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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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?

It would appear that the product itself hasn't worked that well for Evernote either, so there's obviously blame to go around.

> 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.

225 Million users later...

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).

It's easy to get tons of users if you're selling $10 dollar bills for $1 dollar.

Vast majority of whom have never paid a dime for an Evernote product.

User isn't the same as customer, though. Evernote needs customers. They only have users.

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.

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