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 32 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
Source code will become irrelevant as AI prompts replace programming, predicts Simionato
“But I think the code will become irrelevant, but I'm biased. I'm a PM. So I care about the prompt and the result. But I think that ultimately what you want to do is to deliver a great UX by giving the right commands.”
Neuralink will transform the world more than AI over 50 years
“I think Neuralink is the product, like the thing that can change the world the most in 50 years, including AI, in my opinion. So I know people love AI, I love AI, I use it every day, but I think that ultimately the way you perceive reality and the way it chang…”
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 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 …”
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.”
Mature apps should aggressively monetize existing users, while growing apps prioritize virality
“It has been the case often where we've made the paywall more visible than in the past, just because acquiring products that have already grown and that already have a large user base, then you have more to unlock by monetizing people who are already there. Ins…”
Bending Spoons monetizes WeTransfer by paywalling expired file recovery
“On WeTransfer, we built a feature that allows you to recover expired transfers, which wasn't available before. We noticed that many people were hitting this page where basically would tell you the transfer has expired. You cannot download anymore because of co…”
Simionato: Deceptive price hike messaging signals product value insecurity
“If you're trying to like shy away and like, should we like use bullshit language and not really tell people that we are increasing their prices? That's a bad move, and I wouldn't, it means that you're not confident that your product is delivering value to peop…”
Product designers will abandon static pixels to design directly in code
“I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things.”
Simionato: Products for millions of users require polish over speed
“Speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're probing the area around you, but then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that, that millions of people use. You cannot half ass an experience.”
Subscription models fail for mobile games due to long engagement lifespans
“The lifespan of that experience is much longer in time, and so it doesn't make sense to pay a subscription for something that, that gives you that much runway.”
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.”
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…”
Ideal PM candidates are former entrepreneurs or deep analysts, says Simionato
“I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep, thoughtful analysis over how something works at Mc…”
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: Fitness Apps Suffer Poor Retention Due to Motivation Friction
“And one of the things that we noticed is that 30 Day Fitness is a good product because people want it, but it's not great at retaining people, meaning that after a while people lose the motivation that they need To show up every day, you know, when you're trai…”
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: Subscriber retention is Evernote's single most important metric
“Retention. Subscriber retention is the most important thing on Evernote.”
Simionato defines retention as the percentage of life spent using a product
“The way I think about retention is it's the percentage of your life that you choose to spend together with a product, right?”
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: Mature software products should focus on retaining existing users
“If you're already have an existing customer base, I think your number one job is just to make sure that they love being on that product. Unless you have some crazy insight for, by doing this, I could 10 X my user base. It's very hard. It's very rare. I think y…”
Simionato: AI tools will enable product teams to test 3-5x more ideas
“So today we have a backlog of a hundred ideas and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months. You know, I think that we'll reach a point where we can actually try 2030, 40, 50. Both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work t…”
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…”
Bending Spoons spent up to $7M licensing games for failed platform Playond
“We spent, I think like five or seven million dollars on, on licensing and it eventually didn't work.”
Simionato: Bending Spoons currently avoids launching new in-house products
“No, we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that we wouldn't, but no, it's been a while since last time we …”
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.”
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: AI accelerates prototyping, but core product prioritization remains essential
“I think with AI you can build prototypes faster and so that allows you to test easily, which is something you couldn't do in the past, but the underlying principle of you need to focus on what matters is still very true today.”
Bending Spoons' legacy app 30 Day Fitness still generates millions annually
“I'm not sure what it makes today. I think it's still in the several millions a year.”
Bending Spoons' HQ Trivia clone reached 2 million registered users in Italy
“We, the two million registered users in Italy Only. Italy is, is sixty million people in total. So one in 30 people used to play that game.”