The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evernote's 2023 price hike caused its largest subscription churn event
“The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed, and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless.”
Evernote's headcount dropped from hundreds to under 100 after Bending Spoons acquisition
“Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than a hundred.”
Evernote cannot compete with free Apple Notes for casual users, says Simionato
“They wouldn't pay because they are casual, and so they wouldn't invest much on a product that just gives them, like, basic functionality. They have loads of competing products that they can choose from. Apple Notes, Google Keep, and stuff like that, and so it …”
White-Sullivan: Evernote is a terrible tool for research and organizing ideas
“Evernote is a terrible second brain and just not a good place for organizing your ideas or building up a repository of research.”
Lemkin: Bending Spoons raised Evernote's average subscription price from $75 to $250
“If they can do what they did with Evernote, which is raise the pricing from 75 to 250 dollars a year on average, right?”
Lemkin: Bending Spoons reaccelerated Evernote growth with 20% of staff
“Evernote reaccelerate, Evernote was dead and they reaccelerated the growth of Evernote, right? With a fifth of the employees.”
Simionato: European and Silicon Valley software teams exhibit identical work cultures
“Honestly, I don't see that, that big of a difference. No. It's not like I spot a trend in how, I don't know, the WeTransfer team versus the Evernote team, just to name two that I worked very closely with. WeTransfer was based mostly in Amsterdam, some people i…”
Evernote now monetizes based on content creation volume, not feature gates
“Instead we monetize based on Content. So based on how much you have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more. If you don't create much, then you can use it for free.”
Ferrari claims Evernote usage equals or exceeds that of cooler apps
“Sometimes people have characterized Evernote as you said, kind of on a decline, and it can be true in some ways, but it's still as used or more used than a lot other Brands that people think are more successful or cooler.”
White-Sullivan: Evernote's file-and-folder architecture creates unnecessary friction
“Evernote's not built the way your brain is, and a lot of the friction that you have with reusing thoughts in Evernote is Incidental complexity, because they follow this files and folder metaphor from an archaic time”
Stebbings: Bending Spoons filing US IPO at $20B valuation
“Evernote, Vimeo, WeTransfer, AOL, Eventbrite, a very massively executed roll-up strategy, a 1,000,000,003 in revenue, and they're filing to go public at twenty billion dollars on in the US from Italy.”
Validate features by asking users for past use cases, not future intent
“The things that people actually do are different from the things that they say, and so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it, you should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would ha…”
Simionato: Subscriber retention is Evernote's single most important metric
“Retention. Subscriber retention is the most important thing on Evernote.”
Bending Spoons will announce Evernote V-Eleven with new AI features next week
“Next week, we are announcing Evernote V-Eleven, and it's going to be a significant change compared to what Evernote is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years, but it's also containing three advanced AI feature…”
Simionato: WeTransfer's overall product complexity equals one Evernote feature
“WeTransfer, in terms of complexity, could be one feature of Evernote, and Evernote has, like, literally hundreds of features.”
Simionato: Bending Spoons builds Evernote features for utility, not ROI
“Many of the things that we do on Evernote are not because we want to increase revenue, but it's because we want to make the product more useful. And in a very unquantifiable way, we just trust that by making the product more useful, people will keep choosing t…”
Simionato: Exploratory AI product features cannot be forecasted with upfront business cases
“When you build instead an exploratory AI feature on Evernote, you don't have a business case because you don't know how many people will use it. You can guess, but it's different.”
Simionato: Bending Spoons avoids marketing push notifications on Evernote
“So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events, but we don't like use them as a marketing strategy just because we think it would decrease the user experience.”
Bending Spoons acquires growing, flat, or declining assets, not just distressed
“By the way, we don't acquire I don't necessarily acquire distressed assets. I know that people, some people have characterized it that way after Evernote, because Evernote, some people thought would qualify as such, but we have acquired a lot of products that …”
Bending Spoons acquired Evernote to optimize its product, monetization, and costs
“We thought we could improve the product. Monetize it more efficiently and also run the company more efficiently in terms of costs. So we felt all three levers were offered a little bit of space for improvement.”
Phil Libin replaced himself as Evernote CEO at 400 employees
“And I think the kind of towards the end of my stay at Evernote, you know, I basically decided that I needed to replace myself once we gotten, you know, it's about 400 people that just felt like I just wasn't the problems that needed to be solved at a medium si…”
Evernote and LinkedIn succeeded in China by granting local leaders autonomy
“For a long time now, people have pointed to Evernote and LinkedIn as being decent deployment that happened in China. And both of those cases, they hired very local sort of general managers or heads of China. It gave them the freedom to build their own teams, l…”
Evernote reached 220 million users while running on a shoestring budget
“You know, we have two hundred and twenty million users and we have a very like shoestring budgets.”
Scale hiring requires selecting for specific strengths over the absence of weakness
“Being really intentional about the one or two, sometimes three areas that are required for any role to really be world-class in hiring for the presence of those two or three things, as opposed to the absence of weakness early in a startup's history, you really…”
Phil Libin almost entirely stopped using email as Evernote CEO
“I'd kind of stopped sitting and I stopped doing email almost entirely. Like for the past few years of my life, like I had very, very slight contact with email”
Bending Spoons made Evernote offline note access free for all users
“Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature and now it's free.”
Bending Spoons funded all pre-Evernote acquisitions exclusively with earnings and debt
“Up until Evernote included, which is a year ago, I can, on first approximation, I can say that All of what we have done through our own earnings and debt.”
Evernote holds monthly product health meetings to decide what to kill
“We have a monthly product health meeting, and we talk about how products are doing in a very rigorous way, but we also talk about Things that maybe we should consider to stop doing.”
Evernote has users in every country, including the Vatican
“This is a company that literally exists in every country in the world, including regions like the Vatican.”
Evernote will expand its focus to team productivity software
“We've done great things throughout our relatively short history to unlock and become a superpower for individuals, and we look forward to doing the same thing for teams and really helping them be much, much, much more successful and productive and organized th…”