Evernote's CEO: 5k new users a day, but retention is a problem

my 2 cents.

I'm a developer who's been keeping everything in my life electronically since since 1984. When I outgrew Windows Cardfile, I developed my own web based Knowledge Base. That solution has gone through several major revisions, but is still basically a text based knowledge base. Today that KB has over 90,000 notes and millions of lines of informaton. It's my brain for sure. I'm flirting with Evernote, and would have already jumped over except for a few concerns and a surprises.

First off, I think the product will be hugely successful. Just the idea is life changer. period.

That said. I worry the search functionality is not flesible enough. How about being able to search for this string and that string, but NOT this string? Possible? Always return rows after search by modify last first order?

And Here's the missing feature that just makes soooo much sense, it had to be overlooked.

There are two main reasons I keep detailed notes. 1. myself and 2. To Share. When I'm documenting for myself I'm often very sloppy and scatter brain.
For others, and often the same documentation evolves, I want to create a blog type entry with feedback and sharing. The sharing option of Evernote is weak. If Instead if Evernote offered a way to turn public notes into a blogger type blog, automatically and retaining formating THIS WOULD BE HUGE!!! I see this as low hanging fruit for them that they are in possition to grab NOW. The day they offer this they will need to open the flood gates in their direction.


Thanks.

I'm a premium customer of Evernote, as well as someone who's been using it for quite some time now, and while I like Evernote it's 50-50 whether I'm going to renew my premium membership or continue to use the free version much. There are two reasons why:

1) No nested folders. Tags are annoying, I prefer to organize stuff in folders. Why won't Evernote add this facility? Seems pretty obvious, if you ask me.

2) More irritatingly, the quasi-proprietary way that Evernote locks you in to the app. Phil Libin -- and it was nice to see him answering questions on this forum -- was being, and I mean this with the greatest of respect, somewhat disingenuous about this issue. In my experience, it is *deliberately*difficult to export notes for use outside Evernote. They make you use this cumbrous .enex format, essentially to disincline you from leaving. All I want to do is what I used to do with SOHO Notes and Yojimbo -- which are looking a lot better these days now that I've tried Evernote -- and that is, drag a note (PDF, RTF, webarchive, JPEG, etc.) out onto the desktop and that's that. The process should be effortless, not a hassle. So, yeah, it's possible to do, as Mr. Libin pointed out, but it ain't either easy or simple.

In sum, Evernote is a great app and undoubtedly useful - until you want to export your notes or organize them as you wish.

@Phil Libin Thanks for taking the time to respond directly to comments. That says a lot, I think, in your favour.

I do feel, however, that I need to re-emphasize my earlier point about exporting. I used your app for good period of time before deciding to switch to Yojimbo and unless I missed something obvious, there didn't seem to be a seamless, simple way to export *all* my data. In my case there were many notes and bookmarks that I just ended up having to recreate on my own because exporting was getting me nowhere on account of your proprietary formay. See Scott Rose's comment above, explaining that problem in point #2. This is where I was sold on Yojimbo, because it saves my data in a format that makes it easy to export out later on should something better come along.

Evernote's engineering team has done a HORRIBLE JOB on the Evernote product. Not only do the features of its Mac version PALE IN COMPARISON to outstanding Mac note-taking programs like SOHO Notes, OmniFocus, Stickies, and Yojimbo, but:

1. Evernote has NO ABILITY to import either RTF or text files into the program, so if you've already been taking notes for years in Stickies, SOHO Notes, OmniOutliner, Notebook, Yojimbo, or any of the other of hundreds of note-taking apps for the Mac, you've got NO WAY to get your notes into Evernote. They've got a hidden feature where you can drag-and-drop RTF or HTML files onto the Evernote icon, but it does NOT import them correctly... it completely messes up line spacing & character formatting.

2. Furthermore, Evernote LOCKS USERS IN to using Evernote, because Evernote provides NO WAY TO EXPORT YOUR NOTES out of Evernote either. They only provide an export of their own proprietary format (which locks you into Evernote) and an HTML format (which is only good for making websites, not bringing into other programs).

I bet that this is another one of those examples where the Evernote development team is probably one lazy computer programmer guy in his bedroom who is way over his head right now.

@bingo (#21) We're working on that. The current iPhone app uses Apple's text-editor which greatly reduces our ability to work with checkboxes and rich text, so you can change the state of a check box in a note, but you can't add or delete checkboxes. This sucks. It's going to be hard to work around this, but we're going to do it.

@fran (#10, #22) Sorry, I set aside your question about proxies because I didn't have the answer off-hand, and I forgot to get back to it in my final response. Evernote works fine with corporate proxies as long as the native client OS is properly configured to use them. If you can log into your account via Safari or IE by going to www.evernote.com, you should be able to login in and sync with the downloadable clients. (I say Safari or IE because those are the standard browsers on their respective OSes and also inherit the underlying OS proxy settings, Evernote itself works just fine in Firefox and Chrome as well). If you have access to your OS proxy settings, you should be able to get Evernote syncing without a problem. Most of our users say that they use Evernote both at home and at work, so we know that the corporate usage rate is fairly high. However, there are some organizations which lock down their networks and prevent users from having access to the proxy settings on their desktops specifically to prevent them from getting out to the open web. There are features that we could build into the product to partially help some of these people, but it's an expensive arms race to do so and we haven't had the resources to really dive into that yet. Most of the time, you can get the OS proxy settings modified if you do it yourself or ask an administrator, so hopefully that'll work for you.

@Phil Libin (#18) you didn't comment on my post #10
any reason for that?

Please add ability to make/edit to-dos on the iPhone!

Wow. I've never seen a company CEO show up in a review thread like this and actually deal with the real questions. I expect CEOs to be raving fans of their own products - they wouldn't be good leaders of that company if they weren't, so I can forgive a bit of RDF in the answers, but I really appreciate at least having the sense that someone in leadership is listening.

Feels like another reason for me to trust Evernote and continue with the product. Thanks for showing up.

some harsh comments for evernote.

Very interesting comments on this thread. I thought I'd address a few directly and clear up a couple of misconceptions:

@LD (#1), We have some sharing functionality in Evernote now, but it's more of a first-step than a full-featured social platform. Most of our users use Evernote to store their private notes, thought and memories. We'll be adding more sharing and collaboration functionality this year.

@jacoch (#2) Our Windows client has gone through a difficult process to get from being a local-only-Windows-notetaking-shareware (version 2.x) to a full-fledged Evernote client. The current Windows beta version (3.5) is finally at a state where we can use it as a stable development platform for the future. From now on, Windows upgrades will feel a lot more like Mac upgrades have always felt; rapid incremental improvements without major conceptual changes.

@S?io Garcez (#3) You don't need a paid account to use private sharing. You only need a paid account if you want to give your private-shared friends modify privileges to your notebooks. Native client access to shared notes is on the roadmap. We absolutely have no idea what users are storing in their private notes. We do not look.

@Klaus (#4) Thanks! The iPhone app is improving all the time and is used millions of times every month. Get in touch with support and see if they can help with any particular problems.

@jdavila (#5) Our long-term retention is actually great. See my previously posted comment.

@Sutter (#8) Try it with a new version. It's many times faster.

@spk (#9) Evernote absolutely, in no way, locks your data into any proprietary format. You can export it as HTML or as a fully-documented XML file which preserves all the structure. There's also full AppleScript support and a full API that lets you freely put data into and out of the service. It's even stored in human-readable format right on your Mac. Data portability is a core component of our architecture. We wan't you to stay with Evernote forever, because you know that you can leave anytime you want.

@ruindpzzle (#11) I love LiveScribe. We'll talk to them.

@PZ (#12) Try the new Windows beta (3.5) - It's a from-the-ground-up rewrite to make it much more like the Mac client.

@bloodthirstyrobot (#13) Awesome name. You can use Evernote forever without paying. There will always be a free version. You can switch from free to premium and back to free at any time and not lose any notes. You can export data at any time in a choice of open formats (see above).

@books (#14) Improved text editing is at the top of our engineering list. It's become a lot better in the past two months and will continue to improve quickly.

@Paul (#15) Thanks! Would love to talk to you about specific iPhone issues.

@Sergey P. (#16) You can organize stuff in Evernote using notebooks and tags. About half of our users seem to do that and the other half just pile everything in and find it later.

That was fun. Thanks all for the comments.

Phil Libin
CEO, Evernote