I think it’s an example of trying to charge for things that are low value, and, more importantly, low cost.
Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.
It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user.
When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very cheap alternatives.
I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.
The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something cheap. But don’t do something not valuable and expensive.
Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don’t want custom Evernote sync and I especially don’t want to pay as much as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss in a bunch of files.
> I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.
This is the problem with most VC funded startups. You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees. When it comes time to actually make a profit, these companies struggle because the value proposition simply isn't there for what they're offering.
Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No. But someone has to pay back the billions spent on useless corporate bloat and thousands of employees.
> This is the problem with most VC funded startups.
At one level I shouldn't care. The VCs burn the money, the users make a bad choice to rely on something that will inevitably disappear when the profit-seeking crunch comes, not my problem.
But it's unfortunately for all of us because all this human energy (from users, developers) that gets wasted over and over on doomed-to-fail proprietary solutions could be so much better spent on developing, using and promoting open source distributed solutions that can stand the test of time.
Yeah true. Being laid off sucks, but let's just say a few friends I had at Twitter are taking a very nice vacation with no rush to start re-applying. Can't be said about most non-tech jobs experiencing layoffs.
> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.
To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.
I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.
Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.
> Take GrubHub and DoorDash for example. Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction?
While I agree with the sentiment, it is worth noting that the 30% helps cover the delivery-person’s cut. Ideally, there should be a fixed cost courier charge, but that’s tangential to the point here.
In general I would agree but the hardest part of any success is getting the word out there.
Especially for double-sided markets like food delivery where you have a chicken and egg problem - why providers sign up when there aren’t users and why would users sign up when there aren’t any providers.
That’s a human problem, not a technical one, and is the expensive bit.
> You have millions invested into an app that really is a glorified CRUD service that somehow ends up with a team of 500 engineers, and 3000 more employees.
You are just looking at the tip of the iceberg. Being essentially a CRUD app doesn’t mean it is less complex than other software. This is similar to saying “Facebook is just a web site, I could make that over a weekend.”
I agree that many of the features they were adding were useless (to me), but I disagree that you can encompass what they do with the description of storing and editing files. Their value was in the removing any concern a user might have about where a note is, both in terms of which device, and where on the device. There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that, I want to capture bits of information and then be able to find it again without thinking about it. What I was buying was simplicity, reliability, ubiquity, and speed. They screwed up because they didn't seem to realize that was their core value proposition.
I feel like something more subtle was at work too. Much of my Evernote uses were just clipping Web pages to save for later or organize and search later and at some point I no longer did that. Why not? Well, I can take a few guesses. I graduated from college, for one. But also, I started reading more things on mobile devices, which didn’t nicely integrate with the clipping tool. Probably I now spend more time on social media sites than reading articles on random sites. Maybe it just got to be less trendy and exciting. I don’t remember any particular change to Evernote that made me drift away from using it.
When it comes to pure “notes” I find either Google Keep or Apple Notes are good enough and work with less effort on my part so that’s where most of my scribbles go.
>There are a bunch of ways to sync and edit files, but I don't want to spend time or brain power on that
I see what you mean. But at the same time I do have the brainpower to simply remember to save my notes into the "notes" folder, which I then sync into some cloud storage.
Or even just use Google Keep. I'm fine pasting links, copying pictures, and jotting quick notes down. I didn't necessarily need inking support on my end. Condolances to those who did, as well as other features like audio and others I can't remember off the top of my head.
Good question which can only be answered by them. But given the amount of money they raised compared to their likely acquisition price (bending spoons has only raise slightly more capital to buy all the apps they are buying than evernote did for its development), I don't think they've walked away with much financially.
Yep. For the founders in particular though, who had the most influence early on in taking the VC path, odds are they took some money out along the way, perhaps quite a bit more than had they stayed small.
Sounds like perverse incentives? If your best coarse is to ruin your company and product to make a buck, you may as well be a telemarketing scammer or some other vulture of society that make bank off the mystery/rent seeking of others.
I have to hope that the original owners really wanted to make the best product possible and lost their heads with the power to create that they thought the investments would bring.
Theoretically it aligns the incentives of the founders with those of the VCs putting new money into the round (eg the founders are OK with the company taking more risk, because they have diversified their personal net worth somewhat). Now, the incentives of the VCs putting new money into the round, there's certainly an argument that they don't always benefit society or deliver the best possible product...
Is this typically possible? My understanding is that most VCs insist on being paid first in the case of an exit, at least to the point of getting back what they put in. Founders and employees are typically last in the line.
Yes, during the rounds where VCs are stepping over themselves to invest, founders can negotiate terms that permit them (and their employees and early investors) to sell some of their stock as part of the deal, in a secondary sale (https://rizstanford.medium.com/secondary-sales-in-vc-backed-...).
Either way, it's poisoning the well. It's a shame that many (most?) SaaS applications lack data portability. I get that part of it is it's easier to have a custom schema than adhere to an established file format (or creating a new open format). The cynic in me believes a lot of it is good old-fashioned lock-in or casual indifference to their customers' data.
That's may even be fine for some bits of data. But, for anything I want access to long-term, I just can't trust SaaS start-ups anymore. Very few acquisitions end up with a favorable outcome for the customers. Sometimes the service gets unceremoniously shut down. In other cases the app gets folded in to some other product the parent company owns. In yet others the product suffers as the parent company tries to squeeze what it can from the existing consumer base.
I have no real interest in trying to scrape my data out of a vault so I can recreate it elsewhere. Increasingly, I limit my choices to established players with a history of long-term product support (e.g., Apple or Microsoft, but not Google) or OSS. I'm sure in the short-term I'm missing out on new functionality that could increase my productivity, but I don't like the anxiety of knowing I could lose all my data in an instant and so I don't truly engage with such products. My primary concern is no longer than the company will go out of business but rather that they'll try to shoehorn a growth model that doesn't make sense for the core product so they can then sell and sail off into the sunset.
Obsidian is an interesting case where's it's not an established company and it's not OSS, but they've made it possible for you to ensure long-term access to your data. If needed, there could be an OSS-equivalent of Obsidian to read those files. But, I'm happy to just pay them for a good product. If they were to have a big exit, that's great for them and I don't think I'd be impacted very much.
The trend in software has been a move to walled gardens and there's been strong adoption there, so I don't think my mindset on the topic is a prevailing opinion. But, I have noticed family members and such have grown increasingly tired of service shutdowns from acquisitions. Expensive devices become bricks. Important data goes away. Etc.
A common tactic now is to have this idea of lock-in. That if you don't continue to use said service you loose everything. This forces you into that subscription and makes it extremely hard to transfer and move.
I have seen many apps that lock data export behind enterprise subscriptions - that have no pricing and only "contact us".
I do think there are times it may make sense to have some unique file format (maybe your app does something special and needs that format) but there should always be a way to get that data into something more standard. Whether that's a text file, a CSV file or something else.
Apple is not a company I would trust with long term product support, at least at the pro end. It has dropped several products. I used to use Aperture, for instance, which was a great pro photography product, but it was dropped with no real exit route.
Obsidian: also worth looking at DEVONthink for similar reasons, but with the advantage that you have a choice of sync services including running your own. The database is open, but a risk point is that it uses RTFD for notes with graphics. That's not supported off the Apple platform, but there are similar risks with any method of storing notes with graphics.
But they should be just text files with pointers to non-text things.
Creating a proprietary format just because is an unnecessary complexity and cost.
I used Evernote for 5-10 years and had thousands of notes. I had maybe 10-20 photographs or diagrams mixed in, but mostly it was text.
Not sure how common my use is, but they kept adding stuff I didn’t want. And it’s now a “free” feature in Apple notes, onenote and countless others.
I think the difference is that Microsoft and Apple are just trying to find efficient ways to store data in their cloud storage. Evernote was trying to find ways to make customers pay for note taking.
No. But I’ve pretty much always come back to storing text files, photos, and PDFs. It may not be as elegant a solution but it’s completely portable. Never got into OneNote when I used to use Windows for the same reason.
Storing text files in the cloud is super cheap. And having an app to easily edit those files is super cheap.
It was free in the beginning because this is a “classic” software problem where it’s cheap to develop and close to $0 marginal dollars for a user.
When Evernote started charging for dumb features and locking in my notes, I switched to one of many free, open source, or very cheap alternatives.
I think Evernote’s problem is that it should have just stayed a 1-2 person company. They ramped up costs, then pushed up prices, and customers mehhed out.
The lesson here is to do something valuable or do something cheap. But don’t do something not valuable and expensive.
Sync is nice, but notes can be easily synced everywhere by layering on top of Dropbox or iCloud or whatever. I don’t want custom Evernote sync and I especially don’t want to pay as much as Dropbox for it. Id rather just pay for Dropbox and then toss in a bunch of files.