Maybe fail fast should also include ... fail cheap?
>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.
That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.
Properly executed an explosive startup that burns fast and fails hard can still net the founders substantial change just by setting their own salaries and running investor money through the ringer fast and furious.
I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility to outside money in your future ventures or interests.
Yeah there absolutely is a perverse incentive there.
Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.
YC’s own Sam Altman parlayed a failed startup into millions of dollars which he later turned into hundreds of millions with the mentorship of Paul Graham.
You get downvoted for mentioning that but I'm with you. I'm finding the NY Times impossible. As i live in Europe it's not of sufficient relevance to me to take out a sub but I'd like to see the stories linked to here.
Firefox's "Containers On The Go" addon lets you spin up disposable tab containers (see "Multi-Account Containers") with a single click. This works wonders for sites with limited free reads; it's increasingly the only way Medium is browsable for me.
I just get "You're in private mode" notification even without cookies. Firefox Focus only has a private mode, and tbh I wouldn't turn it off even if I could.
I think a lot of the problem is the sort of hook that makes these apps great ... isn't often a sustainable thing or isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.
> isn't enough to maintain user and/or investor expectations.
I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.
Oh, yeah. You are able to snap a picture of a receipt and search for the amount and it will highlight the part of the picture with the amount? It was my workflow at the very beginning of Evernote. This was soon pay walled - breaking search if you were relying on it - and even when you pay highlights weren't working anymore. If it's working fine now, I might come back.
I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in
Microsoft OneNote was released in 2003, while Evernote was founded in 2007. There were changes Microsoft made to allow OneNote to better compete with Evernote, but they did not make the product itself in response to Evernote.
I moved from evernote to onenote earlier this year.
It was easy to move all my stuff (i was never a heavy user) using the tool onenote provides for the purpose.
I have no complaints. I moved because I felt guilty/insecure being a free user of evernote.
Onenote doesn't give you the guilt trip and it's got that Microsoft permanence about it.
Evernote came a decade or so after Microsoft's OneNote. Evernote did make Microsoft improve their product though. It seemed as Microsoft was improving OneNote, Evernote started to go backwards.
OneNote still feels like Microsoft's best kept secret. It is a simple solution to the common problem of taking notes. I'm convinced one of my previous bosses got several promotions just because he used OneNote to keep track of notes.
Apparently onenote sucked at synochronisation at one point which didn't do its reputation much good Also they are replacing the windows app with one of those universal windows applications which involved a temporary loss of a lot of features.
Coming late to onenote myself, neither of these have been problems for me.
In a technical support department where documentation is largely controlled / poorly controlled by a small group... I know of folks who have a lot of 'secret' one note documents that are quite popular inside the company ;)
It wasn't the business that was the problem, it was the product. Eventually, Evernote became insane cluttered, to the point where it was preventing me from doing things. I wished they had markdown support in like 2009, they still don't have it.
Not sure why you'd say that. The entire time reading this article i'm thinking, OMG what tool will I migrate to now? It serves a real need, which is why I happened to pay for both the service and pay with all the time required to keep it tidy.
Except the parent didn't write "don't do SV style funding for a notetaking app". The parent said "building a business on a notetaking app is unwise" with no other caveats.
Failure, in this context could either mean product or company failure, and the "fail fast" adage is usually applied to product, not company. At least as this article presents the story (executive churn, etc), it sounds like company failure is the main part of it.
The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure, if it fails to live up to valuations.
So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind leads to others
As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote, but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations (we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.
I often think of the story of the guy who posted here about how his startup "failed" but in reality it just didn't bring in the massive cash flow that was hoped for.
IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there.
Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two options.
"Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business orotundities being lost if those are the only two options."
I think a lot of companies are doomed because of that attitude. Companies with high valuations like Slack, Github and others can't just keep a nice business going but they have to expand like crazy to justify their valuation. And most of them end up converting a very good core product into a big mess.
If you want to be bold, start your Slack replacement now. Do whatever you can to make it easy to transition to your product (API compatibility, integration compatibility, etc.). Be ready to pick up the people who will be disgruntled by Slack in two or three years.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.
There probably is but it’s really hard to compete with a company with deep pockets. That’s what I find pretty worrying about these unicorns. They kill a lot of potentially good smaller businesses just by being able to burn a lot of money.
How do they “kill” the competition exactly? I understand they have a lot of money, but what do they do with it that makes it impossible to compete? (Honest question)
It's much easier to develop a product if you don't need to make money for financing the development. Selling is also easier if you can afford marketing budgets and sales people. As long as they are losing money they are basically selling 1 dollar bills for 90 cents. Hard to compete with that.
It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.
I work in an industry that is a bit niche and weird SaaS world.
There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.
Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.
It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.
That's very true of niche businesses; one competitor price-warring can wipe our half your enterprise customers and they sometimes haven't got any way of growing except trying to pick up their customers. Not sure it's quite so true of general purpose SaaS sold to a market as big as "people that want to collaborate", especially not when the 800lb gorilla's pricing starts at $60/user/year and their apps aren't universally loved or difficult to replicate at smaller scales
You’d want to look at the market fundamentals carefully: if that company has high fixed costs and lacks strong customer lock-in, problems with satisfying customer needs, etc., you might reasonably think you could pick up customers with better pricing or support.
A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.
I think they idea was to pick up the pieces when Slack implodes. Most of these businesses, looking for 10x growth, do so at some point.
gitlab and bitbucket ain't github, but as github started burning, they started picking up steam. github sold for $7.5 billion. If they can get 1% of that value, that's still $75 million. If they can do so on the cheap, maintaining control, that's not a bad return. I doubt something like gitlab requires more than 5 people to do well enough to achieve that, given patient, low-overhead investors. Done well, that's $75 million returns for a $10 million investment. If you toss the investor $50 mil, and each employee $5 mil, it's not bad.
On the other hand, as far as I know, patient low-overhead investors are a myth.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that GitLab could be five-person company, but it's much larger. I don't think they list the number of employees, but say 56 countries so I'd wager at least two or three times that.
I am saying, exactly, that it could be, waiting in github's wings with 5 employees. They were exactly that at some point. They started in 2011, and they went for Y Combinator in 2015. They waited, and waited, and then grew. The $100 mil raise was right after MS bought github.
This also opens up the opportunity for a lot of lifestyle businesses. It may, at first, seem like a major downside having a venture backed startup competing directly with you. However, they are likely following an all or nothing strategy and there is a chance they go bust.
If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.
Investors want another Google, some people are perfectly happy with niche boutique product, and when all that investor money comes in it obscures what made that original product great. It's a shame that some great products only failed because of inflated expectations. If they had just stayed the course, they would've been fine.
Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?
If the only thing a company achieves is wealth transfer from investor to founder (in the form of wages and/or a sub-valuation exit), then it's not a success but a failure. Unless you take founder economic gain as the sole success metric, but them it's not a company but a fraud scheme. The line between victim and perpetrator blur in interesting ways when a sub-valuation exit is a win for some investors and a loss for others.
It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.
The failure is that start up founders and investors fail to recognize that revenue is your KPI to optimize for in the long run, with a goal of making a profit in the not so distant future. Business is not a social network, and success isn't measured by how many friends/users/downloads you have. Money is the bottom line.
Of course if you give something away for free or sell it cheap enough at a loss, you'll get a lot of "customers". I could do the same by opening a free taco stand on the street. But it is in no way a sustainable business model.
What if your business model were to get a huge investment from some rich friends, give away free tacos, put all the other taco stands in your town out of business, become a taco stand monopoly, and then charge for tacos at any price you want?
I see what you're getting at, and that's the logic some VCs seem to be using. But rarely does it ever work, because you'll need to start charging sooner than later, even at a loss. And once you do, competition will show up.
See Uber vs Lyft.
You'd be better off investing in a real business with a real revenue plan. Still, yes, your model works in an environment where collusion can take place. Which is why collusion and the VC aristocracy is so damaging.
If you put other taco stands out of business, their assets are cheap to buy. Tada! You are now competing with someone whose cost base is lower than yours.
Value creation doesn't come from the absence of other value creators.
Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit. Evernote's core functionality is extremely reliable and valuable to a lot of people, including myself. Maybe Apple should buy Evernote.
> Apple's "Notes" application is a well known unreliable piece of shit.
Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.
In the “classic” (non-iCloud, add an account via System Preferences → Internet Accounts) mode Notes.app does store notes on your e-mail server via IMAP.
Perhaps you haven't tried it recently, but Apple's notes app is excellent. I've certainly had less problems with Apple Notes than with Evernote's constant bloody sync conflicts.
Why would you want to pay billions for a note-taking app when you can have a programmer, a PM and a UX guy make one for less than a rounding error in your budget?
I've also found Evernote's core functionality to be an unreliable piece of shit. Almost any time I edit a note on two devices (even hours apart, always online devices) I get a big nasty merge conflict.
Actually, no I don't. I get two copies of the file, with no merge helper.
Really? I think Notes is far superior to Evernote. Notes was shitty but the newer versions since the past 2 years allowed me to completely remove Evernote.
A bit of a nuts idea for Evernote: you pay a (decent $$$) monthly fee and you get your own boss. They help you manage your life and make sure you are doing all the things you plan to and enable you to calibrate your time management / ability to do things when you say you will.
When it did its show HN I asked their support team a question; they acknowledged the question, said they would get back to me, and today I'm still waiting.
I have left bosses that don't deliver on promises, I'm not going to hire one.
Evernote failed because their product was sub-par. Onenote always provided better organization, better pen input. There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.
Mentioning OneNote sort of makes another point as well. I expect a lot of Office users have never heard of OneNote. The whole general category that lets people save notes of pieces of the Web for later use just turned out to be not that big a thing for most people.
I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc.
Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.
I, like many others, use OneNote for science and engineering purposes. I use it to keep hand-written notes from seminars, calculations, discussions with collaborators, as well as keeping track of every every wafer I've fabricated on. I take my tablet into the cleanroom with me. When I'm repairing a piece of equipment, I take pictures and paste them in my notebook and draw on them where I think a failure has occurred. My daily experimental workflow involves making a new sheet per day, logging my changes to my experimental setup, and pasting matplotlib plots into it. My life as a scientist revolves around onenote. If you go to a conference, you'll see numerous people with their surface pro or surface laptop, surface pen, and a copy of onenote open. Evernote missed the opportunity to make a real tool. They kinda almost did. They sorta grazed by making a real tool. Enough so that I sunk more time than I wish I had into trying to make their software work for me before throwing my hands up and realizing they're completely unserious about what they're making.
The tool I used for a time was fairly explicitly aimed at researchers as I recall. Though TBF that's probably a pretty niche area. (See also Scrivener on the Mac which targets screenwriting and book writers. It's been around for ages so I assume it's making someone a bit of money but, I also assume, very much in the lifestyle business level of revenue.)
I wanna say Scrivener exists - or at least it did in the first place - because it was a "scratch your own itch" kind of project. New versions are pretty rare, it's twelve years old and only on version 3. Checking their 'about us' page (https://www.literatureandlatte.com/about-us) confirms that; the founder learn to program explicitly to make the
There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.
So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.
> There were just numerous places in which you could see that man-hours were being placed in the wrong places.
I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all."
I'd like to leave Evernote (I moved to Linux, which they don't support, and their web app is insufficient). But for me the killer feature is doing OCR on PDFs and images you post and including it in search. I haven't found that elsewhere. Does anyone else do that?
Unfortunately search in images never works for me in OneNote. I have quite a few PDF documents with scanned contracts as images and none of them are found by OneNote or OneDrive search.The content in the images of the PDF files are immediately available in search results on my Google Drive.
Dropbox feels like they are in the same shitty spot that Evernote is in. They took way too much cash from investors and can't run a great little file-syncing-and-sharing business.
I remember when someone first showed me evernote with a bunch of hype. And I was like "This is pointless, I can't believe it's a company."
I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.
I get you but if you go on to the discussion forums for evernote either on their site or reddit you'll find people who have their entire lives at their fingertips thanks to this app and for whom it's vital to their work. They use its IFTTT functionality to an insane degree such that every document they get it's one click on the phone and it's filed.
I'm sure there's a subsection of hard-core users that find it really great. The people I interacted with it were just treating it as a document cloud. For me, I carry my work laptop everywhere when I'm working.... so I don't really need to do much on the phone.
This is a common fallacy, usually caused by people either not calculating or excusing downtime for self-hosted systems. A big one is time-to-recover: I’ve seen people disparage cloud options for years and then eat days or even weeks of downtime after the wrong server fails, and attempt to handwave reasons why that shouldn’t count the same as a 15 minute outage which was resolved before most users noticed.
One contributing factor may be the difference between surprise and planned outages: if you know things are going to be down and how the work is progressing, it doesn’t seem as dramatic as an outage of unknown duration.
Personally, for a long time Google Keep worked for me (although it has gotten a bit cluttered)
I tried Notion and OneNote but their mobile apps were just too annoying and clunky (reaching 200+ MBs) for the value they provided for my barely 2-3mb of notes
Currently I'm back to Google Keep with occasionally using Trello and Google Tasks
I've seen a couple of the series of videos that Evernote have been releasing recently explaing the company's plans etc to users. Ian Small comes across as a decent, down-to-earth guy, the sort you'd like to see succeed.
My wife and I tried using Evernote for keeping a running shopping list. Our options were: You can copy the shared note, but only that most recent version. Or, you can keep it as is but always have to navigate to the "work chat" and click on the note there (no way to add a shared note to your notes without copying it).
not trying to spam, but i created a shared action item tracking list myself, free to use, my particular use case was to track everything in our family from buying things to other tasks. i could also use this for work, only iphone.
I stopped using Evernote after they started pushing their "sharing" features in the UI so hard that I struggled to use it to take notes. I just wanted a notepad that synced between devices and they wanted to be something else.
I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.
FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per year.
I don't use Evernote any longer for several reasons (lack of Linux support, privacy, etc), but I haven't been able to find anything to replace it for my use case. Evernote has a great web clipper and handles handwritten notes and scanned PDF documents really well. That, combined with its reasonably good search and organization features (tags, notebooks) made it really useful for me.
I've found their web clipper has really gone downhill. Best I can tell is that it's getting conflicts with ad-blocking plugins over cookies - as in I need to log in all the time and sometimes it maybe works at all.
In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.
Most people don't know this, but evernote was created maybe 15 years ago, as a desktop app (https://lifehacker.com/download-of-the-day-evernote-2-0-wind...). I used evernote before their version 3, which is the one everyone knows today. Evernote 2 was a brilliant note taking app, the first and best of its kind, and it cost a few dozen bucks, which I gladly paid... Then they shifted to the online version called Evernote 3, abandoned their original client base, and started charging a monthly fee in place of the perpetual license (that people already paid...).
All this, to say this wouldn't be the first time evernote disappoints loyal customers. I guess you do what you have to do to survive...
Around 2010, I was chatting with a colleague about them. Even then, he was talking about how its "current incarnation." It sounded like back in the day, it was a bunch of Russian handwriting recognition experts, and they built a company around that.
I can't read the article due to paywall, but why does a note-taking app need to be a unicorn in the first place? It just seems so excessive.
Like couldn't 80% of the value of Evernote be written as a simple, intuitive piece of software that a middle-aged programmer in Boise could maintain in his free time?
While that may be a slight exaggeration, Wikipedia's numbers of 251-500 employees sounds quite massive. I'm not obviously privy to all things the company does but it makes one wonder.
The programmers who maintain MediaWiki, the programmers who write the backend and frontend of Wikipedia, and the people who run the organization that raises money to fund Wikipedia, are all seperate organizations. Giving users the tools to view and edit Wikipedia in every language and on a variety of mobile devices is actually a lot of work.
Evernote was a great application, and paying for features was not a problem (at least not for the reasonable ones among us). The problem was the the application kept growing and getting slower, more bloated and ugly. In my case, it got replaced by lower-friction apps which were better designed.
I think it's a problem of management not knowing what to do with developers once you have a solid stable product.
Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.
And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.
I first used it when it was on Palm's WebOS on the Palm Pre. They very quickly supported a lot of devices, many operating systems that are gone now (WebOS, Windows Mobile, etc.)
I took all my grad school notes and audio recordings in Evernote. I even paid for additional storage. Then they decided to abandon loyal customers and charge subscription for just syncing additional devices. I've since moved to the notes app. One less subscription for me.
Same. Notes isn’t quite the same product — can’t easily clip webpages, create annotations, tags, etc, but largely I don’t have as much a need for that anymore!
I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?
I know a lot of people use One Note, might be worth considering. My use-case is not that heavy right now, so just it is just notes for me at the moment.
I was spooked away from OneNote. I mistakenly deleted an entire notebook on their iOS app with a single swipe and press. Bizarrely, the notebook was completely irrecoverable. Not only that, but the desktop version of OneNote, which previously had the same notebook, automatically synced the deletion. I laughed at how efficiently I was being screwed. This was a couple years ago. I reluctantly switched back to Evernote.
I’ve also had trouble with OneDrive. I like most Microsoft software, but MS needs to rework its schema for auto-save products. They’re seamless 99% of the time, but come with the black swan risk of catastrophic failure at the worst time. I’d rather just ctrl+s and email backup copies to myself.
In fact I am developing Sciter Notes to bring back that handy feel of EverNote.
For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser.
https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/
(or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).
Looking at how people are pissed at subscription apps, "pay forever" doesn't seem sustainable either.
If people ain't paying for newer release (as in old good charge-for-major-upgrades model), maybe that piece software can be considered "done" and it's time to go after another sector?
Yeah part of me wishes there was a better payoff model for this done, but supported software. I scorn subscriptions often because it often warps into products I don't want so they can justify the payment or force a SaaS that is just waiting to pop and break it.
Microsoft picked up much of the functionality in OneNote. Even if the cut and paste between other MSFT apps is awful, once you have Office it’s kind of hard to justify paying for something else. Seems like an old pattern resurfacing.
oh wow i didn't know it started in 2004. i personally used it in high school to take notes at high school on my EEEPC back when those things were still all the rage, that was probably between 2007-2009 or so. i don't recall running it as a native application however, but hey my memory is spotty at best so i wouldn't trust it
Instead of this 'long and winding road' wry style pr, the reality is EN spectacularly screwed up.
They had the world at their feet but got in their own way. I still use it because incredibly there isn't anything better i'm aware of (I tried onenote but didn't like it) but for me EN is a case history of the incompetent side of valley hype
Code quality of the service they were offering:
It's improved a little recently but search is still bad, the shared document function was very buggy and made material disappear. General bugs and niggles in past.
Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.
I've been enjoying Joplin[1] very much. I could criticize a few things about it, but it does have a web clipper (which was Evernote's killer feature for me), and supports cross-device sync. It even has a decent mobile client (I use it on iOS, I won't speak for the Android one), as well as a CLI (also haven't used it).
Subscription is great for the company "selling", might be fine for other companies paying it, but I absolutely despise it as an end-user/private customer and will do everything I can to find an alternative (e.g. with a single-purchase license).
Single purchase licenses are way better but a company with a cloud component can not be sustainable on that model. One option is to provide a way to offload the cloud storage to another company (such as Dropbox syncing).
Depends how much data users use. I have a feeling you could store and transfer a lot of data for a £40 fee.
A couple of alternatives:
1. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web platform to do this nowadays.
2. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature upgrades. Retro, I know.
3. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates. JetBeains works like this with their products.
And even if they are at the beginning, they can randomly be removed later.
E.g. Adobe Lightroom, which I pay a subscription for, had the option of moving to a fully paid version (which was able to open data from the subscription). However now it's no longer possible and when (not if) I stop paying, I won't be able to migrate my catalog (=edits) anywhere, short of exporting all photos as tiffs.
But exporting as TIFFs seems a pretty reasonable option in that case. Your edits and catalog are all saved in a form you can import into another program.
I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example.
At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.
It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.
> It's funny how people can have opposite opinions on what constitutes an essential item. For me, the password manager is at the core of everything I do... And it's the first one I'm willing to pony up money for... Even more than the cost of maintaining my personal domains.
I wonder if drilling into the whys of these choices would be useful. Like maybe password management is so crucial and with specific requirements that it makes no sense to pay someone else to take control of it.
I'm personally very willing to pay for smarter people than me to handle problems I have but maybe it's not always the case that they're smarter than me or maybe there is a really ergonomic solution I can retrofit to my needs.
Problem with single-purchase licenses is this: what if, after the short trial period, you decide that you don't like? Or what if you find a better alternative?
With SaaS, you can simply cancel your subscription. With a single-purchase license though, it's basically money you have flushed down the drain (unless the company is really generous with their refund policy).
The other side of that coin is subscription models are great for corporate software. Nobody wants to work at the company using ten year old broken software because corporate wants to delay the upgrade cost as long as possible and then roughing through the botched upgrade process.
What I hate about the rush to subscriptions is the addition of cloud elements where they are not needed.
A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it.
Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail on Someone Else's Computer. That's a hard-no for me, and really too bad, but it did make me figure out that I can replicate the workflow I built around that with Mutt and a few shell scripts.
I don't know how common that is, but their attempt to extract regular revenue meant they lost revenue from me. I do sincerely hope it works out for them - I love indie devs! - but more and more, I find subscriptions lead me to substitute open source for whatever it is.
I had similar problem with 1Password. They wanted to move their model to subscriptions, so I decided to take another look at password managers and migrated to KeePass which turned out to be even better alternative (requires some manual setup, but I don't mind).
I also used to use 1Password and migrated to KeePass. The problem is that password management isn't a good fit as a service with the subscription model. It's completely unsexy (nothing wrong with that) and therefore doesn't have the "can't do without this" emotional factor that connects people to, say, their phone data plan, their gym membership, or even their Netflix habit. Password management is something that you set up once and hopefully forget about completely.
Awesome for the company, but not so much for the customer.
As a customer who values his time I have to manage one more recurring payment, I have to interact with (up)sales-people disguised as customer service and I have to keep records of canceling the service n years (depending on jurisdiction) because I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
> I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
Is this a common practice? It sounds very unethical, but the cynic in me can imagine it happening.
That is all fine, but there fundamental question still remains as to why anyone would think, or thought, that a note taking app would be worth billions in valuation.
Evernote stumbled and failed to execute so many times. The got hacked, had a clunky/yucky UI forever and lost people's notes. Plus, like a meal kit service or taxi app, they didn't have anything that was inherently defensible. That's why they failed.
I use Evernote to store mostly bookmarks, tag them, sometimes I take a note with it. I'm mostly reliant on the search by tag feature. I use Evernote on multiple devices that sync.
What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?
I tried Notion but there's something I don't like about it. It's also kind of slow. I have been using Bear and I like its simplicity and features a lot!
From what I can tell it's somehow possible to link to file locations in a .org file, and sometimes I'm able to cause emacs to open that file within the ide, but I'm shaky on the details.
The orgmode hype I still don't get. I code full time in emacs and still don't get it. Maybe because all the use case blog posts I've found can be reduced to "you must discover a user flow for yourself."
I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.
Orgmode sort of standardizes a bunch of things that are useful for project management and note taking. Things like putting due dates and then building an agenda for the week based on that.
How you use it is largely up to you. I usually break things into files when I feel like it's its own high level "thing".
Do you take a lot of notes? If so, what do you use to take notes? Some people don't take a lot of notes, and Org mode might not be useful to them.
My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.
For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.
sounds like what you're doing is exactly what delicio.us was doing before they were bought out by yahoo, i'm curious also to know what hn users have for this. i use instapaper, but it's more of an archiver, not sure if it supports tagging
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] thread>Lots of once-hyped companies live on the “Remember this?” spectrum. On one end, there is a cluster of fast flameouts — the Yo-Ello-Peach-Meerkat-Stolen-Clinkle-Secret-Color coterie.
That makes me think someone should create (maybe has) a start-up graveyard for folks to peruse.
http://startupgraveyard.io/
I don't really think its in the self interest of someone trying to make a successful product in tech to take a landslide of outside capital to try to grow a functioning, healthy business. But its definitely in the self interest of the founders if the goal is to get big and blow up. Because getting big alone has many benefits - besides the aforementioned pay, you become connected and influential in the industry in ways that can absolve you of responsibility to outside money in your future ventures or interests.
Investors throw so much money at these guys and by doing so... can create incentives that straight leads to driving the investment into the ground and walking away with a bag of cash / future prospects.
You can't trust Evernote to have searchable archive anymore. Instead it's a convoluted app with lot of useless features. They lost their focus.
There's a lot of gee whiz out there.
I think the latter part is key: VC funding means people are pressured to chase huge returns and over-compensating staff (especially at the executive level) as if they’re a billion-dollar company. That frequently leads to neglecting the “little” things which would actually make it better for users — in the case of Evernote, I stopped using it because the sync was unreliable and the apps desperately needed a QA/UX team with veto authority. Tossing everything into Dropbox should not have — but almost always was — a better experience for me and I stopped using them around 2013.
[0] https://apse.io
(Archive link for those who prefer non-broken web experiences)
Then open it.
I wish this worked for the WSJ too, but it appears they're smart enough not to send the full article text in the initial request unless you're logged in
http://web.archive.org/web/20041114033908/http://www.evernot...
I had no idea OneNote even existed until well after Evernote, and I worked at a lot of places using Microsoft products.... strange.
PS: Any suggestions on alternatives?
It's not that a note app can't be successful, but clearly not with SV style funding and expectations.
The issue with "unicorn" failures is that a product can be really successful in objective terms (users, revenue, profit..) but still an investment failure, if it fails to live up to valuations.
So, if investors in 200X thought (and paid as if) the company had N potential... N becomes definition of success. They'll also, in all likelihood have already begun to spend accordingly to that N level. Failure of one kind leads to others
As I said, it sounds like there are fundamental company issues with Evernote, but it also could be that it's more of a failure to live up to expectations (we should have been slack!) than failure in objective terms.
..I know people who like Evernote.
IIRC he bought it from the investors for cheap (so they could get it off their books) and then just ran it as one guy (maybe a few more added part time later)... and it does just fine in that conext, and who knows what might happen from there.
Kinda makes me think that a lot of Unicorn style world domination or nothing, result in some business opportunities being lost if those are the only two options.
I think a lot of companies are doomed because of that attitude. Companies with high valuations like Slack, Github and others can't just keep a nice business going but they have to expand like crazy to justify their valuation. And most of them end up converting a very good core product into a big mess.
You may never be as big as Slack but there's probably a business there.
It's not impossible to compete but just much harder.
There are two companies backed by deep pocket investors who are happy to lose money, their products are straight sold at a loss because they desperately need market share gains to hopefully dominate and survive when they finally worry about profits.
Now the company I'm at is doing fine as we're small and such and we haven't lost customers to do the absurdly low cost pricing from the other two companies. But I know of others who have lost customers, nobody can match the pricing, and simply because they don't have the backing they will not survive.
It's very possible the two deep pocket companies won't survive either, but it seems like a fairly destructive pattern to have a market torn up ... when the driving force isn't even creating a stable company / what I would think of as typical market forces that help everyone.
A great example is Uber: they’re dominant but they have a ton of debt and neither their customers nor, especially drivers, have a reason to stick with them if the money is better somewhere else. They could conceivably make that up through superior logistics but if you thought you could do better, say in a particular geographic area where you can get drivers who know where anything is, it might be reasonable to compete if the absence of such a huge amount of debt gives you enough leeway to support an app development team and treat your drivers enough better that they’ll favor your clients.
gitlab and bitbucket ain't github, but as github started burning, they started picking up steam. github sold for $7.5 billion. If they can get 1% of that value, that's still $75 million. If they can do so on the cheap, maintaining control, that's not a bad return. I doubt something like gitlab requires more than 5 people to do well enough to achieve that, given patient, low-overhead investors. Done well, that's $75 million returns for a $10 million investment. If you toss the investor $50 mil, and each employee $5 mil, it's not bad.
On the other hand, as far as I know, patient low-overhead investors are a myth.
Thanks to rutierut who remembered it better than I did ;)
Most business activity in America is far from the Bay Area. It concerns itself with the sorts of quotidian businesses opportunities you speak of.
If they end up closing down or pivoting they have helped to create the market and all their users will be looking for an alternative.
Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?
It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.
Of course if you give something away for free or sell it cheap enough at a loss, you'll get a lot of "customers". I could do the same by opening a free taco stand on the street. But it is in no way a sustainable business model.
See Uber vs Lyft.
You'd be better off investing in a real business with a real revenue plan. Still, yes, your model works in an environment where collusion can take place. Which is why collusion and the VC aristocracy is so damaging.
Value creation doesn't come from the absence of other value creators.
Since the big update a couple of versions ago Apple Notes is one of the better note apps. Syncing works great, and it has been far more reliable than any of my forays into Evernote.
Search for “Notes Exporter”
It appears to be a leitmotif with the apple ecosystem: they try to lure you in and then keep you in by limiting your choices of interoperability.
At some point, this should have a negative overall: the number of users gained vs. the number of users not joining due to fears of being locked in.
anyone know a way around this?
And I have hundreds of notes that I migrated from Evernote.
Actually, no I don't. I get two copies of the file, with no merge helper.
https://jasonkincaid.net/evernote-the-bug-ridden-elephant/
https://bossasaservice.life/
I have left bosses that don't deliver on promises, I'm not going to hire one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18512197
That's why I left Evernote. I can't imagine trying to tell their story without mentioning that.
Evernote never embraced privacy. On-device encrypted and analyzed notes would have made them a natural Apple acquisition, to boot.
I should be a target for this sort of software and used something else in the same general vein for a few years. But I don't really like everything tied up in a proprietary format even if I can export bits and pieces to some degree. And more generally just tend to go back to text editors, word processing docs, etc.
Put another way, it's software that sort of demands 1.) That you want to carefully save/curate what you read and write for later reuse and 2.) You go all in on a particular program.
There's a total of twelve people listed on that about page, only three of whom are programmers. Most of them are also writers, including two of the programmers, and it sort of sounds like a lot of these jobs are part-time.
So yeah, definitely lifestyle business rather than unicorn.
I once read an interview with the founder of Genius, and something he said stuck with me: “I guarantee that 90% of you are working on the wrong things, and you think you’re working hard, but you might as well not be going to work at all."
Spot-on.
But it won't help your Linux support issue :(
I think we can refer to that as the age of 'cloud madness' where anything and everything cloud-related was the new hotness. I think we've forgotten just how strong the buzz-wordiness was around cloud, it was prolific.
One contributing factor may be the difference between surprise and planned outages: if you know things are going to be down and how the work is progressing, it doesn’t seem as dramatic as an outage of unknown duration.
I tried Notion and OneNote but their mobile apps were just too annoying and clunky (reaching 200+ MBs) for the value they provided for my barely 2-3mb of notes
Currently I'm back to Google Keep with occasionally using Trello and Google Tasks
- Joplin Editor is nice (due to KaTeX), "cloud" syncing can be made to work, iCloud not supported though
- Quiver https://happenapps.com/ , is paid, but math/equations are supported via MathJax, iCloud is supported
Currently, Joplin works for me but Quiver is overall better.
https://getsdone.xyz
regarding evernote, i use this religiously, but mainly for personal note taking with sync across devices.
I want Evernote Personal which would be just the core product and a web clipper. The only advanced feature I really would want included is OCR of text in images. Every time I search for something and it finds a snapshot of a whiteboard with that text on it, I get a little thrill.
FWIW, I am on the $35/year plan even though I only use it maybe 10 times per year.
In the bigger picture, it seems from a customer side that the vast majority of what they've been focused on developing over the past few years has zero value to me (i.e. work chat). They ought to be very concerned about their future if that's how their product is being perceived as evolving.
It seems perfectly reasonable to create a new subscription license for a new cloud product.
Like couldn't 80% of the value of Evernote be written as a simple, intuitive piece of software that a middle-aged programmer in Boise could maintain in his free time?
Natural selection at work, I'd say.
Without proper direction people just keep adding features that are only used by a tiny subset of the userbase, and you end up with a bloated application that's slow to use because it's full of functionality that nobody uses.
And of course, you still need to pay those developers, so you shift the burden onto your userbase through ads or fees, making your application less appealing.
WinZip was a good example of this.
I’m just worried about exporting my data before they go out of business, but to put into what? Is there any good, ideally open source, alternative that can accept Evernote as is?
I’ve also had trouble with OneDrive. I like most Microsoft software, but MS needs to rework its schema for auto-save products. They’re seamless 99% of the time, but come with the black swan risk of catastrophic failure at the worst time. I’d rather just ctrl+s and email backup copies to myself.
And, if you take VC money, you don't even get that option.
I did note renderer and editor (HTML, WYSIWYG) for EverNote 2. Later that code became Sciter Engine (https://sciter.com)
For now it stores notes only locally but in next version it will be possible to use clouds (DropBox, GoogleDrive, etc.) for sharing and accessing notes from Mobiles and browser. https://notes.sciter.com/2019/06/28/note-sharing-is-coming/ (or to use dedicated server for that (paid option)).
Yet: I am looking for co-founder of the project : https://www.sideprojectors.com/project/project/11572/scitern... - please contact me if someone is interested.
And business' look for a sustainable business model, because it's literally a question of life and death for them.
If people ain't paying for newer release (as in old good charge-for-major-upgrades model), maybe that piece software can be considered "done" and it's time to go after another sector?
Search is hard. Google has the benefit of getting a lot of training data. Corporate intranet search, searching your documents, etc. has to actually figure out relevancy and can't infer it from having already served that query thousands of times in the last day.
Phil Libin was more concerned about stroking his ego and turning the company into a lifestyle brand like apple than actually improving the product.
I've been enjoying Joplin[1] very much. I could criticize a few things about it, but it does have a web clipper (which was Evernote's killer feature for me), and supports cross-device sync. It even has a decent mobile client (I use it on iOS, I won't speak for the Android one), as well as a CLI (also haven't used it).
1 - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin
However, creating a subscription model doesn’t necessarily mean there is a service that warrants it.
I think having a cloud component is often used as an excuse to explain the subscription model.
A couple of alternatives:
1. Decouple the cloud syncing component and sell that as subscription, with a sync-less version for a fee. PWAs mean you don't even need to give up the web platform to do this nowadays.
2. (My personal favourite) is sell a perpetual license but charge for feature upgrades. Retro, I know.
3. Sell a subscription licence which includes a perpetual license for the latest copy of the software. If you stop paying, you stop getting updates. JetBeains works like this with their products.
- I use it regularly. (Which means I'll probably be upgrading to new versions anyway.)
- The price is reasonable for the value
- I can export my data in a form that's still useful/accessible once I cancel my subscription.
The problem is that all those conditions are frequently not met.
I think single-purchase licenses work for some things, but they're a hard sell for others. For example, I really, really can't justify paying for a password manager for example.
At the same time, monthly subscriptions make sense for some things but don't make sense for others.
I wonder if drilling into the whys of these choices would be useful. Like maybe password management is so crucial and with specific requirements that it makes no sense to pay someone else to take control of it.
I'm personally very willing to pay for smarter people than me to handle problems I have but maybe it's not always the case that they're smarter than me or maybe there is a really ergonomic solution I can retrofit to my needs.
With SaaS, you can simply cancel your subscription. With a single-purchase license though, it's basically money you have flushed down the drain (unless the company is really generous with their refund policy).
A great example of this is a little addition I've been using to Mail.app, called MailTags[1]. I've been using it for years, religiously upgrading as I go, because email is my primary communications mode and I had a great workflow built around it.
Now it has gone subscription and is storing metadata related to mail on Someone Else's Computer. That's a hard-no for me, and really too bad, but it did make me figure out that I can replicate the workflow I built around that with Mutt and a few shell scripts.
I don't know how common that is, but their attempt to extract regular revenue meant they lost revenue from me. I do sincerely hope it works out for them - I love indie devs! - but more and more, I find subscriptions lead me to substitute open source for whatever it is.
[1] https://smallcubed.com/scs/
As a customer who values his time I have to manage one more recurring payment, I have to interact with (up)sales-people disguised as customer service and I have to keep records of canceling the service n years (depending on jurisdiction) because I don't know yet who will buy the leftovers of a company once it's not profitable so they can massmail "due payment notices" to all former customers, making a profit from those who fail to object in time.
Is this a common practice? It sounds very unethical, but the cynic in me can imagine it happening.
What would HN crowd recommend as an Evernote replacement?
Nothing beats emacs/org-mode + beorg on iOS for me though. beorg even has scheme-based scripting, although I haven't tried it out yet.
Evernote users are accustomed to more than text files.
I can't even tell whether I should have more than one .org file.
How you use it is largely up to you. I usually break things into files when I feel like it's its own high level "thing".
My personal wiki includes several thousand .org files that are interlinked using hierarchical tagging. No other note-taking tool I've evaluated has all of the features and efficiency of Emacs and Org mode.
For example, Evernote doesn't allow users to enter tabular data and make calculations on that data, which Org mode supports. The suggested solution for Evernote is to attach a spreadsheet file. That's what I did with the various note-taking solutions I used back in the 90s. Now all of my small sets of tabular data are included in the same files as my notes.