Evernote is in deep trouble | Hacker News Reader

Evernote is in deep trouble

businessinsider.com

128 pointscoloneltcb94 comments

Surprise. Evernote is just such a shockingly low quality product. First of all, as a note taking company, you CAN NOT LOSE DATA. EVER. I use my notebook for keeping data and derivations and lecture notes. Data is the most valuable thing in my profession, insights sometimes don't come twice, and lectures are often never given twice. So, the service already sucks. The client is buggy and bloated with features... Which I find somehow insulting since they're developing new useless features and selling merchandise that nobody needs while they're ignoring crucial flaws in their software.

Finally, and maybe this is something only scientists people care about, their pen input support is abysmal... AFTER acquiring one of the best note taking products for the iPad! How have they managed to screw this up so bad? OneNote gets all these things dead on correct, and that's why it's the standard in labs that keep digital notes. Evernote does not seem to understand the role their product takes in people's lives. I really hope they either shape up or go away so they can stop distracting people from what they actually want.

From this article, I have some of my software business beliefs validated:

- don't be afraid to charge money

- release frequent, small updates. Users tolerate this much better than infrequent big updates with major changes

- focus on quality. Every update should include several bug fixes. As much as possible, fix bugs before adding new features

- focus. Put all your eggs in one basket, to some extent.

- watch costs like a hawk. Operating in 10 locations sounds like Evernote let their costs get out of control.

I feel like this should be engraved in stone and delivered to anyone who is thinking of getting into this game but try telling that to a hot headed under 30 founder who is worried about burning that cash as fast as possible to 'grow big and sell the company'.

I almost feel like SV is all about exits and not enough focus on meaningful products that arise out of genuine passion to solve a real problem.

Those kinds of founders need a dose of reality. That path is usually more like "burn lots of investor cash and your reputation, then fail." For the very few who sort of pull the pump and dump burn to exit thing off there are dozens who just crash.

doesn't seem to happen. people who raise ridiculous amount of money seems to do it again and again and investors are happy to keep shoveling piles of money around. vast amount of money is moved around and evaporated.

that kind of money if distributed to single founders who have a working product, generating revenues would have a far more benefit to society and consumers instead of one giant company that bullies it's way into the markets by splashing money around.

I've seen that too and I still don't understand it.

Not all products are equal.

As a user, be afraid of services that don't charge money.

> watch costs like a hawk. Operating in 10 locations sounds like Evernote let their costs get out of control.

This one's so important. When you have some millions in the bank from VCs, it's really easy to default to "just spend it" mode. That can vanish so quickly, though... particularly when you're setting up offices with the intent of impressing potential hires and VCs.

I wonder if people absorbing this fact would also start recognizing that basing yourself in SF is a pretty good way to shoot yourself in the foot cost-wise.

You could probably open 3 different offices in 3 other metropolitan areas for the same cost as your SF office.

Yup. I used to belong to a non-profit which had its headquarters in Milpitas (just checked, and it still does). Several years ago, they radically changed their fee structure, complaining that costs were too high. Well, sure: if you base yourself in one of the most expensive parts of the country, costs will be far too high!

Also, as a developer, there's no way I'd want to live in the Bay Area. I'm glad that many people enjoy it, but California's not the place for me, not at all.

Milpitas is nothing like SF, aside that it is an overpriced ghetto

Evernote is only a weird bloated SaaS company (with hundreds of employees) because they followed the wrong business model.

Evernote should be more like Minecraft (Mojang). A cool piece of software that a handful of people develop but a billion people use. They would be wildly profitable and worth many billions to Microsoft and others.

True. Like Sunrise (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/02/11/microsoft-acquire...) and Acompli (http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2014/12/01/microsoft-acquire...)

The Evernote Mac client is the one of the worst piece of software on the Mac platform. I've actually been using a $5 replacement app, Alternate, and moving my Evernote text notes back to nvALT synced through Dropbox.

Evernote, please, I do not want:

- Work Chat

- Headlines from Business Insider

- To be CONSTANTLY BUGGED TO UPGRADE

That's the biggest thing. I'd love to give Evernote money, if I knew I was going to get left alone. Instead, all the Evernote Premium members I know are _still_ bugged to upgrade and get all these stupid, useless features thrown at them that they don't want.

I agree with you. I am a middle tier ($25/year) user and I eschue the Mac app and just use the web interface.

I filed a bug report last week on getting too many nags to use new features. On my Android phone, saying NO to using a new feature did not prevent many new nags about the same feature.

It is this nagging that might convince me to not renew my yearly service when it expires.

I assume you mean Alternote (not Alternate) which says it's just an alternative GUI to the Evernote backend. So you still seem to be at the mercy of Evernote?

Evernote has me hooked on cross device persistent notes. And I will change to the first quality alternative that lets me import my existing notes from Evernote.

Evernote still can't handle even simple non-overlapping changes on two devices. Every time I close my laptop I have to wonder if changes were synched. Especially embarrassing because superb open source code is already available for conflict resolution (git, for example).

EDIT: someone should write a notekeeping app built on github.

As a Linux user I have never used Evernote, but Google Keep has cross-device persistent notes and I've never had even the tiniest glitch with synchronization.

As a Mac and Windows user I've never used google keep as there is no native app.

There's a Chrome app, which is "native" enough for me.

That's great and I genuinely hope that it works for you. The point I was making was that there was no point. Text files and an ftp server are arguably as good, but ultimately meaningless in relation to the article.

I don't think I understand your point.

Google Keep works offline, it has seamless syncing when it is online and I can access it from all my devices (including my phone).

I guess you don't consider a Chrome App to be a "real" native app and that somehow makes it different for you, but I don't see any meaningful distinction.

Requires Chrome. I don't want to run Chrome to simply run an app. The actual point I was trying to make was that I dust get the point of your post. I should have just said that I guess. Not meaning to be snarky by the way.

Dropbox + .txt files. Never failed me. Just need to remember to save before you put away current device. Can use whatever editing interface I favor on whatever device I'm using -- usually Sublime on my Windows/Mac machines, I'm only viewing on my mobile devices.

Sublime has a "save on focus lost" option, so you don't even have to remember saving.

This. Personally, I like DB ` .md`. Edit/view from Editorial on iOS (or Byword) and BBEdit or Byword on the Mac. Or better, VIM from the CLI since that spins circles around any GUI. Markdown exports nicely to HTML 5 for web projects too.

Use the Chrome App Launcher and pin to the task bar (if using Windows). Makes using Google Keep more convenient

Just curious, what do you need a native app for? I ask because I'm usually suspicious of any company that has a native app when one isn't needed. I usually suspect they have some ulterior motive, spy ware, malware. Etc. Plus even if they don't have an ulterior motive installing a native app is one more vector for having my machine owned whereas a web site is not. (the browser might be a vector but it's a given I'm going to have one)

I think native apps qualify as the offline-mode for a platform like evernote. I don't user evernote personally, but I do ride caltrain for ~2 hours every week day during which I try to be productive offline. For me that means having a local development database and usually some documentation for whatever I'm working on. I can easily see this meaning evernote native for a fervent note taker. Granted you could have a web app using local storage but that's unreliable at best and they already seem to have a problem with syncing..

"works on an airplane" is an important quality for many.

Google Keep works offline.

Usually more responsive than a javascript interface in my experience.

Evernote native vs web Sublime Text vs Atom Mail Client vs Web mail etc.

Just looked into it and there is a Chrome app. It can be started from the Mac Launchbar and runs in its own window.

Not native, but feels close enough for this type of thing to me.

The thing I've become hooked on and am desperately trying to find a replacement for (just in case) is the functionality that adds a checkbox to a text file which can then be searched for with the todo: search parameter. For example "notebook:Pdcast todo:unfinished" will show me notes with things I still need to do (any unchecked todo checkbox will mean the note appears in that search)

I realise there's a billion and one todo apps out there, but being able to combine my ramblings and 3am thoughts with an in-line todo system is the killer feature for me. I think the next notes app that supports this will have to be a self-hosted option

I'm pretty sure that you could do that with org-mode…

Interesting and thanks for the heads up but I don't believe I'm quite compatible with that software. I guess I'm also looking for usable-at-3am features, web accessible, phone accessible (currently iOS), centralized or at least synchronised, and the only feature Evernote doesn't seem to provide - backup-able files/database

CLI, Linux.. emacs (!). I'm not sure I could manage to grasp emacs during the middle of a really good day much less a quick note at night

How much would you be willing to pay for this software? Available on all desktop and mobile platforms, with flawless synchronization and ridiculously good search capabilities?

How much are you asking? Evernote's pricing plans and features work for me, I'm looking for a viable alternative in case it vanishes.

Picking up some sarcasm in your comment, could you ask the questions or make the statements you're hinting at and I'll be happy to discuss!

Thank you for your reply.

No sarcasm in my statement at all. For the past several years, I've been looking for a personal knowledge management application that would work for me and now I'm seriously thinking about just writing it because I can't find one.

I'll probably write one even if I can't make a business out of it, because I need it. I'm also curious about the business potential and have been asking people in my personal network.

Evernote's pricing seems like a good benchmark - I heard that from several people already.

NValt uses (a possibly nonstandard) markdown notation for checkboxes. So a search for unchecked would be "[ ]", checked is "[\]"

apple notes works pretty well for me across devices

Evernote is such a great idea and in its early stage, it showed a lot of promise as the "trapper keeper" of all things digital. But as time went on, the client became bloated and there were weird products like Evernote Food that were pushed on users.

I'm still using it for certain parts of my work, and I'm increasingly frustrated with the pop ups in the application every few days to upgrade to Evernote Premium.

Someone is going to make a product that looks a lot like Evernote that's going to succeed. But I think Evernote's best days are behind it.

Yep! Between syncing issues on previous versions and the latest pops every time I open the app I'm trying new things.

Most things are going in Jrnl.

I think I'm going to give OneNote a try for everything else. Friends swear by it and the latest version seems to work pretty good on OS X.

Don't forget Evernote Market, where you can buy - for unknown reasons - light purple business socks from Evernote. Talk about losing focus if you have too much VC money.

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

Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had only submitted that one review.

When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a little over the top.

Wasn't really suspicious - there was a call-to-action at the top of the app to help Evernote by leaving a review (the reviews help their app store optimization).

There are a lot of die hard Evernote advocates out there that'd be happy to.

Holy hell. Today I learned that "appstore optimization" is a real thing...

It's not just a real thing… it's big business. Entire companies exist around it.

All I need is a good web clipper like evernote's Clearly, so that I can directly save cleaned webpage to a .doc file in a Dropbox folder. Still can't find one.

Also, why dropbox does not create a simple note taking app, just save notes to a dropbox folder?

If you don't need it to be a .doc, Google chrome allows you to save webpages to PDFs just by going to file > print[0] and it works quite well. The Evernote clipper worked pretty well IIRC, but either way you will have to edit the markup a bit to get the results on a very cluttered page. In a pinch though, chrome does a great job if you don't want to have evernote simply to clip pages.

[0]http://www.labnol.org/software/save-web-page-as-pdf/21153/

Word allows you to open PDFs - so it can be edited and saved as anything you want.

I generally avoid Chrome, but I'll give that a try. I hope it works better than my experiences with both Safari and Firefox on OS X.

Those browsers have long supported what is mentioned in your linked article:

   File -> Print -> PDF -> Save as PDF

However, it's very hit-and-miss of what results you'll get. About 80% of pages come out fine, but the remainder can be quite awful. And it's unpredictable which browser will do better on any given page. At the least, you'd expect results to match printing to paper, but sometimes even that doesn't happen. Safari has a Reader View that produces good results, but I don't think very many websites support it.

Unfortunately, certain websites go out of they way to prevent us from saving them to PDF.

MS Edge does this and saves to onedrive.

It saves webpage / clip as a picture. Really not what I want.

because there are plenty of note taking / writing apps that use dropbox directly?

Don't know if these recent articles will turn out to be the death toll for Evernote. Kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. At this point, Evernote could pretty much do anything and still nobody on this thread would be convinced they are doing it right.

Another thing that I never liked about evernote is their API is perhaps the worst API I have ever encountered. Thrift should never be used for external APIs, period. [0]

[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-poorly-written-APIs/answ...

It's interesting to me that EN is apparently in deep trouble partially because of buggy feature releases. Three days ago I wrote this comment in response to the last article about EN:

I wonder if they're experiencing feature creep because they've satisfied users of the core features. I use a program called Devonthink Pro according to this method: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... and in some respects my use hasn't changed that much. I use syncing features and some other pieces, and maybe the engine has gotten a little better over time, but mostly I do what I did with it 10 years ago.

I wrote a little more about DTP here: http://jakeseliger.com/2010/11/12/scrivener-or-devonthink-pr... , though I understand that some people use Evernote differently than DTP.

Mostly it seems to me that DTP is very close to "feature complete," for lack of a better term.

DTP is Mac and iOS only which makes it far less useful. I use Evernote on nearly every major OS: OS X, Windows, Android, iOS and web. DTP isn't an option.

Point of semantics - DTP already means something; DeskTop Publishing. Using it to describe another piece of software is confusing.

How does the sync between machines work, in your experience?

I know it wouldn't work for a lot of people, but I myself keep looking at switching from Evernote to "DevonThink Pro Office" because I would be OK with going Mac-only to get reliability.

(I know Devon has an iOS app, but my understanding from their own forums is that the iOS app is basically garbage, and the users are all basically waiting for Devon's rewrite that has been in progress for years; is that right?)

I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though, even if they are all Mac. Last time I checked, that didn't really work, the sync was a hack built on top of Dropbox and it had tons of problems. Do you use that and has it improved?

How does the sync between machines work, in your experience?

Not that well. For me it's not a huge issue: I use an iMac as my primary machine and keep that as the primary database / state. If I end up doing a lot of work on a MacBook, I manually copy from it to the iMac.

I do need it to reliably sync 500,000 items across multiple computers though

Probably it's not for you! I think you can get a free trial, though, and test it.

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

Maybe for late stage investors, but if you applied that strategy as an early stage consumer investor you would have missed almost much every big hit (FB, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc).

Twitter is a dubious hit. It's wildly popular, but its profits are very unimpressive, to say the least.

$20B market cap. You could argue it should be $10B, but 'dubious hit' for an early stage investor is ridiculous.

OTOH, Many companies provide B2C services to million users for free as a side effect of raising awareness for their B2B paid offers. I wonder whether society should value this benevolent side effect to the point of reclassifying their primary purpose to "Providing a benevolent service". Yes, I'm almost being ironic because it's a failure of a business model, and I'm afraid of whether GitHub will maintain its public free service for long.

> $100 per user standard valuation

Is that actually a thing? If so, I can retire on the valuation of my obscure vanity blog, but I'm also worth a few million to websites I've accessed.

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

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

I heard this a lot: Evernote sync-ing is buggy. Could someone point to me how to implement a good cross-device sync-ing algorithms? Or is it perhaps just as simple as using object version based on timestamp?

I've never done this before so I have no clue how easy/hard it is to implement one.

why not libgit2 with a decent diff/merge UI?

Here's a set of slides on how Spotify does it with playlists:

http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/JimmyMrdell/playlists-at-sp...

The gold standard right now is operational transformation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation

But this requires that you capture every edit, which (I think) makes it more complicated than classical merging techniques which just work on whole documents as input.

I was a longtime user of evernote but recently gave up. The webclipping tool was phenomenal but the notetaking interface was so and so (their desktop app was also poorly built which made things worse). After awhile, onenote took care of my notetaking needs and pocket of my linksaving needs.

I think this was a great part of why evernote faltered. They just became a repo/dump of user crap. People didn't care to engage with the platform and therefore did not care to find out what extra value it could give them, thus preventing them from converting to paid users.

Were you able to import your Evernote notes?

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

Now I use Skim for Mac to take notes form PDF files.

Actual headline: "The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble"

Current: "Evernote is in deep trouble" (overly strong, imo).

Also, I don't think the article supports very well the "deep trouble" description. It sounds like the company has plenty of money and continues to grow.

That doesn't seem like that big of a difference to me. In fact, I'd say the actual headline is more hyperbolic. The inside story of how $1 billion is specifically written to cause people to click the link.

I Guess that's true. "Deep trouble" to me suggests the company is running out of money and in somewhat dire straits. Which I don't believe to be the case at all.

What alternatives are people using for Evernote that support more than just text?

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

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

Products like this come and go. I don't know what the value of Evernote is. I've never been a power user. I prefer using Kippt ( sadly, also shut down ) + OS X Notes + Chrome's bookmarks + Google docs + Dropbox.

Doesn't feel like a company doing something so specialised can expect a real growth out of a product that isn't remarkably well done.

While it sounds like your solution works for you, don't you think there's room in the market for one app that does all that?

One of the ways of providing value is to do nothing particularly unique, but to combine several things into a unique workflow.

The fact that you use 4 different services plus one that's been shutdown suggests to me someone else might want that functionality without the trial and error of figuring it all out and setting it all up...

I hate Evernote for the same reasons as must people (because the software quality is garbage, and they just let it languish for years, as they roll out unwanted features). But, it is not true that there are many other products like Evernote.

There actually aren't any products like Evernote. There may be products like the subset of Evernote that you use and the subset of Evernote that this other person uses, but there is nothing directly competing with it on all (or even most) facets of what it does.

SimpleNote, Google Keep, OneNote, Apple's newly-updated Notes, Paperwork, Yojimbo, etc are often cited as potential replacements, but they all do only a small subset of what Evernote actually does.

A lot of people just need to take notes -- and yep, Evernote is a terrible app for that.

But I don't know any other product that lets you, wherever you are, instantly capture computer-based notes, scanned paper documents, contracts, billing statements, photos of napkins and whiteboards and trade show booths, etc. and makes all that content delegatable/shareable to different co-workers, searchable via OCR in multiple languages, and available in both the cloud and via native app across most platforms.

I am pretty sure there isn't such a product, because Evernote is so bad in terms of software quality that I google for one every month or so, and we are still on Evernote two years later.

From the article: "last year, TechCrunch pegged the company's revenue at around $36 million, and while revenue has increased, we've heard the numbers are still short of internal expectations"

So Evernote is valued at more than 27x revenue??

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evernote

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