal of increasing their teams size to get a promotion.
Somebody has to plan work for all these programmers, and most of them are incompetent and don't care about the product. As a result, the quality is terrible. When confronted by the obvious bugs, they try to weasel out of it, and the boss is now very busy trying to keep customers and deal with emergencies (the database is down again!) to keep checking for all the obvious problems, so armies of QA people are hired. At some point a product manager is hired and once one is in the building they will hire 5 more within a year. Now you have 6 product managers having meetings with each other literally all day, and having not even a basic idea of what is going on they will start making plans. Since the programmers look busy when they are not seen or heard from so they just hide as much as possible and try not to attract attention, or put on headphones and stare at their monitors. The Product Managers look busy when they are having meetings, so they are always in every meeting, and pretty soon they insinuate themselves as the go betweens since they are always talking to the boss and the programmers are never around. Now the boss has even less idea what is going on since all the information getting to the boss is going through PMs who have literally no understanding of what is going on, and who get almost all of their information from other PMs, who get almost all their information from other PMs.
If this is a small company it is now basically in the same situation as Evernote is in now, and will go out of business soon, and if it's a large company the original boss has made such a mess and wasted so much money that the team he manages is large enough that the boss can get promoted to VP.
OR
The person in charge has enough technical understanding to keep his 10 programmers honest and make reasonable plans and be respected, and he keeps the team size at 10 super productive, happy programmers. If it's a small company he sells it to a big company for a huge pile of money, and if it's at a big company he gets passed over for promotion to VP because the job goes to some idiot that has managed to hire 500 incompetent programmers, 250 QA testers, and 200 PMs.
Exactly. Also, these PMs are likely to act in a way that will get good developers to quit and will not hire someone because they are too competent. I don't think it is always malicious though. They view themselves as a valuable part of software development. So when someone says that micromanaging good developers and putting them in 15 meeting a week is counterproductive, the PM assumes that person is lying or wrong. I MEAN IF NO ONE IS MANAGING THE DEVELOPERS, NOTHING WILL GET DONE.
Wow. It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers. How does an engineering team prioritize what to work on based on feedback from tens of millions of users across every country on the globe and most hardware/software platforms. Are engineers suppose to recruit, train, pay, and manage themselves? Are customers suppose to support themselves? Or is a script going to take care of that?
B2C companies are hard, partially because it takes lots of C's to make the B viable, and working with C's is expensive.
>It takes more than engineers to run a company. Unlike a lot of the engineering squad, marketers come up with the copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing and more that convince strangers to become users and users to become customers.
Yes, but not much more, especially if you're just a glorified notes app, which other companies manage to be with 1/10 the workforce.
And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.
To be honest (and not to seem arrogant), I know a lot of extremely talented engineers who have on occasion - or would be perfectly capable of - coming up with copy, art, offers, banners, ux and spend some time on marketing. And it would be automated.
> And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.
Apparently there's more to marketing than "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing".
All of these are tactics and don't tell you how you're going to make money or what your product and positioning should look like when your low-end use case is given away for free on 90% of phones (Notes, Google Keep), and the high-end is bundled in at zero-marginal cost with the Office 365 subscription your workplace has (OneNote).
How many companies are competing with Google, Apple and Microsoft?
> And all that "copy, art, offers, banner ads, ux, reporting, email marketing" hasn't worked that well for Evernote.
But it has worked for companies like say, Airbnb, which in its inception was a glorified Craigslist, but today is the world's biggest "hotel company" by some metrics.
Airbnb wouldn't be 1/100th the size it is if it wasn't for crossing the line between their original (public) plan(rent out unused space in your primary residence) vs their current plan (be an unregulated hotel with better returns than the long term rental market can offer)
Much like Uber, skirting & ignoring local regulations pays off handsomely.
Are they active, recurring users? I bet a good number of those are people who tried it for a week or two, realized it didn't cover their needs or they couldn't keep up with it or they didn't like all their information siloed in one application or something, and then stopped using it.
Like I tried Evernote once, for example, and I'm probably counted in that list of users, but I never used it for more than a couple of days before going back to Google Keep and Google Docs (with some Scrivener when I want to make an ebook).
Depending on how their funding was structured, perhaps they might have had too high a head count. But if their problem was too little revenue, then you’d want them to have more sales and marketing (and to a lesser extent product) people over more engineers.
It depends. First company of Evernote founder was run by engineers, had a contracts with Apple (Newton handwriting recognition technology), Disney, Microsoft, and their tech is still sorting mail at USPS[1]. This is the photo of the Paragraph team circa 1991 - https://maxkotin.com/2018/03/12/book-about-paragraph/
Lets say you were just hired as the President of a furniture company. The owner says he knows it's good furniture but even despite huge investments they can't seem to sell any furniture. Your job is to turn things around.
You start on the factory floor. The furniture is made by a combination of machines and human workers. Some people are employed to set up and configure the machines to make furniture parts. Around 150 people work on actually making furniture, either assembling it, doing quality tests, or setting up and operating the automated machinery. Things aren't perfect, but you aren't going to make any changes on your first day so you make some notes and move on. The furniture hasn't changed much over the years, it is still basically the same as it was when the furniture store opened. The furniture gets 'improved' from time to time, you see a step stool with an alarm clock, a small safe, and a webcam built into it, but when you ask the foreman he tells you nobody has ever turned on the alarm clock or used the safe or connected the webcam on any of the step stools. People seem to mainly use the stools so they can reach things that are up high. There is a problem where sometimes people slip when the stools are wet, so they worked out how to add a nonslip pad, but the product managers have decided that the next feature will be to add scents to the stools, so you can buy a stool that smells like cinnamon or one that smells like apples. They have a big advertising campaign already paid for and they already sent out the press release announcing "ScentedStools", so the machines need to be set up to start stamping out stools that smell like "Fresh Linen" by the end of the week. There are daily status meetings to update them on the progress. If the "Fresh Linen" stools aren't being produced by Thursday they are going to start having two status meetings per day.
You hear it's someone named Jim's last day, so you set up an exit interview. Jim tells you that the bosses and people upstairs don't really know what is going on in the factory. Most days he just sits and reads the news, his "nontechnical" manager doesn't know anything about furniture or how Jim does his job so there's no way for the manager to know what is going on other than to ask Jim. Supervision primarily consists of making sure Jim is sitting at his desk and looking at his monitor.
Since US labor laws don't allow Jim's manager to set specific hours for him to be at work, his manager has started scheduling 9AM meetings every day to force people to turn up. Every week or so Jim has to update some Product Managers upstairs about what is going on, and he just says they are making steady progress and comes up with some specific problem to explain why they aren't done, pretty much anything with jargon will work since nobody upstairs "could tell white oak from red oak". It takes about 5 minutes to give his status update but he's expected to stay for the entire 1 hour meeting, so he brings his laptop so he can read furniturenews.com. He says he is quitting to take a much lower paying job because he is bored and doesn't respect his manager.
Next you go upstairs to the office space and find 300 people having meetings with each other about annual plans and prioritization, writing mission statements and meeting to discuss mission statements. The 300 people upstairs are constantly in motion and complaining about how over worked they are. They each have 5, 6 or even 7 (sometimes more!) 1-hour meetings every day, but you only see them meet with each other, nobody has any meetings with anyone from outside the company, nobody has meetings with possible customers, and only very rarely do you see anyone from the factory floor in these meetings, and then it is almost always just to give a status update. None of these folks really understand furniture very well, they can't really tell good furniture from bad furniture, they literally don't know the difference between solid oak and cardboard, they don't know how long it takes or how much money it costs to build a chair. After a few days of meetings you haven't met anyone who cares about furniture at all, they all seem to want to work at the furniture factory because it pays well, or they like the prestige of being 'in furniture'. Mostly they talk about how overworked they are and make the case for hiring a few more people. If they could hire another person for their team they wouldn't be so far behind. You aren't sure what they are getting behind in, are they talking about meetings they can't attend because it conflicts with another meeting that is more important somehow? Do they need more time to work on power point slides for the next days meetings? Some of the office folks have degrees in furniture science, but none of them have ever successfully built or designed any furniture outside of little school projects.
Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
Wow. You know, I read your original comment with the opinion that it was very programmer-centric but this narrative made me think deeper about what you're trying to say.
I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus, things that have already been said to death. But it's amazing how a narrative, storytelling, can make me re-examine my own initial opinion like that.
>> I think Evernote sucks and they need to refocus ...
I don't think Evernote sucks in whole ... I very happily pay for Evernote annually-renewed premium subscription, and it's great at doing what I rent it for ...
+ it accepts documents, scans, photographs, text in notes that I can put in categories
+ it clips web page content through browser extensions and saves them as notes
+ it accepts emails composed and sent to it, and emails forwarded to it, turning them into notes
+ it does great OCR on scanned/photographed notes and documents
+ it does great matching on searches, from both explicit text and OCR'ed content
+ the browser interface is great, the Android, macOS, Windows apps are pretty decent
... and that's all I want.
Evernote's seen their missed opportunities and has tried to catch up:
+ they want to be Slack with channeled- and threaded-messaging -- Slack works better
+ they want to be the business document repository -- I much prefer Confluence (or other Wikis) for structuring and storing long-term relevant information
+ they want to be an issue tracker
+ ... every other collaboration thing under the sun
They've been pushing hard on all these multi-user shared-content angles. It seems like both a technical and marketing challenge -- they likely are too boxed-in and the jump a customer needs to make to envision using Evernote's new business/multi-user/collaboration features is too big.
Once the founders left and their "Building a company that will be here 100 years from now" left I left using it. I now use Boost Notes and Google Keep works better for me.
They have all those employees but does Evernote do anything new to make people's life easier in a different way the past ten years??? I answer no.
Burn the furniture outside. Its losing you business.
Fire the marketing team. (Seen this happened at colleges before)
Hire someone within from the floor as upper management that is the furniture expert. Give them actual power to ruffle feathers.
Hire outside a few middle managers from successful companies and pay them well.
CEO talks about how everyone needs to love what we make and do, furniture.
Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.
Restructure after 9 months and get rid of people who don't buy in who more then likely will leave on their own.
> Company has managers work the floor for two weeks on a rotating schedule for the first 6 months. Each manager does two different jobs for a week each. Pepsi does this every year. Friend of mine was in upper management and he drove a truck and delivered products a week a year.
I like that idea. Let managers deal with the details of the product or service. Have them exposed to countless, tiny, everyday pains and problems, which are invisible when handling big picture ideas.
For companies that deal with digital goods instead of physical products temporary low level support rotation might be a chance to get higher level positions down in the trenches. Basecamp seems to use such a system: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3676-everyone-on-support
Well the question is if you were the CEO. The CEO is going to have to roll up their sleeves and be the change maker. The environment will have to change. Staying the same is not an option in the long run.
> Why do you think those 300 people will work against their own interests?
When the company environment is one of empowering people to change themselves or help them move out of the way, because change is coming, allows current management a choice. Believing the best about people and that they also want the company to succeed and that deep down they also are frustrated by the low profits. That they actually just need someone to guide them to the promise land. I guarantee you that this management team is totally in paranoid "How are we still in business?" mode. If you can say, "We are turning this ship around and making this company survive through hard work and tough decisions will get people to leave or to actual apply themselves.
You have to change the work place environment and pretty much that will take care of the majority of the 300 people. The hardest thing to do is to change the workplace environment that really can only happen from the top down.
One thing about change, good or bad is that change is difficult. In environmental change at work it is unbearable for months and months. You keep meetings with fewer and fewer people and they will start looking for greener pastures and search and find these articles.
If people are comfortable they will not look for new opportunities.
I guess I am saying that people don't take a self-assessment of their work till they are feeling left out or can't meet some challenges. Either way you have a better company from your management when they do. People will either flight or will challenge themselves, but staying the same is not an option.
Why do companies have to get so big? Does anyone value equilibrium? Let's say I make the perfect app that does exactly what it needs to do, and no more. It seems way more logical and appealing to keep things tight: just have a core team to maintain the product and company. No more features need to be added, it's already perfect.
What's the point of expanding? Would you even be making much more money per employee by growing huge? If I were the founder, I would much rather try to get the company stable, and have it become a passive income stream and have the time to make a new thing, instead of spending my life milking every last drop out of it until it becomes an irreparably bloated mess.
Typically it’s because these companies end up on “the juice” and owe investors some multiple and enough scale to get acquired.
They hire talent with the same growth mindset... not the sustainability mindset. They don’t tend to think, “what moves do I need to make to be around 100 years from now?”, they think “how can I get 20x growth in X time”. Unfortunately now they are thinking “how can I keep my job”.
This is a good reason (hypergrowth), but there is another reason -- HR.
At most companies, tech or otherwise, it is hard to get more pay by doing a better job. You often cannot just get paid more for delivering faster, or delivering less buggy code, or closing more bugs than anyone else.
You get paid more for having a team. HR uses "# reports" as a metric for pay at almost every company i've been to. So I hire. I hire 3 when i need 1. I hire 5 when i need 2. Ideally, you end up doing no technical work and "managing up" the whole time. Recipe for success.
Great advice for the furniture business...worst possible advice for Evernote. Good luck using screenshots on a website to get someone to pay $8/month for Evernote. The only realistic way to convert someone into a paying customer (at such a high price point) is to get them to use the product heavily.
I would argue basically the opposite. If you're selling sofas at $4500 and your main competitors are giving them away, you're only going to sell to customers that really like your particular sofa. If you sell them at $500, and they're quite a bit better than the ones your competitors are giving away, you might be able to stay in business.
Burn the furniture pile (or move it into a warehouse or build a fence around it or something).
Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
As for the factory floor workers, optimize this later, sales is the focus so don't get distracted trying to optimize production until you forecast that it will fall behind sales. Get out and Sell! Get that furniture into stores.
Don't even fire the 300 people in the office, it's not worth the time you would put into it. Hire a consultant that specializes in downsizing to do it for you. Anyone who works in the office is considered contagious so no exceptions.
> Hire a new COO who is the head salesman, and compensated purely by how much furniture they sell. Give them freedom to hire whoever they want so long as they are also being paid based on commission (and don't let them hire anybody already at the company).
Oh, so magic the problem away?
And no one wants to work for your company on commission.
I guess you have never heard of a sales team before? Every sales team in the country works mainly on commission, and most executives have most of their compensation based on meeting performance metrics. So what are you even talking about?
I think your comment lays out a lot of interesting parts of the realities and problems at this hypothetical company (which is pretty much everywhere I've ever worked to some degree). I don't think that these learnings are enough to actually achieve success though, if for no other reason than you have not defined what "success" looks like for this place. Not a criticism, but a place to start thinking from.
Before you can actually accomplish anything at this furniture company, I think a few other things have to happen:
1. Who has the power to fire you? The owner is the obvious answer, but maybe there are more people -- perhaps they are people who report to you. What do they want done? Can you get some political capital by executing on those things, even if they don't really matter?
You are coming into a dysfunctional place and at some level trying to make it functional. You will inevitably be subjected to backlash and are a candidate for host rejection, and you need tools to fight against that if you are going to succeed.
2. Find allies. This is a 500 person company, and you may be the boss but you can't be everywhere. People already inside the company could make great allies, but you have to worry about whether they are already too institutionalized or if there are political dynamics that you are unaware of. People from outside the company will be seen as outsiders, but may otherwise be more able to share your vision.
3. How long do you have to execute? The company is obviously burning a ton of money, so how much longer can that / will that be allowed to continue? You don't want to plan to use every second of that time, but knowing the order of magnitude (6 weeks, 6 months, 6 years) can be hugely helpful. Slow changes may be easier to roll out, but you most likely don't have 20 years to right the ship. If you don't have enough time to get to your end goal, then you need a new goal.
4. Is the product actually any good? What is the core institutional strength that you're working with? In this case, is the furniture actually made well? Is it made quickly? What do you have -- even if its a very small thing -- that gives you any kind of edge? Find a way to make that the core of your business.
5. What is the goal / what does success look like? This is the big one. You need to pick something (and get buy-in) and work towards that. Trying to fix everything about a company at once is doomed to failure. Trying to do twenty things and getting 10% on all of them is probably a waste of time. You need to be able to clearly articulate this for different audiences in different mediums in order to get the resources to execute on it. You may not be giving the same message to all groups.
In the case of the furniture company, I could see success as a few different things.
Option 1: Reduce burn and gradually spin down the business. This might sound like failure, but if you have no core strength and no way to get one, making the inevitable company collapse more gradual and graceful may be the best win you can get for yourself, the owner and the employees. If you had any customers, it would be helpful for them as well. This means figuring out who to cut in what order, what resources can be sold to return funds to the owner / other investors, and so on.
Option 2: Divide the business into the working and non-working parts, in order to contain and eventually excise the diseased parts. If the existing operating constraints and burdens are too great, you may need to give up on parts of the business.
Find teams or individuals who seem to execute well (if there are any) and quietly move them to work together on something that can be made, sold, marketed and shipped isolated from the teams that can't handle those tasks. You might need to outsource large parts of this vertical, or maybe even every part of it. Eventually you separate the businesses throughout a spinoff or an acquisition, unless you get the right signals and proceed to Option 3 instead. This is a way to succeed now without having to also pay off all of the debts of the past however many years (which you leave with the old business).
Option 3: Actually fix the entire business. You have all of that furniture piled up that people are taking for free, so that could mean that people will pay for what you make if only you sold or marketed it effectively.
This could also be a false signal. People will take things for free that they wouldn't be willing to pay for -- you have polluted your potential market by devaluing your product -- and you may not be able to overcome that. You also have the twin problems of the humongous historical costs and current operating overhead to produce product at this level. You will have to greatly increase your ACV or profit margins in order to not only pay for today's operating costs but to eventually cover all of the costs of getting to this point.
This option seems to be what Evernote has tried to do, by moving up-market into more enterprise-y things like team chat. I think that path is hopeless for them, and they will never achieve success that way. It might be too late, but they should probably try to get to a different successful outcome.
I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group). It's the VC/Angels money that allows such theoretical stories to be actually applied to startups.
>> Then you go out behind the factory and see a massive mountain of furniture stacked up to the sky. The factory workers have been building furniture every day for years. > People all agree that it is good furniture, maybe the best there is. Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
>> How do you fix this company?
> I'll take a shot : you don't, the free market does it for you (ie. the company isn't going to last long, or the plant get shut down if part of a group).
That's a pretty lazy, ideological answer. They're giving away their product for free and there's no mention of a sales team in the whole story. Before you get all enthused with "creative destruction," someone could try laying off some of the useless employees and actually selling their product first. Destruction shouldn't be the first solution, it should be the last.
No, it's neither a lazy nor ideological answer. It's a very pragmatic answer.
If you're the head of a plant where nothing produced is sold for a price that cover your expanses, then no, sorry, the system [0] will soon have your company closed down, depending on your amount of emergency cash. And if you're part of a group then you are in for a very rough time with the group's C[E/O/F]Os, and odds are that this will ends up with the plant being shut down (machines/peoples may be rebased at other plants).
> Nobody ever buys any of it. It's not sold in any stores. No hotels buy it. No businesses buy it. Lots of people are lined up as far as you can see to pick furniture out of the pile for free.
This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.
[0] suppliers, banks, state - what I maybe shouldn't have called "free market" in order to avoid epidermic reactions
If someone asks you to fix something (or to do anything for that matter), and you are playing their game, then you should try in good faith.
It seems like you are saying you'd give up because it's pointless anyway. Maybe it is pointless (maybe Evernote has too much debt they can never repay), but if someone were paying you to fix a problem in this hypothetical scenario, giving up shouldn't be an acceptable response.
> This is something that can't realistically happen for a furniture plant. You can't pile up furniture up to the sky without paying your wood suppliers.
Have you ever seen $300MM worth of wood? I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.
Well, I'm not sure about wood, indeed, but I guess specials species can cost a lot. But I definitely saw $300MM of metal in a single stocking rack, not even speaking in terms of machines and buildings.
> I specifically said the owner had pumped a huge amount of money in the company.
Yes, I read that but I put it apart a bit too quickly, apologies. I would love to be pointed to real cases where huge amount of cash were invested in finished-good producing plants with no sales whatsoever. Off the top of my head I can think that Tesla's industrial activity can come close to the description for the investment story, however they do sell - their problem is more of meeting the production target.
I've seen with my eyes plants coming out of nowhere [0] with banks backed cash, but they definitely had customers commands already passed.
So Evernote spent that much and they didn't even make any furniture, so their wood costs were very very low. Zero even. They still spent that much money?
Not related to startups, but: the free market's distorted. Google, Apple, Facebook & co. are quite competitive today.
But they are also sitting on war-chests worth multiples of their yearly incomes (or at least a big chunk of 1 yearly income) and they are close to monopolies in some of their markets.
Even if they'd break down this badly, they'd be around for decades. Heck, IBM is still around :)
GAFA's are somewhat specials. I was very precisely answering to a very well written story about a plant producing furniture.
As a matter of fact, if you were Ikea's CEO with a rather important war-chest (however not at the level of Apple assuredly), you would never let "live" one of your plant if all it's finished goods were given for free because nobody would want to buy it.
Well, at least these guys have been diametral to Evernote's effectivity for me. I used to use the app daily as a paying customer - after the "everything needs to be white or a very light shade of grey" update, I hardly do anymore - it's just too exhausting and confusing to operate.
I have not yet pulled the plug on my subscription - but most likely will once a serious contender with OCR comes around.
This is particularly relevant from my particular perspective. Maybe you could call me a trans worker- I have pretty successfully transitioned from a full-time marketing and sales person to a mostly developer, partially product person over the past several years. I really love and hate both sides of the work, but I'm glad to have walked in so many shoes. There is rigor that marketers and sales folks face that most engineers would not succeed at. Despite the fact that you only see them in meetings, they do a remarkable amount of work to make things not go off the rails, and most of it is invisible. Sales heavy firms do tend to close first, engineer later, and that generally results in terrible deliverables. Conversely, engineering heavy firms are notorious for delivering products that feature everything and deliver little to no (perceived, ie actual) value.
My assertion is that it truly takes all kinds. I find it remarkable that Evernote can serve 225M people with 500. I think that the people who give effort to find the genius in every department themselves become enlightened.
Product people are important, I don’t think Op was saying otherwise. But it’s typically more labor intensive to actually implement the ideas that product has, so in a healthy org you would expect to see more engineers than product people to ensure that everything is close to in balance.
To give a concrete example of what marketing staff "do".
When facebook & "viral" was mainstream, our marketing staff decided they wanted to make something go viral. It was an image with the word 'SALE' (90% of image area) & our company logo (10% of image area).
Company wide email: "blahblah blah..Let's make this go viral!!"
It was then that I realised job titles don't equate to talent or impact. Marketing is 90% admin and the 10% that is creative can be better handled by more creative people(frequently not in the marketing dept - engineers/designers)
I am a product manager and I have been at both ends of the spectrum.
Case #1: Only product manager for the entire company. Spend all day trying to understand what's the most important thing to do for the current sprint. Comes out with nothing.
Case #2: One of the several product managers trying to find something to do to show to our boss.
I guess it depends on your base, but if their revenue is about $100MM/yr (which I highly doubt, companies love to outright lie, but lets be optimistic) then it's still only about $200k/employee, and their employee costs are likely $300k-$400k/employee/year, if not more in their Redwood City headquarters.
First, they now have about 300 employees. The “500+” number is just something you made up, just like you made up your $10mm revenue number.
Second, I’m highly skeptical that the CEO is making fraudulent financial claims in his letter to the employees. Unlike you, he: a) actually knows the facts, and b) is liable for his false statements.
Finally, it’s clear you have some kind of bizarre axe to grind against Evernote, hence the baseless speculation and outright lies over the years. No idea why, but it’s pretty sad.
You can respond if you want but I won’t be reading or replying.
I've basically been coding mad and heads down for 2 months building it. I think we will have a release candidate in another week or so...
My hope / goal is to make a BETTER Evernote that's open source and lasts 20-30 years.
We have some AMAZING Open Source apps like VLC that just seem to last the test of time.
I think we deserve better!
One of the other things I wanted was something that was inherently hackable with a plugin API. The data is stored on disk and persisted via JSON so it's easy for write 3rd party apps that use the data.
It also works with git, dropbox, etc if you want cloud sync. I'm probably going to build in native cloud sync though and probably use Amazon Appsync since it supports offline sync easily.
I think a note app should be designed around the idea that the first action you take by default is always taking a note, and that actions should be made available where appropriate as a reaction. Shockingly, not many apps do this that I am aware of. Taking notes in an expeditious manner isn't always a design priority, and I don't think that's a needed sacrifice to make in a note taking app. That's why I never used evernote, anyways.
I find myself using the plain old "Notes" on Mac for nearly all of my note taking. It's just so much simpler than dealing with sections and pages and organization.
Most of my notes are relatively ephemeral, perhaps lasting for a task or project. Rarely to I need to reference things that aren't in relatively recent history. When I do, I'll just scroll back or do a universal search.
I feel like Bear[0] comes pretty close. I’ve been using it for the last few months and it’s one of the few apps I’ve found that actually allows me to just go in and take a note/jot down a quick blurb as needed.
I tried to use Evernote and it just never stuck with me. It felt like it was too much overhead just for capturing quick ideas.
+1 for Bear. I used Evernote for years but it finally became too slow and bloated with several thousand notes and tons of features I never use. I need a lightweight note app, if it takes more than a second or two to fire up the app and jot down a note then that’s a fail.
Bear is working well for me. The only thing I don’t like is no audio notes and weird formatting which makes copy pasting bulleted notes into other editors somewhat painful. Still my default note app and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future (or until I have thousands of notes again causing performance to degrade...)
I liked and used bear when it just came out, but it is moving at a glacial pace when it comes to adding certain important features, such as adding support for tables and equations.
Bear has a very good story when it comes to sync with the iPhone. But if you need cross-platform support, tables, equations, and such features org-mode, Typora, etc. are much better options.
We can, but they introduce tons of challenges in rendering and display, change the serialization format (whereas basic stuff can just be edited and viewed as plain text) etc.
Besides where does one stop in a note taking app? One could also ask for footnotes, bibliography management, graphs and plots, handwriting recognition, PDF management, and so on...
Notational Velocity (and clones) always seemed to do well with that. Very light, very plaintext, but great as a sort of reactionary "Open and start typing and ask questions later" platform.
I might pick a more liberal license in the future but for now we're not a library and I think GPL is good. I'm actually more concerned about app bundlers stealing it and putting it on the App store or something and not contributing any changes back.
The GPL doesn’t really stop bundlers from stealing it. It just requires them to provide the (potentially modified) source code to their customers upon request.
Yeah, it's also really important to understand that they only have to give source code to their customers. They don't have to provide source code upstream. So it's completely legitimate to take a GPL piece of software, make modifications, sell it anywhere you want, put a conspicuous note that you will supply source code on demand to your customers, and then never, ever supply source code because none of the users are technical enough to want the source code.
This is part of software freedom. Your end users do not have to distribute binaries or code to anyone that they don't want to. It's just that if they distribute a binary or code to someone, they have to grant the same freedoms they received.
Sometimes it's a bit hard to grasp these nuances (especially the, "Hey they can sellmy software" bit). It's important to understand that before you choose a license.
Code isn't protected from becoming proprietary SaaS with the GPL though, AGPLv3 is the only way to ensure those that take your code, modify it and offer it as SaaS publish the altered code.
Looks awesome! I rarely use PDFs and even more rarely create or edit them, but I hope you do well.
I’ve long thought that dealing effectively with PDF or other complex, crufty formats is a good candidate for a “shlep blindness”[1] style startup, and I hope it works out for you.
I've fought with/used a whole shitton of note tools, including Evernote and OneNote, and what I've finally settled back on is plaintext synced via Dropbox.
I don't even use Notational Velo anymore, since OrgMode converted me to an emacs zealot. Turns out, there's a workalike mode called deft that gets me all the same awesome search behavior.
On iOS, I use a mix of Drafts and Editorial (well, and BeOrg, for the orgmode files).
By going this way, I'm no longer dependent on someone else's product map for my notes. Sure, I guess Dropbox could become problematic or something, but there are other options there -- in this context, it's just plumbing.
Looks interesting! My use case revolves a lot around PDF and trying to remember the best bits, I'll be trying this out.
For the general public to catch on to whatever the next Evernote is, I think it will have to have; inviting visual elements like Notion, collapsible text like workflowy, better reminder/project management. So many of the top feature requests of Evernote that have been neglected, some since nearly the beginning.
and if you have a blog or a twitter account please give us a shout out. Polar is a brand new baby , only 60 days old, so not many people know about it yet.
The quicker we grow the more contributors we get which means the quicker we grow :)
I have been looking for something exactly like this. I've tried some other apps as a place to collate and organize PDFs but haven't found anything. This looks really promising.
Thanks.. please jump on the Discord or join the reddit group. We're making FAST progress so if it's not 100% there yet just give us a few more weeks. Or even better send a PR or submit a feature request.
The guys on the Discord list were really really wanting tags in the repo view so I just banged them out on Monday.
Evernote is an example of a great product that is incompatible with the VC model of funding (also see Twitter). Once you take VC it's not acceptable to be a niche product that does one thing really well, you have to worship at the altar of cancerous growth. The VCs would rather the product be ruined than miss an opportunity for 100-1000x, and if you don't agree they will install adult supervision to do their bidding.
I don't think it is a problem with the VC model at all. Evernote has taken more than $300MM in funding. Nobody put a gun to their head and made them take that money. The people who run Evernote decided to go in and tell investors that they had a plan to turn Evernote into a multi billion dollar company, and that plan said they needed a huge pile of money, and the investors made the mistake of writing a check.
Evernote could have skipped those VC meetings, skipped renting the huge, insanely expensive office just off Rt. 1 by SF, skipped putting huge, expensive light up Evernote signs on that office, and skipped hiring hundreds of engineers in the most expensive place in the world to hire engineers. They could have rented a small office in a commercial park in San Jose and only hired 10 people and now they would be quite profitable. They could have done this by only taking a few million dollars in funding, and now they wouldn't need an insane valuation to exit.
This feels like the same thing as the other poster said. The problem is not so much that the VC model exists, so much as the leaders of Evernote decided to pursue it (and perhaps to some degree the culture in silicon valley which pushes founders towards this model).
101, not rt 1. They’ve had a massive sign on a building on 101 that always struck me as a zeitgeist for SV — a note taking app with its logo on a building...
I don't think anyone thinks Twitter is doing well in its own right. It's shedding users, it's possibly harming democracy, their moderation is being questioned daily in the national US press and many users don't know how to use Twitter.
I encourage you to have a look at Guillaume Chaslot's https://algotransparency.org - it identifies what videos YouTube's algorithm most often recommends, based on a given search. Serious question (I'm not trying to be facetious): looking at those recommendations, what do you think?
That is not proof. It's cherry picked topics for uncontrolled Youtube recommendations to a bot account they created. I think nothing about that is scientific and it screams tech illiteracy.
Google ads were also used substantially during 2016 [0]. Google’s ability to target messages to demographics that they only know because of their data trawling is effective for selling garage door repair and election influencing.
This "harming democracy" and "being questioned daily in the national US press", is all about the existing arbiters of information (also called the mainstream media) trying to protect their control over information dissemination.
I agree, it's the widespread VC culture of big growth & big exits that gets people talking about Evernote as dead or dying, when in reality if it was a small company focused on it's core product and building steadily then it'd be considered a success.
For a company success should be making a profit, treating your employees well and making something worthwhile.
Evernote is better for filing documents / archiving things - whether those are PDFs, web pages, business cards, physical mail, etc. OneNote is better for free-form notetaking and editing. Each page feels like an open canvas.
In particular: I can't drop a file directly onto the OneNote icon to archive a file - I have to make a "page" and drop it into the page's canvas. OneNote doesn't provide tagging. It enforces a certain organization that only makes sense for notes (notebooks > sections > pages). Attachments always feel like a second-class citizen inside of a page (which isn't to say OneNote's attachment handling is wrong, it's just designed for storing handouts in class alongside your handwriting, as opposed to archiving every piece of paper on your desk).
In my use case, I use Evernote (with a ScanSnap scanner) to archive every piece of physical mail I receive. It's great that I can just throw in a pile of mail, push one button, let the scanner bundle it into PDFs/JPEGs/contact cards as appropriate, apply metatadata, and OCR/index it. I tried to move this workflow to OneNote, and couldn't get anything as smooth.
I use both. I use OneNote for notes in class, and Evernote for long-term archival/recall of everything else.
(Personally, I think that DevonThink is a closer replacement to Evernote than OneNote is.)
My boss today wondered why he made a particular decision for a commit he made 3 years ago. He pulled up Evernote, searched for the bug number, and had his notes from when he was working on it. Mystery solved.
With OneNote, he’d have to have some sort of filing system to organize that. With Evernote, he knew it was there and he could search for it if he needed it. That’s not to say you can’t search in OneNote, just that the archiving model of Evernote works far better for his workflow.
I spent years with the same workflow, and Evernote groaned to a halt with over 5000 PDFs in it for me. (i7, 16gb ram).
I now store all my scans in Google Drive and use the OCR that comes with the ScanSnap. It works just as well, the search is Google fast and I can share them easily.
The one feature I never found a decent replacement for was Evernote's web clipper. It worked really well, and I actually used it quite a bit since it was so low effort compared to saving a page or copy/pasting something that I might want to refer to later.
Evernote killed itself by losing its vision in search of ever greater monetization, how the current product compares to other products on the landscape is irrelevant.
The free version of OneNote is lighter. The version that comes with Office is full-featured. (Don't know exactly what's different, I've only used the office version.)
The full version is also free. It comes included with the Office365 installer, but can be downloaded on its own:
https://www.onenote.com/download
OneNote syncs to OneDrive - so if you have O365 your storage space is quite large, whereas free users only have 5GB (though compared to Evernote's 25MB this is still plenty)
Unless they've changed it quite recently, the version that comes with Office365 and the one from https://www.onenote.com/download are different programs.
I did an office 365 install a week ago and recall a second Onenote popping up. Is it just no longer being developed, or did I get one of the last installs? I was unaware of the change!
Attachments, yes. Web clipper, no I don't think so. But I doubt most people who used to use Evernote and now use Apple notes ever used the web clipper (including me).
I don't know what Evernote supports, but OneNote lacks some simple features. Can Evernote import slides from a PowerPoint larger than 50 MB? Because OneNote lost that. Does Evernote actually support saving to a file? Because OneNote doesn't support that trivial feature either.
Mac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product. The free OneNote though should be the same and there is even a web-based version.
> Mac Office is always missing things, it might as well be a different product.
Is it? I've been using Excel cross-platform for a while and I haven't found a missing feature yet. (Although some keyboard shortcuts are annoyingly altered.) I don't use the rest of the Office suite as much, but OneNote is the only outlier I've seen personally.
What do you mean? I have seen medium-sized wikis written using OneNote, and I've seen it used as a collaboration environment for specifications / mockups / design in groups of dozens of people as well.
It's definitely niche in the world of VC. Take Twitter. The hope was that they would be the new Facebook, which basically everyone uses. While Twitter may have a lot of users, they aren't growing, and it's pretty clear there are basically two groups: Twitter users and non-Twitter users, and non-Twitter users don't see much reason to use it.
But in the hopes of getting everyone to love Twitter, a lot of people think they lost focus on their existing users, which didn't make their existing users happy but never ended up enticing significant numbers of non-Twitter users either (FWIW I am in the "non-Twitter user camp", so not complaining they broke my experience)
I've been a loyal evernote user for 5+ years now and IMO, its unequivocally, the best note taking app out there(including Keep, OneNote, Apple notes, Wunderlist etc). Looking at the comments, I am surprised that evernote isn't as popular among HN'ers as I thought it would be.
Having said that, I can see skepticism surrounding the app based on erratic updates they've been shipping for a while now.
The app has been ruined by :
- Wildly Inconsistent UI (Windows app > MacOS)
- Switch to table layout (monster margins look ugly and quite frankly, unbearable)
- Uncertain updates (more often than not it'll break an existing feature)
Few months ago, I mistakenly updated the Mac app and it was such a painful experience, I had to dig into archives and reinstall 2016 version to restore some sanity. As someone who is heavily dependent on the app, these changes have been frustrating. I'll be jumping ship the moment a viable alternative appears.
I have just under 15K notes and have been a Premium customer since 2008, however, these days I find myself barely touching Evernote at all, and have switched to primarily using Notion.so, with Pocket and Zotero for snapshotting/handling research, and a bit of Dropbox Paper (I had a soft spot for Hackpad).
From my perspective, Evernote has gotten consistently worse over the past few years (some of this is due to the core product not scaling as people put more notes in - the search craps out and the organization sucks):
* No way to easily exclude say web clippings from search; in general the search results are inadequate (and doesn't factor in recency or frequency appropriately) of cache things intelligently - this effectively makes Evernote a PITA for anything but write-only usage
* Rather than helping people categorize things, they've made it progressively harder by making Notebook organization clunkier. I never got into using tags because it didn't make very good suggestions, and there's no hierarchy. With dysfunctional search, in the end it's all just a "pile."
* The original appeal of Evernote was seamless syncing across all platforms, but I'm almost entirely on Linux these days and there's no official client or good alternative, and the web interface is awful. That pretty much killed my usage for good, but every time I launch the iOS app, it seems to launch slower. There's way too much friction for creating notes.
I'll probably be exporting and cleaning house sometime soon. While the web clipper is great, I can probably find a better alternative (or just switch to Zotero for everything, as it does fine page snapshotting and the collections/subcollections largely work like you'd want). The OCR is probably the nicest thing I'd miss, but besides occasionally scanning some receipts or other papers, I'm not sure there's anything else I use it for. Also, their security/privacy updates from last year also made me hold my nose.
There are some neat open source projects that have started up recently, but I'm also starting to think about my notes and research in a more long term view (keeping and syncing, but also publishing).
How did you find the learning curve with notion? I found it on here a few days ago and thought it looked amazing, gave it a few days trial but now I feel like I am just wasting time with it trying to do the things that I want.
Simple things like not being able to put different colors on text in the same block or even just putting a simple table (no not a database) into a block have put me off it. Also it is difficulty (re: impossible) to copy and paste notes over from another application without it getting all messed up.
There are definitely some rough edges - like you mentioned, copy and paste is awful (tbf this is very hard to implement, it's all edge cases), there's no web clipper yet, and for me, personally, I get annoyed by the '/' shortcut (also the search has gotten slower and slower (not sure if this is due to growing corpus or other issues) and there are some other niggles (not doing a great job auto-expanding where you're nested when you jump to a page for example), however they are consistently improving the product in lots of very noticeable ways: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...
And it does really the few things that I most care about:
* Seamlessly syncs/accessible on all my devices (I wish it did better offline access though)
* Has a rich, modern WYSIWYG editor (w/ markdown shortcuts, supports attachments and different types of embeds, comments/etc)
* Has a tree hierarchy on the left - I would prefer faceted nested collections (you can't put a note in two folders), but it's much more effective than single-pane organization like GDocs or Dropbox Paper
I've used a few the tables a bit and it's pretty rudimentary - if you don't need the organization, from what you've outlined, honestly it sounds like GDocs still might be what you need (I've always had a lot of GSheets I link out to from my notes - sucks it's not all in one place, but for notetaking, I think the more important thing is that I have a way to organize/find pointers to things, which GDocs completely fails at).
I've used onenote for a while and tried to move over to evernote - it's horrible on windows.
Simple things just as being able to highlight multiple words to change fonts or even have auto capitalization not have a toggle.
The only thing I did like was the ability to repeat the last command you took but that shouldn't have to exist for stuff like changing fonts of certain words one at a time.
If you use a Surface, or other modern, non-caveman computer with excellent pen support, then there is nothing better than OneNote for note-taking. Interestingly, MS has been slowly deprecating the legacy desktop version of OneNote in Office and replacing it with the free Windows 10 app, which is now far more capable than the old version was.
Of course, there still things that should be added - especially in the drawing, touch/pen UI (bring back radial menus!), and data management/tagging searching departments, but if you haven't tried it lately, OneNote has gotten staggeringly better over the past couple of years, and IMO, easily outstrips its current competition...
Oh, and FWIW, MS has put a LOT of effort into improving the OneNote apps for iOS and Android, too - they are approaching full first-class citizen status, which makes them really handy. (Funny, I used to bash MS, but they're really doing a great job with OneNote, VSCode, and WSL, all of which I use and rely on regularly. Now if they (or anyone else for that matter) could only build modern email/calendar/contacts app that works as well as what we had in the 90's (Palm, cough, Palm...)
Interestingly, I just checked their update history for iOS, and it seems the last real update was almost a year ago, and it was mostly bug fixes or other non-descriptive updates since then.
I think my comment was around the wrong way, I meant that evernote was horrible on windows - so much so that I just switched back to onenote out of frustration.
I do miss the desktop version of onenote as that had a lot more features that I was hoping to find on the windows 10 app version.
Evernote is good for pasting in arbitrary formatting, but horrible for editing formatting, and thus simple notes just get lost in a see of Dreamweaver-esque WYSIWYG nightmare formatting.
I wanted to love Evernote, even swore by it for a time, but after a few months of extensive use, it becomes apparent that they don't care about customers outside of their business plans. Feature requests as old as 5 years get ignored while they keep pushing out features that would make Evernote more like a powerpoint alternative than a note-taking app.
Personally I want to think this is happening because better alternatives have been popping up. There's bear and omnifocus and, recently, notion.so that does a lot more than Evernote for a relatively cheaper price.
Also all of them have dark modes while Evernote doesn't.
Evernote, like so many apps before it, has fallen head-first into the go-big-or-go-home trap.
These companies start a desperate, doomed-to-fail chase of a gigantic market, at the expense of their small-but-profitable niche. It's understandable from their board members' perspective, because a nice 5% ROI is not what they're after. They need that moonshot, even if chasing it likely results in losing everything.
See also: Every company that decides that their platform now needs a social media element.
Between Apple Notes, Bear, and OmniFocus I have no reason to use Evernote. They all do what they focus on well, cost less over time, and are proper native apps to boot.
For OmniFocus in particular I also have the assurance that its maker isn’t just going to up and vanish any time soon. They’ve been around since the NeXTSTEP days and are quite healthy.
I'm looking at the Omni products and they seem all great. But I might be transitioning from iPhone to Android in the next 24 months and am afraid of losing a lot of investment.
Evernote to me just seemed like a worst case scenario of technology jumping the shark. Note-taking should be a simple matter, and there are good apps out there that make it nearly as easy as a pencil and paper. But Evernote is not one of them. I gave it a try and I felt like I was jumping through hoops and learning curves for basic things, which just seemed silly for note-taking and related tasks.
The problem is if you raise 300M for a note taking app you need to come up with some plausible way for your company to be worth 3B. There is such thing as raising too much.
I think they also shot themselves in the foot many years ago when they had a lot of heat... they were too expensive. If they were cheaper and converted more passionate users into paying customers back then, those people wouldn't have looked for alternatives, of which there are many.
Evernote did one thing extremely well. I remember being in the Valley a few years back and saw this huge Evernote building from the freeway. I was stunned, this entire building for my simple note taking app! What happened in a quest for growth is they bloated the product. It was no longer a simple elegant note taking app anymore.
Evernote from the outside appears rudderless. The founders gone and it's clear that the MBA's running the place not only don't have a passion for the product - I'm willing to bet they don't regularly use it.
I'm still convinced with the right leader it can be salvaged because so far there hasn't been a compelling product to seize its market.
I think it could even tolerate more than $1/year. I shell out money for anything I find useful, and I like evernote, but $4/month is insane for what it is -- considering all of the alternatives. I'd easily pay $1/month though, maybe $2/month if it really became important to me.
I would love an opensource replacement for Evernote. But it must allow me to clip images into it. Life is not always just text, and most of the programs that people claim they use to replace Evernote are text only.
Evernote also allows me to embed PDFs (or any file really), which is nice, but as a minimum spec, I insist on the ability to drop in images.
(Joplin's dev here) Can confirm that Joplin can embed images - you can copy and paste an image directly by pressing Ctrl+V in a note, or attach them. It's also possible to attach any other file, PDF, etc. and open it in an external viewer on mobile or desktop.
Evernote import is also supported and as far as I can tell works well for many users. If you find any glitch or issue though, feedback is welcome.
The app is still under development with, at the moment, a focus on bug fixing and improving the desktop and mobile usability.
You can in Onenote, with the bonus of not giving Google even more of your data. The online client seems to work really well, although I prefer the native one.
I used to use Evernote and had too many failed updates and corrupted databases leaving me out of wifi in the big world without my notes. Sure they'd resync once I went back online, but I keep essential things in there.
It has an incredibly impressive feature set for an open source application, but it seems to me too much effort has gone into bells and whistles at the expense of the basic functionality.
The thing that killed it for me is that unlike every other text editor in the world, you can't apply formatting to text until after you've typed it.
Hi, creator of Turtl here. I'm hearing good things about Joplin/Omni, so I'm going to spend some quality time with those apps to try to learn from the things that they are doing well.
Also, we have a new version coming out very soon, v0.7.0, that will have significant UI/performance/stability improvements. I think it's worth checking out (although obviously I'm biased).
Turtl requires a server to sync, right? I don't remember that turning me off initially, but after using Joplin - I really wish more apps would make use of regular plain-text file syncing.
Have you thought about having Turtl sync to a local directory, or using something like nextcloud/dropbox? I don't know much about the backend of Turtl, so I'm not sure how reliant it really is on the server process..
I'll look for the 0.7.0 release and check it out, thanks!
Yes, I've thought about that. And it's an attractive idea, however one thing that sets Turtl apart from other note apps is that it's both encrypted and enables sharing. Other apps do one or the other, not both, and in order to truly support both you can't use something like Dropbox or Nextcloud unless you want to be handing people keys out-of-band and doing a lot of manual work.
Turtl's main goal is to make security easy. If you have to setup Dropbox or Nextcloud to get syncing working, then it didn't attain that goal, I believe.
Also, by providing a service on top of the server, I can eventually make some money from this thing I've spent years building =]. I hope you like v0.7.0 when it launches!
I definitely forgot about the sharing aspect of Turtl, thanks for that reminder! I also understand your point of being able to provide a service, and I hope that it is successful for you when premium launches! If you haven't already, you should also consider looking into setting up Patreon as an option for donating towards the development of Turtl.
I re-downloaded 0.6.x for now to give it another try. One of the things I remember not being completely happy with was the web clipper. Has that changed at all with 0.7.0, or do you plan on improving it in the near-future?
There are a few other issues/questions I have, but I'll troll through the issue tracker first before bothering you too much :P
You really have to do something about your website. You get nearly no info nor simple stuff like screenshots. Is there a way to help you out in that regard?
Evernote had such a feature- Skitch was their program which integrated screenshots and allowed for marking them up, indexing the text inside the image, and filing them alongside or within my other notes. But they killed it and I'm not sure why. It still works but is buggy and unsupported now.
Evernote is more than just a note taking app. It's a full on document filing and storage solution. It's a one stop shop for a paperless office and miles ahead of other cloud based providers like Google Keep and OneNote on that front. Its just too bad that no one making product decisions there knows that.
I've been a premium user since 2011 with literally thousands of notes all categorized, tagged etc. I finally decided it was time to jump ship and migrated everything over to DEVONthink. Assuming you only need to have it on apple products (its iOS/MacOS only), it has everything Evernote has and then some. Its got some awesome system integrations as well as some cool scripting capabilities that allow you to extend it to suit your needs. Oh and you can encrypt the data stored in it and store it wherever you want. You can even choose different locations for different databases.
I didn't know this when I bought it, but DT is also way more capable than EN at handling large complex file types like Logic sessions and such. You can open and play them right out of there like any other file. I've been looking for a way to better manage all my multitrack recordings and be able to sync them between my home and music studios. Looks like DT might just do the trick. Highly recommend.
Gonna mention Quiver (The Programmer's Notebook) as it hasn't been mentioned yet. I've been on Evernote for about 10 years and have a few thousand notes in it. This news is discomfiting and I look forward to checking out some of the contemporary alternatives. Lately, I've been putting more technical/nerdy stuff into Quiver, which understands code and does syntax highlighting and all that good stuff. I don't like it as much for the free-form stuff I do in Evernote, but for code snippets it's great.
Anyone have any more infomation on what jobs exactly were cut? There's difference implications on whether it's a geneal whole company layoff versus laying off a single department versus discontinuing some expiremental side project and the staff involved therein.
My guess is that there were some engineering job cuts at least. I’ve had some views from Evernote engineers on my LI profile today. Could be coincidence though!
I've tried Evernote a couple of times and don't even understand why people use it and why does it take more than a couple of devs to maintain, it seems sooo simple (yet hardly intuitive) and lacks any smart features I sought when looking for a personal information management tool.
I have a scanner that with the push of a button scans records and sends them to Evernote, I then shred the paper. Receipts, invoices, various mailed things all go into Evernote.
I also use Evernote web clip to save a copy of a web article (or often a recipe) which I would like to either finish later, have for reference, or share with someone.
I also save notes about computer things. Research for all my options to do X, or commandline snippets to make Y happen.
Then I can scroll back in history and it helps recall to see the things I have been doing.
Side note: I use DEVONthink for all of those. It's not cheap, but neither is Evernote Premium. Also, DEVONthink's AI for classifying new data items, summarizing them, and searching in them is outstanding. Subscribe to a few choice RSS feeds and you have a personal database full of new, discoverable research.
I wrote a blog post describing how I use Evernote for GTD as well as general record keeping. Its flexibility is both a strength and a weakness: it lets you tailor a setup that works well for you, but it also makes it very difficult to see how to get the most out of it at first glance.
With their market share, Evernote has so much potential to make helpful and innovative products, yet they screw it up so badly. They rarely add features, and when they do, they're never the ones the users want. I'm determined in my lifetime to create an alternative that actually reflects the needs of people who are idea creators.
I was an Evernote loyalist in the early days of the company, but eventually the apps got too sluggish and too complicated. The product started as a nice interface that got out of your way, but that went out the door as they tried to scale and make actual money.
I was then burned by OneNote (the MacOS app is pretty bad, and has terrible export options).
I now almost exclusively use plain-text files in a Dropbox folder, and I don't regret it at all.
This is the problem when a note-taking app tries to make it ‘big’. A good note-taking app can be a niche business. But when you raise hundreds of millions of dollars, there is pressure and you are forced to make unnatural decisions to show growth.
Also, note-taking apps are part of a suite. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, Zoho (disclosure: I am with Zoho and we compete in note-taking space with Zoho Notebook). It is a challenge for any independent app provider to compete with a single app against suites in the long run. It’s surprising Evernote didn’t expand to other productivity apps beyond note-taking.
I share your surprise. The magic of Evernote when i used it was tagging. It’s a concept that could have made office suites or other productivity use cases better.
It’s a project I’ve been working on for a couple years, and has made its rounds on HN in the past. Thought I’d share again for anyone seeking alternatives.
Here is a suggested plan for Evernote to succeed. Look at what types of note people are making - do a session with different types of note/subject/user.
For every single thing, make a piece of functionality specific to that note type, subject or person. Do this hundreds/thousands of times and review what helps you grow.
- Note Type: Generic Note, Todo List, Wedding, Mood Board, etc.
- Subject: Scientific/Maths notes, Programmer notes (i.e. python/jupyter notebooks, observablehq.com), Notes for specific industries, designers, school teachers, etc.
I can't really give good examples of these until I see the usage but you get the idea.
It really feels to me Evernote is for one a or two very specific types of people/use cases/subjects (the founders probably) rather than making something their users really want.
My GF worked there and this was precisely her job. She loved the product, but just had to leave the company; they didn't seem to get what it would take to make the company successful.
I'm not sure that company could be successful -- they raised so much money there's no way the investors could be made whole just on that product. I believe (from public info) their revenue is in the single digits per quarter.
It doesn't help that their CEO is an ex googler. I don't mean this as any insult to Google nor to him specifically, but working at G doesn't prepare you for a more resource-constrained environment where the product's traction and success is of existential import. I've seen this problem play out over and over.
I have wanted this for years. Think structured notes. If I'm jotting down a review of a restaurant in Evernote, let me give it a star rating and locate it on a map. Let me give places I visit the same. Let me choose what widgets show in a 'Note type' -- and when I search let me search for these fields.
E.g. "All items in EverNote within 30 miles of X and with a rating >= 4 stars"
I am describing a flexible database with a cracking UI. And nobody has done it AFAIK (except one startup a couple of years ago that took funding then burned)
Tangential: For bonus points, add other modes to the note taker. A WorkFlowy-esque outliner, one of those where you add cards to the right of each item to drill into detail. There's lots of different types of notes people want at different times.
Yes me too - the context awareness is key but it's unbelievably obvious and you could literally add an unlimited amount of awesome and useful functionality.
This is almost exactly why a few weeks ago when I finally decided to look for a way to start mangling my mess of random things I jot down while working, or browsing the web, etc... Gave Evernote a look, because I had heard it was "the best note taking app", and was almost immediately unimpressed. Browsing through the site, and playing with the free version, I hardly found any of the features offered by the paid versions better than what I already had with my unorganized "note taking" process (essentially tons of notes in OS X's Notes app, various text files here and there, and plenty of forgotten to-do lists & kanban boards).
I was actually pretty blown away people are paying for the features Evernote offers, the only advantage from my disorganized workflow (aside from it being a little more organized) is looked prettier (albeit no dark mode kinda killed that too).
I just wanted something that was a bit more tailored to how my normal workflow, something a little closer to just using my text editor like when I'm programming. Something that supported Markdown, syntax highlighting, organizing into folders, tagging, and preferably with a dark theme (I won't stop using something if there isn't one, I'll just try to find an alternative with one if possible). Had Evernote offered these features, or a package with these features, that are a little more tailored to how I work, I probably would've bit the bullet and got a subscription.
Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote[1]. And it was exactly what I was looking for, and didn't find in Evernote. First class markdown support, dark theme(s), syntax highlighting, the ability to setup cloud storage for syncing across devices, and it's even free and open source! But, that's not even the best feature (for me at least), Boostnote supports VIM keybindings! And honestly, that's one of the biggest reasons I never got around to getting one of these notetaking apps, because of the lack of VIM keys it's so jarring to break from my normal workflow where my editor is either vim or is using the keybindings, I used the vim Chrome/FF extensions, but until now I couldn't try to take notes without slamming esc a bunch and sighing because I just typed "kjkkkkhlkjlkjh" for the millionth time.
If you're a developer looking for an Evernote alternative, definitely give Boostnote a look. It fit right into my workflow instantly, no bugs, no ads, no bullshit, and it's got all the features you would get with Evernote, but with a touch of specialization for developers. If it weren't FOSS, I hands down would've almost immediately bought it/subscribed, because it literally had everything that I wanted out of Evernote. And, now I get that devs aren't the general public, and the basic note taking functionality
will likely be just fine for most. But, at first glance, I don't see a single thing it does in the free tier, or the first paid tier, that you couldn't accomplish with OSX's Notes & Preview app, so I don't see how offering just the most basic note taking feature set is a sustainable business model when so many free (and often even builtin) apps do exactly the same thing. It certainly wouldn't hurt for them to start offering something unique, more specialized, like one of your examples Bullet Journaling. I'm only semi-familiar with it, and have been meaning to look into more, however one of the reasons I haven't was I wasn't able to find the "Evernote of Bullet Journals" online. And for people like School Teachers, if they built out some functionality specific for them, like a first-class lesson planner, alongside their normal notes, and an idea board, etc... I'm sure teachers would flock to it (if it didn't suck that is), I know my mother would love a nice looking, easy to use app, that she can take notes, work out lessons plans throughout the day, and keep her to-do lists all in one place.
Unfortunately, given the OP, I'm not anticipating that Evernote is going to be jumping on building out specialized feature sets anytime soon.
Edit: I did just log into my Evernote account that was linked to an old gmail, and was able to stumble upon some notes I apparently "tried" taking during university, one of which is titled "Thread Safety" and it's contents are "It’s good to keep your threads safe." Maybe it's not Evernote I'm not a fan of, it could just be I'm just not a fan of taking coherent/useful notes.
> Fortunately, thanks to some kind commenter here actually, a few weeks ago I found Boostnote
And you've been that kind commenter today for me. Boostnote is the first suggestion here that actually seems feasible for me, properly cross-platform, the UI seems very well done, lots of customizations, and (if I understand correctly) plain Markdown storage, not yet another obscure unnecessary format that's unreadable without the app. I've been using Simplenote after Evernote started being too bulky and unreliable, but Simplenote is not quite polished and doesn't seem to be getting any love. I'll give this a try, it'll be really good if this pans out. Thanks!
For the reference of anyone reading this: unfortunately, it looks like Boostnote's mobile applications are currently "on hold", because they're known to be buggy and unreliable, and the old maintainer has left the project. That is a pretty major issue for me, though (hopefully) only temporary.
(Another issue is that it's not really "highly customizable" once you get into it - even though "customizable" is a proud part of their tagline - but at least that doesn't seem to be intentional, just some messy disconnected design of the Preferences page, according to an Issue comment on github.)
Am I the only one that wants to puke when I hear/read how hard it was for the exec team to decide to lay people off?
It seems like empathy 101 to me to not make the layoff of an employee about you, the one that made the decision to probably throw their life into chaos, but it seems to be almost ubiquitous in these announcements.
I switched from onenote to evernote a very long time ago to get away from microsoft office. After evernote went to shit, though, I didn't have any real alternatives so I went back to onenote. I wonder if the newest free version runs in wine.
> I wonder if the newest free version runs in wine.
Microsoft already discontinued OneNote (the Office version). The last version will be 2016. They're offering OneNote as a modern app now that requires a Microsoft account and syncs to the cloud - and of course it doesn't have equivalent functionality.
This might be a little off-topic because I only vaguely remember using Evernote, and thus am not as familiar with its feature set; but does anyone here use Google Keep? I remember trying it during its soft launch, but didn’t revisit it (Google Drive and Pinboard are sufficient for me). But I can’t recall the last time I’ve ever heard someone mention that they use it.
Yep I use Google Keep all the time. I switched from Evernote to Keep maybe a year or so ago.
Keep has a very simple and convenient design. There's a note length limit that I find annoying sometimes, but encourages switching to a Google Doc instead if the note is getting too long. Also love the syncing between devices (web, multiple Android devices)
It's ok for grocery lists and other really simple stuff, but it's too basic and bare bones. No tables, no free layout, no attachments, basically nothing else than either checklists or simple text with some images. 95% of my use is making a grocery list on the computer and reading it on my watch.
This entire thread is a gold-mine for product research that they should probably already be aware of. But it won't be read and the company won't be improved.
What sense does it makes to have some guy from the heavily sheltered and insane Google X running a real business and product? He probably doesn't have the first clue of whatever he is doing.
Evernote was great for a while. Then they decided to go nuclear with monetizing it while simultaneously ruining the software with the worst design changes and features imaginable.
I really recommend Quiver (http://happenapps.com). It supports code blocks, LaTeX, html, markdown, etc., as well as attachments of any kind (pdf, jpg, etc.) The format is well documented and open (https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver/wiki/Quiver-Data-Format), so you could potentially write your own parser if it ever becomes unsupported!
There's also an android app (called quaver) that someone else (not the original developer), has built using the open JSON specs. It works, but isn't that great.
Syncing the JSON data to the cloud keeps all devices in sync. It also has an import feature that allows you to import your Evernote notes.
I've been an Evernote premium subscriber for 4 years. I love Evernote and use it everyday. I haven't found a tool with as high quality of a web clipper, great search and optical character recognition and intergrations with everything. Will be sad to see it go if it does.
Probably a good thing for the company, honestly I didn't even think Evernote required 54 people total, that seams incredibly bloated for such an increasingly irrelevant software.
Evernote has great discoverability of notes. Search works. And when viewing a note it suggests related notes. With the browser extension it even suggests notes in Google's Search (too bad I'm now using DuckDuckGo), related to what you searched for.
I also like the multimedia support, like being able to record audio. Other people like web clippings. Unfortunately their business isn't sustainable, as we can see and I'm thinking of switching.
The "encrypted text within a note" is pretty cool too, although I haven't used it much.
Frankly, I can't find a replacement that works as well. I hope they can restructure, but with only $10MM annual revenue, I don't see how that's possible.
So on the alternatives I'm thinking of:
1. Other proprietary alternatives — like Dropbox Paper, which is nice, but Dropbox has killed products I liked before, therefore sorry Dropbox, but you're not fooling me again; this actually goes for other note taking apps out there; fool me once, shame on me, etc.
2. Something based on open standards — e.g. Apple Notes is OK, but very basic when you sync it with FastMail or a Google Account; this is what I was using before Evernote; I might go back to it
3. Open Source — Standard Notes (standardnotes.org): love the idea, open source, end to end encrypted, does daily backups in Dropbox which is awesome; unfortunately it's not very polished, had issues with it
So if I'm going to switch, I'm going to choose either open source or something that syncs with my email or Dropbox account.
What are the other good alternatives to Evernote with multi-device sync?
I've been using it for so long now. I don't specially like the product but it does the job. I use it on daily basis for notes, lists, ideas, reminders, todos, backlog…
My only issue is that the free plan is limited to 2 devices and I've never felt like paying for Evernote. Not sure why. I just checked the pricing and it's actually super low. Maybe I should upgrade.
I use Dropbox Paper (work at DBX too) and it’s quite amazing for the long form research notes - I’ll have like a million projects going and paper documents is just such a nice way to pick em up, write some stuff and then put it down again (and embeds online and file media really well). The free version is he one I use personally and it’s great! But it’s not the best for a large repo of short personal notes - I too am looking for something there (always wanted to get “in to” Evernote but just never did) - I actually use Todoist for small reference notes and material now.
Dropbox Paper is fantastic, and my favourite shared writing environment (visually so much nicer than Google Docs)
I'm up to 7000 words in one document. The feature I'm missing in Dropbox Paper is around organising my notes and research for what I'm writing. Think of Scrivener or other writers' tool, which knows you're writing on many levels and need a scratchpad around, and to keep the outline bullet points even after you've written prose for that section.
I've taken to having a separate Paper document to contain the research/notes/outline and one for the draft writing. If this is a use-case you consider for Paper, it'd be awesome to have more support.
If not, then HN can you suggest a better, shared writing environment?
Go check Notion.so. I've been on the same boat as you for a long time, tried all the open source atlernative I could find as well as the paid ones but kept coming back to plain-texting.
I read about notion a few days ago and it's been smooth so far. It's everything I've been thinking of for when "I'm gonna make my own note-taking app I swear". I'm looking at moving maybe a third of my notes to it and use it for a few weeks before I consider moving fully and paying, I guess. The desktop client is an electron app so that might be a turn off for some. But! There's a web clipper on their road map too so that's one point for them that always makes me look back at evernote.
I haven't used evernote so I don't know all of its features, and I'm sure dynalist is missing many of them, but it's wonderful for all those things you mentioned (notes, lists, ideas, reminders, todos). The android app is a little sluggish, but that's pretty much my only complaint, I love everything else about it.
The single reason I switched from Evernote to Onenote is that it is expensive. 5$/month for a note taking app? Seriously? With 6$/month, I can get a full office suit, an email with no ads, plus 1 TB of OneDrive. Evernote is a sort of app that should make money at scale by offering extremely cheap deals.
I've found Zotero to be very convenient for managing notes alongside where they matter for me at least, which is alongside documents and images. You can also link related entries and add tags. The notes are very basic, so probably lack many useful features found in Evernotes, but they're good enough for my purposes. Related to Evernotes financials though, who can say where it's going to be as a product in the next couple years? The real thing that I like most about Zotero is that it is open source, has a local data store with a simple sqlite database, and is developed by a non-profit. If your notes are ephemeral, there are miriad other options. But if you want to keep them long term and preserve their connections to other content, I think you have to be able to easily parse and port them yourself.
Few decades ago many applications such as C++ compilers, Word Processors, productivity applications and just applications in general were often built by a single person!
Now a primitive CRUD app takes hundreds of people of staff.
Say what?
What the f happened to productivity. Looks like someone's driven off the productivity cliff.
Using it for the things I use it for, I prefer the workflow to using Docs.
Evernote does OCR things, can take audio or camera notes, and has a tool to grab copies of webpages with various levels of cutting out non-content.
>Why do I need Evernote if I have Google Docs or Office 365?
It's a bit like asking why you'd need a PostIt note if you already have a piece of paper. They're tools that do pretty similar things that specialize in very overlapping but slightly different tasks.
my understanding is that office OneNote does a lot of similar things. I suspect that the answer here is that you don't need Evernote if you have Office 365
Although I use OneNote more, Evernote's bookmark/favorite feature is sadly lacking from OneNote. If onenote had a panel for favorite notes, that would be huge.
I have an Epson scanner and use their ScanSmart (I think this is what it is) to setup the flow that lets me push a button on the printer and the scanned PDF will show up in one of my notebooks. The OCR might actually be coming from the Epson software and not Evernote, maybe I'll look into it later.
The OCR results I have now is not terrible nor wonderful.
Dropbox is extremely reliable, and has not given customers a real reason to switch imho. Evernote is famously unreliable with a "quirky" interface that often behaves strangely.
The pain of Evernote was enough to make me switch. Dropbox has not yet pained me enough to switch away from being a paying customer despite the fact that I have a 1GB OneDrive plan with Office.
I tried to switch away from paid 1TB Dropbox to the bundled ("free") 1TB OneDrive that's bundled with the Office subscription I need to have from time to time.
Filesystem integration with the Mac was disastrous. Three problems: 1- some characters are not permitted in filenames; you find this out when synch fails and have to guess where the problem is; 2 - some files simply silently don't synch; and 3 - a couple of times a day it would decide it had lost synch and then would have to re-index the repo, which not only took up cycles (I could survive that) but meant there was no synching while that was happening.
Whereas I just have almost everything in my DB directory tree and even do all my development there (builds and all).
At my last company we had Box which is almost identical with Dropbox but with a much more complex interface to satisfy corporate I/T. Total overkill for a startup!
The big difference between the two is that: Dropbox is the simplest version of any cloud storage concept that nearly every level of computer user can understand. Evernote is not simple.
Dropbox was an early solution, and put the effort in to make it nearly effortless to get set up.
They've also built a lot of good will from me over the years with promotional offerings. I don't actually pay for a subscription, but I've got about 13gb of quota.
If anyone is surprised by that they haven't really been using Evernote. Honestly, there is so much they could improve about their product and business model just going through this thread and reading the feedback. It's such a shame as I believe it had a lot of potential.
I used to use Evernote daily (was even a paying user for a while) and I hardly ever do anymore.
After the last few redesigns have I have started searching for a decent alternative and recently came across Nuclino (https://www.nuclino.com/). It can do everything Evernote does and more for a way cheaper price - WYSIWYG editor, markdown support, hierarchical lists, kanban board, mind maps...
Don't think I'll be going back.
The note-taking tool business is tricky. OS vendors have great versions included for free (Apple Notes, OneNote) and there is a surfeit for free and good-enough solutions.
It makes me fearful about the positioning of my own tool - https://thorny.io - an interactive notebook for decision making.
It could be categorised as a flavour of note-taking tool because it's like a cross between an outliner, a spreadsheet, and a logic-programming tool. If it is treated as a type of note-taking tool then it puts it into the red ocean. I'm not sure there is space for multiple note-taking tools in people's workflow. Spreading notes across tools would be a massive pain-point.
I have Evernote but never found it easy enough to use to depend on it. And it just seems scarily buggy. I'm a paid user too!
I just tried to use it for a new project and when creating a shared note it kept telling me my email address wasn't validated. Well there's no way to validate one unless you go to the web site, delete your address and add it again! It also offered to set up 2FA...only I'd used 2FA to log in! So I got a new set of replacement keys. This was frightening enough that I exported all my data.
But what tool shares phone/laptop and permits formatted text, attachments, and offline use? Apple notes almost gets there, but doesn't.
I've been a user of Evernote since 2011, and previously I would use various ways of documenting my personal notes/work notes. Why I use Evernote is it's decently polished, works across OS versions and allows the best mix of storing attachments. A few months ago I tried a large selection of other note-taking apps and really wanted to like Standard Notes but it just felt not as polished and the extensions were not so great. I really think Quiver would be a winner if it was open to Windows, and I'm starting to think Onenote is the winner. But most of these lack the tree view of the notes (nested tags/notebooks) or they don't allow attachments storage.
I really want to switch from Evernote to something else, but one of the main things I use Evernote for is scanning, OCRing, and organising real documents (mail, receipts, etc).
What is a good alternative for this? I’m willing for it to be a separate system to note taking.
I'm looking for exactly this, and at this point I don't care what it costs. I just need something to store all my receipts/mail/invoices in, and have them OCR'd and searchable from all my devices (so unfortunately DEVONthink is a no-go)
The software never felt right for me from the beginning and I jumped ship as soon OneNote became available for Mac (I moved later to org-mode). I remember a few years ago a talented friend who was accepted by Twitter, Google etc. for internship was rejected for an internship by them for some reason and he was really upset. Clearly the management has some serious problems with their engineering team. No surprise at all to see them struggle.
What's the reason companies tend to do huge layoffs like this, a bunch of people at the same time, instead of firing them slowly one-by-one? It doesn't seem like a big public event like this is optimal to the companys bottom line, and it's not great for motivation for the remaining employees? Are there legal reasons you can't hide a "big layoff" as a "slow series of firings"?
IANAL Yes, there are protections to prevent you doing things which are a proxy for redundancy. Being made redundant is different to being fired for the employee (severance, in my country at least they have to actually eliminate the role, right to unemployment benefits).
Used Evernote for years and switched to OneNote when EN became truly awful (think it was after a major UI redesign and full of bugs).
Have now been using OneNote for longer than I used EN and really happy with it. Major downside is no Linux client and, although the ON web app is one of the best I’ve ever used, it still sucks.
Anyone recommend a solution re Linux? Anything out there as good as OneNote (‘just works’) that also supports Linux, please?
I have been using Evernote for years. It's complete for me as far I am concerned. Taking notes and getting synchronized. I am not sure what features they want to add to have tens of software developers. I also don't understand why they have hundreds of employees.
For anyone who was laid off from Evernote, there is a service called https://layoff-aid.com which helps recently downsized tech employees (not just engineers) find new jobs
Evernote is one of those applications that I use in a permanent WORN mode (Write Once Read Never). :)
I'm still waiting for the killer extension where I can take all my restaurant reviews (for a city) and dump them on a map to see the closest one to me.
How would the transition be for a vim user with relatively little emacs experience? I know how to get out of emacs and how to get into the M-x doctor (it saves me hundreds of dollars on therapy), but that's pretty much it.
I used vim for YEARS and it still hold a fond place in my heart... and my muscle memory.
I use a flavor of emacs, spacemacs, that has had a TON of work to map it's controls to "vim-style" keybindings. If Emacs didn't have vim-style editing, I would not use it.
Not really surprised. I pay for a lot of freemium apps, but never paid for Evernote. It's hard to create value for "Note Taking". Alternative is capturing notes in a free google doc or use paper and pen.
For me, it's a case of the free alternatives catching up. Apple's Notes isn't as good as Evernote, but it's completely sufficient for many use cases. While Evernote is definitely better, it's not $7.99 per month better for most people.
Huge mismanagement. I used to be a loyal EN user. Even considered paying for the premium offering, but they just didn't price it properly for what was offered. They also went some weird directions that I didn't like, and removed features that I did like. Then they kept raising rates. They also never put in a dark mode or even themes and made constant changes to make it impossible for it to be done easily on the user side.
Edit: To be clear I'm paying for Standard Notes right now. So I'm not someone against paying for good things.
If Evernote did not take funding, they likely would have had a path to profitability, even a meager one.
But, if Evernote did not take funding, it's likely another note-taking app would have, and Evernote would not have been able to compete with free VC money and RSU compensation.
It was very popular for a long time. It was one of the first apps of it's kind and got some loyal users. Then stagnated while tons of competitors blossomed.
> Then stagnated while tons of competitors blossomed.
Which competitors have blossomed and are also cross-platform? I can think of OneNote, but the 'clip from web' feature in Evernote is superior IMO. But I hate Evernote's "rich" (my foot) text editor for being so dumb and so basic, and the lack of organisation that tags and notebooks give, and am always keen to find a replacement.
Replacements always seem to have better features, but the cost of getting a note into them is higher.
Why do they need so many jobs to begin with. It is a nice product and good for a small company. It is not right to pursue the path of being a company that big.
the executive departures two weeks ago characterized
Evernote as “in a death spiral,” saying that user growth
and active users have been flat for the last six years
and that the company’s enterprise product offering
hasn’t caught on.
If a company isn't growing, its dying. Six years without customer growth? Its amazing they managed to rise a down-round, let alone any round at all.
Hey off topic, but if you use that markdown style for long quotes, it's simply awful looking on mobile. Gotta scroll waaaaay to the right, then alllll the way back.
I just do this:
>Hello I am a quote that is extremely long lined with no newlines. I will break based on the width of your device just like any other normal text inside an HTML element. Look how long I am wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
Listen. This is an HN style sheet problem, not user choice problem. The fact is, using the preformatted macro is a better way to highlight verbatim passages of text.
>Your version just mixes in with everything else you typed, and hardly looks like a differentiable block of text at all, regardless of whether it wraps or not.
Hey look! A completely distinct
block of text. And wow! It's
monospaced too! This gives the
impression that it's reprinted
exactly as originally written!
And all I had to do, to make phone
people happy was manually wrap at
maybe, like 30 chars. Amazing!
I can't argue the logic, but this makes me sad. Can't someone make a product that people will pay for that is sustainable over time (even if # new users == # lost users )? Why does everything have to be huge to exist?
Not everything does but they raised a lot of money on the presumption that they would become huge, and now that screws up the incentives for new hires etc.
Evernote can export notes into ENEX XML document itself.
I've used https://github.com/laurent22/joplin to import this ENEX file and access most of the features (formatting, images) but not other (i.e. password protected values)
In case it's useful and you're on a Mac, FYI you can use Bear (bear.app) to import EverNote's XML export file; and you can then use Bear to export the whole thing as a bunch of markdown files.
Evernote sold branded socks at one point. Not just that, but they sold _paper notebooks._. Think about that: a digital notebook company that "diversifies" by selling paper notebooks. That really says everything about where Evernote was headed.
I stopped using them after they made it clear they had no interest in supporting a linux client. Not sure if they have changed their attitude since then, but that ship has sailed as far as I am concerned.
They gave me premium account for a month. I didn't use it. A couple of months later I wanted to check how it works, so I asked them to enable me the premium account for 1h or 1 day. I wanted to check how the features work. After a week I got an answer: the premium account is available when you will pay. So I resigned. I don't like paying for I-have-no-idea-what.
500+ employees with an annual revenue estimated to be below $10MM. That's $20k of revenue per employee! I mean I can just imagine what it's like there, insane meetings about metrics where 15 marketing managers show the powerpoint slides they spent the last week emailing back and forth to highlight the 2% growth last quarter, while they need to grow by 2000% in the next 48 months just to stay alive. Then in 3 months they have the same meeting.
Evernote has been severely mismanaged (I've been saying this since 2012, links below). I wonder how they feel about all the VC money they spent developing ports for WebOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4855689
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10859391