Peak Evernote was roughly a decade ago. Since then, the product has often felt stagnant (or worse), the company churned through executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. Not gone, not even forgotten, just sort of... there. For the third and final installment in our series about productivity and digital life, we sit down with Federico Simionato, the Evernote product lead at Bending Spoons. We talk about the acquisition process, how he perceives Evernote in today’s landscape, what it took to start shipping new stuff again, why Bending Spoons changed the subscription price, and much more.
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TechTranscript
00:00Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast
00:05of Tools for Thought.
00:06That's another one of those productivity nerd terms,
00:09by the way, and if you've never heard it before,
00:11you're probably better off.
00:13I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the third episode
00:16in our three-part series all about productivity.
00:19Sorry it's coming a couple of weeks late.
00:20Won't happen again.
00:22We've been looking into how people work in this series,
00:25and how we should work, and really not even just work.
00:29We're just trying to find ways to be more functional,
00:33sane, useful people in our digital lives.
00:36The more we do this, the more I'm hating
00:38the term productivity, but it's kind of the best way
00:40we have to talk about this.
00:42For this last episode, we're gonna talk about
00:44one of the all-time iconic productivity apps, Evernote.
00:48My guest today is Federico Simeonato,
00:50who now leads work on Evernote
00:52for a company called Bending Spoons.
00:54But before we get into all of that,
00:56let me just quickly give you the brief Evernote story.
01:00Evernote has been around for more than two decades,
01:02but I think most people probably heard of it around 2008,
01:06when the app launched in the very first version
01:09of Apple's iPhone app store.
01:11That was a huge deal.
01:12Being in the store at the beginning was a big win
01:15for basically every app that was in there.
01:17So Evernote blew up, and it became one of the biggest
01:20productivity apps on the planet.
01:22The biggest number I've seen was that in 2014,
01:25there were 100 million people using Evernote.
01:28I was one of them, by the way, and I loved Evernote.
01:32Many, many years ago, back when I was in college,
01:34I actually did some freelance work for the company,
01:36and I was a devoted user of Evernote for years.
01:40It was fast, it was cross-platform,
01:42back when that was kind of a rare thing to be.
01:44It had a really great web clipper
01:46that made it easy to get stuff into the app.
01:48You could email into it.
01:49It was just great.
01:50It was like a digital filing cabinet.
01:52It just had all my stuff.
01:53I loved it very much.
01:55But Evernote never quite figured out how to keep going
01:59or where to go next.
02:01When it was really popular, around that same time,
02:04it had this weird diversion into being a lifestyle company,
02:08selling socks and notebooks and all kinds of stuff.
02:10It was like Evernote wanted to be Nike for nerds.
02:13It was very strange.
02:15The company also started making other apps,
02:17like a scanner app and the image editing app, Skitch,
02:20and generally, it just seemed like it kind of lost track
02:23of what it was actually for.
02:25Meanwhile, the app got bloated and slow.
02:27The company tried to kind of pivot
02:29to being a B2B app for people at work.
02:33Multiple CEOs came in and tried to reboot the whole thing,
02:36but never quite figured it out.
02:37And Evernote just seemed like it was slowly dying.
02:40One of those apps that's still around,
02:43but stops getting better and just kind of slowly gets worse
02:46forever and ever and ever.
02:48Then, in late 2022, Evernote was acquired by Bending Spoons,
02:51which seemed odd.
02:53Bending Spoons is a kind of mix of tech incubator
02:57and private equity company.
02:59Basically, it buys products, integrates them all together,
03:02and tries to find ways to do things more efficiently.
03:05Basically, by having them all in one company,
03:08you can share some resources, and in theory,
03:11then devote more resources just to the products.
03:14Anyway, a few months after the acquisition,
03:16Bending Spoons announced that it was laying off
03:17most of Evernote's staff and moving most
03:20of the company's operations to Europe,
03:22which is where Bending Spoons is based.
03:24This is a pattern for Bending Spoons.
03:25It does this with a lot of companies it buys.
03:27But at this point, I thought Evernote was dead for sure.
03:30I think most people did.
03:32But that's not actually what happened.
03:34Evernote eventually started shipping new stuff.
03:36It seems to have a new identity about what it was
03:39and what it was for.
03:40And for the first time, frankly, in a really long time,
03:43the product started getting better.
03:45It also got a lot more expensive,
03:47which made a lot of people really, really, really mad.
03:50But we're going to get to that in a minute.
03:52To start with Federico, we just went back to the beginning.
03:55He was an Evernote user himself for years,
03:57and said he was psyched to have the company
03:59on board at Bending Spoons.
04:00It sounds to me like Bending Spoons was enticed
04:03by the combo of big brand, really popular app,
04:07just something in need of some serious product love.
04:11And as soon as they got the deal done,
04:12Federico and his team went to work.
04:15I think the first 12 months, maybe like 11 months,
04:19were just about technology.
04:21Just about learning how the backend worked,
04:24or the client architecture worked,
04:26and trying to, not rebuild it,
04:29because we couldn't rebuild Evernote.
04:32It's 20 years of software, we couldn't rebuild it all,
04:34but trying to identify the most critical pieces
04:37and try to rewrite those.
04:38And this is true of almost any app that age, right?
04:41I feel like this is a story you hear,
04:43it's just what's going to happen.
04:44If you're building a thing in 2004,
04:46and then 2007, and then 2009,
04:48like the world changes every 18 months,
04:51and it's very hard to keep up.
04:53And so I feel like anything of that kind of age
04:56is going to have these sorts of problems.
04:58Yeah, definitely.
04:59Even something that you, right now,
05:00probably in like 10 years,
05:02people are going to look at the code and say,
05:03what were they thinking, you know?
05:06And it's fair, it's fine.
05:08But it was super complex.
05:09And so one of the first things we did when we arrived
05:12was to ship this huge project
05:15that the team already started working on,
05:17which was called RT, like real-time editing.
05:19And it was about synchronizing the note content,
05:23so the content of a single note,
05:24instantaneously between devices,
05:26both your other devices and devices of people
05:29that were also in the same note with you.
05:31And you can see how this is like a completely different thing
05:35than what Evernote used to be.
05:37Or you can imagine how the way the note editor was built
05:42needed to change in order to do this, to achieve this.
05:45And so I don't know how many months
05:47and tens of people went into making it a reality,
05:50but we were able to ship it in the first few months.
05:52And today we just launched Rent,
05:54which is the other thing which we worked on since.
05:58So after releasing RT,
05:59which is about synchronizing the note content,
06:01we started working on Rent,
06:03which is a project to synchronize the metadata.
06:06So the note list, the, I don't know,
06:08even just the title, the snippet, the preview,
06:11the time it was last edited, et cetera.
06:14Not because I want to talk about that necessarily,
06:16but because you see how we started working on it after RT
06:20and now we're done after more than a year.
06:23So yeah, that's the reason.
06:25And the decision behind it is just,
06:28can we improve it in a way that it won't be a problem?
06:32Not anymore necessarily, like forever,
06:34but it's something that we can actually touch
06:37and we feel like we own.
06:39And I would assume there's also a part of that process
06:42where you have to say like, okay,
06:43it's not whatever 2006 when Evernote first came out.
06:48I think it was around then, somewhere in there.
06:49The landscape has changed
06:51and it's a really different kind of world to be in.
06:54And you're in a position of saying not,
06:55we want to take this kind of old crusty app
06:59and like bleed it for cash until it dies.
07:02You're saying we want to like,
07:03we want to renovate this thing
07:04and make it new and modern and forward-looking.
07:06Which I would think also means
07:07you have to kind of sit down and say,
07:09what is the job of an app like Evernote now
07:12as opposed to what it was then?
07:14And I'm curious, especially for you,
07:15as somebody who had been using the app for a long time,
07:18what is that process like?
07:19Like what were you talking about
07:21when you were thinking about like,
07:22okay, what is the next thing for Evernote to be?
07:24Yeah, so there's a bunch of different things
07:26in that question.
07:27So the first one is, what does Evernote do?
07:31What I understood by talking to customers
07:33is that they see Evernote as a tool
07:35for individual note-taking.
07:37That's the core of what it does.
07:40So that people can organize their system.
07:41There's different degrees of how organized you can be,
07:43but like generally people who use such a software
07:46tend to be fairly organized
07:48and tend to have like a system of some sort.
07:51And it's also interesting to see,
07:54to think about what it doesn't necessarily need to do
07:56for the customers that are still like,
07:58the millions of customers that still use Evernote every week.
08:01For instance, it doesn't do a lot of like,
08:04project management,
08:05especially collaborative project management.
08:07They don't care about using Evernote for that.
08:09And so that's one part,
08:11which already tells you what Evernote
08:12will not necessarily try to be in the future.
08:15The other thing is where we think Evernote
08:18is kind of failing at being the best
08:21and where we think there is space
08:23and even just like market need
08:25and customer necessity for such a tool.
08:28And I think that collaboration,
08:30even though people will still see Evernote
08:31as an individual note-taking tool first,
08:34I still think that people would like
08:36for Evernote to be better at like note-sharing,
08:40collaborating real time with people and stuff like that.
08:42And so I'm excited to be working on that.
08:45Is it risky in that process
08:46to spend most of your time talking to people
08:48who have been using Evernote?
08:51Like what's the mix between thinking about the people
08:53who are part of the product
08:55and thinking about people who,
08:57for one reason or another have not used it,
08:59but you'd like to?
09:00Like who do you think about in those early days?
09:02Well, we think mostly about existing customers.
09:06That's our main focus, just because there are so many.
09:10And so we definitely don't want to piss them off.
09:13Then if we can add something to Evernote
09:15that makes it better for both them and new customers,
09:18that's great.
09:19But yeah, I don't think we will want to like
09:22make Evernote worse for people who are there
09:24in the hope that we can add some use case
09:27that maybe is enticing to somebody else.
09:30That's a tricky balance though,
09:31because I think about it,
09:32like we've had Microsoft executives tell us before
09:35that one of the hard things about building for Word
09:38or Excel is that if you remove a feature
09:41that 1% of people use,
09:43that's still 10 million people who use it
09:44and love it and rely on it for work.
09:46And it's the most important thing in their lives.
09:48And Evernote, I think, and really any tool like it,
09:53people are like pouring their most important stuff into it.
09:56And so if you mess with it,
09:57even in the service of making it ostensibly better,
10:02you're going to screw up some percentage
10:03of people's workflows and lives.
10:05And there's nothing you can do that will satisfy everybody.
10:09I definitely felt the responsibility initially.
10:11Like I saw that people understandably like empathize
10:14with them when somebody acquires the tool
10:17that you use like multiple hours per day,
10:19every day in a week.
10:21I mean, you're kind of in a scary situation, you know?
10:25So I definitely empathize with them.
10:27When we first joined, when we first arrived,
10:29some people in the team I think told me something like,
10:32Evernote has a 5% problem,
10:34which like in a very simplified way means
10:37that every feature is used at least by 5% of the people.
10:41It's not like technically true,
10:42but like it lets you understand how complex it is
10:45to think about Evernote with the thousand things it can do,
10:48while everything that it does is used
10:52by a non-negligible amount of people.
10:54So do you then have to just get to the point
10:56where you're comfortable pissing off 5% of users at a time
11:00because it's kind of inevitable?
11:01I mean, you try not to.
11:02So fortunately, it wasn't 5%.
11:05There were some things that were used
11:06by fewer than 5% of people.
11:08So we were able to do some simplification.
11:11So for instance, we removed the work chat,
11:14which was like a piece of Evernote that wasn't very used.
11:17It wasn't also particularly powerful.
11:19So understandably, people use something else for it.
11:21And it allowed us to simplify some part of the product.
11:24But yeah, it's not like you can come and just say,
11:26okay, I'll remove everything except for that thing
11:29because that thing is the only thing people care about.
11:31No, no, that's not possible.
11:33I mean, and even if you take a button that's over here
11:34and you move it to over there,
11:365% of people are going to absolutely lose their minds.
11:39So the individual note-taking thing,
11:41I think is really interesting
11:42because I've talked to a lot of folks over the years
11:45who build a thing that is for something
11:48like individual note-taking,
11:50or I have this deep obsession with to-do lists,
11:52or to-do lists, or calendar apps, or whatever.
11:55All of these kind of productivity tools
11:56start by being for people.
11:59And then you realize where actually the money is
12:01is by selling to teams.
12:03And so they build the collaboration environments
12:05and you build out all the business tools.
12:07And all of a sudden you've changed the app entirely
12:10into something that is basically like a thing
12:13meant for lots of people to use at once,
12:15which becomes sort of the lowest common denominator
12:16kind of app and causes, it just changes, right?
12:20Like I think Notion is my favorite example, right?
12:22Like Notion is a very good app that is completely different
12:25now that they mostly sell to companies
12:27than it was when they were mostly focused
12:28on individual users.
12:29Not necessarily right or wrong,
12:30they make a lot more money because they sell to companies.
12:33But this idea of individual note-taking,
12:35both as a product and as a business,
12:38I think there are a lot of people out there
12:40who are not convinced that's a thing
12:42with a big enough market to be worth it.
12:45Are you sure that it is?
12:47Well, the thing is, like,
12:49if you take into account what customers tell you,
12:53you'll kind of find the answer.
12:55So if you tell people,
12:56yeah, I'm going to turn Evernote into a Teams product.
13:01Which is kind of what Evernote tried to do, right?
13:03At some point, yes.
13:04There was a period of time,
13:05like the work chat thing you're talking about,
13:06there was a minute where Evernote was like,
13:08we are going to be a business tool.
13:09Yes, yes.
13:10I think they were seeing where the market was going
13:13and they wanted to follow that,
13:14but still they had this huge use case
13:18of individual note-taking that they couldn't ignore,
13:20and so they tried to do kind of both things.
13:22So I don't have like a perfect plan
13:26for how to achieve that.
13:27My north star is you talk to customers,
13:31they tell you, I want this.
13:33You talk to enough customers and you notice
13:36if something that you're planning on building
13:38goes against that direction.
13:39So I mentioned collaboration earlier
13:41because it's something that we would like to work on,
13:43but it doesn't mean like turning Evernote
13:45into a collaboration-only tool, for instance,
13:48or like a collaboration-first tool.
13:50You still need to keep into account
13:53what current people using Evernote think Evernote should do
13:56and try to make it good for that use case first.
13:58And then if you want, you can add some of that.
14:00And the cool thing is that people are asking for that.
14:02It's not something that I came up with
14:04or we came up with at some point and said,
14:06yeah, it would be cool if Evernote was more collaborative
14:08and we'll do it against what people want.
14:11It's more like we sit down,
14:13we have countless conversations every week with customers
14:16and they tell us, yeah, but like sharing notes,
14:18sharing notebooks is a pain.
14:21I wish it worked.
14:23Okay, let's go with it.
14:24Yeah, what else were people asking you for?
14:26Because I feel like there's a certain set
14:27of kind of big picture things
14:30that people build for stuff like this.
14:31Like collaboration is one of them.
14:32And I can't imagine you're sitting with a lot of people
14:34who are like, I'd like for there
14:35to be a real-time collaborative editor.
14:36But it makes sense that people were like,
14:38it's annoying that I can't share notes with my partner.
14:40Like simple use case, that totally works.
14:43What else on those levels
14:45were people telling you about at the beginning?
14:47So we have this track, which is called Quality of Life,
14:51that goes a bit against
14:52what usually product management should be about,
14:55which is classically product management
14:57should be about like identifying a metric
14:58and trying to optimize for that metric
15:00and building something to make that metric work better.
15:04Like the app is faster or people open it
15:07X times a day or whatever, okay.
15:08Exactly, yes.
15:10Instead, this track, this Quality of Life track
15:12goes in the direction where we talk
15:14to as many customers as we can,
15:16either like in conversations that we have
15:18on Google Meet every week or through surveys.
15:21And we just try to quantify,
15:24first identify what they want,
15:25and then to quantify how many of them want what.
15:29And so we just rank a list of things that people want
15:32and we try to build them.
15:33Of course, if something takes like six months,
15:34maybe we will ignore it for the time being,
15:36but we try to make it as ranked as possible.
15:41And so good examples of this are collapsible sections.
15:44People were saying, yeah, how can it be
15:46that after 20 years,
15:48Evernote still doesn't have collapsible sections?
15:49Okay, wait, I want to get to the rest of this,
15:51but can we actually pause on this for a second?
15:52Because I am one of those people.
15:54And like the way I work generally is I like,
15:57I think in outlines.
15:58So I do a lot of bullets and I have very long lists.
16:00And being able to collapse individual parts of those lists
16:03is just most of what I need from a note.
16:05And I have heard sort of vaguely over the years,
16:07a lot of people say,
16:09that is a strangely difficult thing to build.
16:11Can you explain to me why that's so hard?
16:12Why can't I have it?
16:14Well, so I don't know specifically how we implemented it,
16:20but the thing is that the note,
16:22you can imagine the note as a kind of a webpage.
16:24And so everything that kind of edits some part
16:28of that webpage is kind of tricky to do,
16:31especially when you leave the rest untouched.
16:34And so I think that might be what they were referring to,
16:36but I don't think it was particularly difficult to build.
16:40I think it was reasonably normal in terms of difficulty.
16:44Okay, so fascinating that that's the first one
16:48that you think of, right?
16:48It might not have been the top of the list,
16:49but like, it's a good example of,
16:51I think there are a lot of like big kind of whiz bang features
16:56that people are talking about.
16:57And we're going to talk about AI in a minute,
16:58like the whiz bangiest feature of all right now.
17:01But my suspicion when I asked you that question
17:05was that most of what people wanted from you
17:07was going to be things
17:08about the size of collapsible sections.
17:10What else is on that list?
17:12Well, slash comments was also a big one.
17:14So like you can do on Slack,
17:16you hit slash and then you type a comment.
17:18So on Slack, you do it like-
17:19It's fascinating that that's become
17:20like a universal thing now.
17:21People understand slash commands now.
17:22It's really great.
17:23Yeah, yeah, it's like, I don't know,
17:25it's like right click, you know?
17:26It's something that you do
17:29no matter the operating system you're in, you know?
17:31And so that's also something that people were asking.
17:34It's a bit more of a niche feature.
17:35Collapsible section, I just bring it up
17:37because it's the obvious example
17:39of quality of life feature that everybody wanted.
17:41But slash comments was also a big one.
17:44Let me think.
17:45Well, image alignment is also like a classic, you know?
17:48Like you could not align an image in the center or right.
17:52You could only have it on the left and you cannot edit it.
17:54So yeah, we built it.
17:55Another one that seems to mystify
17:57every document editor everywhere.
17:59Like why can't I put my photo where I would like it to be?
18:02Shockingly difficult text editing problem.
18:05I think there are memes about Microsoft Word
18:07like messing the whole layout of the document.
18:10All right, we got to take a break.
18:11But when we come back, I want to talk about
18:13what it means to build a productivity tool in 2024
18:16instead of doing it in 2014 or 2004
18:19when Evernote was starting out.
18:21We'll get to all that.
18:29All right, we're back.
18:30Let's get back into my conversation
18:31with Federico Simonato from Evernote.
18:33One of the things you really pushed on
18:36when you took over Evernote
18:37was to integrate things like tasks and calendar.
18:41And it feels much less to me
18:43like a sort of traditional notepad
18:47and more like a sort of stuff going on dashboard.
18:51I don't know if you have a better term for it than that.
18:53But like, what is your sense of what people want
18:57from a note-taking system now
18:59as opposed to what they might have wanted a long time ago?
19:01What was it that pushed you to pull all that stuff in?
19:03That's a good question.
19:04So most of it comes down to what people were asking for.
19:09And especially between advanced users,
19:14there was this need of having a better task manager.
19:17Being Evernote individual,
19:18most people who use Evernote
19:20either use it for their own organization
19:24and not for a team organization,
19:26or they use it for very small projects
19:29or like projects with few people involved.
19:32And so we were asking people,
19:33what would you like us to do?
19:35And tasks was a big part of what they were asking for.
19:39Why do you think that is?
19:40I think it's because they were already there.
19:44So I think that previous teams in the past
19:46built Evernote tasks.
19:48And given that Evernote is not a task management tool,
19:51they didn't give it like a lot of attention.
19:54And so I think that the reason why people
19:56were asking for better tasks
19:57was because they were already there.
19:59I think that maybe tasks weren't there in the first place.
20:02Maybe people wouldn't have asked for it,
20:04but I'm not sure.
20:06Okay, you've just raised the philosophical question
20:08about productivity tools
20:09that is my favorite thing to talk about.
20:11So I think the two schools of thought
20:14as people are sitting there telling you
20:15we want tasks inside of Evernote.
20:17One is to say, people are inside of our app,
20:20there's lots of information inside of our app,
20:21we should give people more stuff to do, right?
20:24Like that makes sense.
20:25Build in to-do list, build in calendar,
20:28you'll eventually end up making
20:29like an email app inside of there.
20:31You'll do work chat again, right?
20:33Like you can go down this road of,
20:35this is an app full of your stuff,
20:37we should do more with it.
20:38And you eventually just recreate Microsoft Office, right?
20:41Like that is one path.
20:42The other path is to say,
20:44we are going to avoid the kind of feature creep,
20:48cruftiness that has plagued Evernote
20:50and other apps in the past.
20:51We're going to slim it down.
20:53That actually what this app needs
20:54is to be more opinionated and simple.
20:56And if you want a task manager, awesome.
20:58There's a bunch of sick ones over here,
21:01one swipe or click away.
21:04And I actually have an opinion on which of those
21:08I think is the better answer.
21:10But I'm curious how you reason out
21:12between saying to people,
21:14I think one totally valid answer would be to say,
21:17Evernote is not a task management app.
21:19That's not what we're here for.
21:20If you want to write a checklist, we've got you,
21:21we're good at that.
21:22But if you are like a person who wants to do
21:24like capital T tasks,
21:26that's just not what Evernote is for.
21:27I feel like that would have been a perfectly valid answer,
21:29even if it made some people mad.
21:31Why did you decide to go the other way?
21:33Man, that's such a hard question.
21:34I'm not sure I can answer that.
21:36So I can give you a few thoughts.
21:38The first one is,
21:39it's the age old question of bundling and unbundling.
21:42Totally.
21:44Software history is full of people
21:46like bundling and unbundling products
21:47and they always like try to integrate more stuff
21:51and then somebody new arises from like a little startup
21:55because they just focused on that thing and they did well.
21:58So I think it's an age old question.
22:00And I think that on Evernote,
22:03on one hand, you want to do what people want to have.
22:06So you want to build what people need.
22:08And if it's tasks, why not?
22:10Like, you know, why collapsible sections?
22:12Yes.
22:13And tasks, not.
22:13So that's one way to look at it.
22:16The other way to look at it is, as you said,
22:19being opinionated.
22:20And I think that there is a,
22:22I don't know if I'm being too like democratic
22:25or if I'm, I don't want to choose.
22:27But-
22:28We're about to talk about that.
22:29That's my next question.
22:30I think that the best way to solve it
22:32is through customization.
22:33Okay.
22:34So that you don't want to use tasks,
22:36you just like hide that part.
22:38Or you don't want to use calendar,
22:41you can just not use it.
22:42And hopefully have some tools to like,
22:45make sure that the UI doesn't get too messy for you.
22:48And I think that that might be the answer,
22:50but I'm not sure yet.
22:51Yeah, we're looking into it.
22:52I buy that theory pretty much entirely.
22:56Like, I think that's right.
22:57And I actually think with a lot of things,
22:59giving people tools to set something up for themselves
23:03is really cool and really powerful.
23:05I also think it leads to trouble
23:07because it's just really hard to do that
23:10in a way that is good and helpful.
23:12And also most people don't touch the defaults.
23:15And so whatever weirdness is on by default,
23:18they're going to get regardless.
23:20But I also think like realistically,
23:22your team is only so big.
23:24You only have so many things to do.
23:26Everything you add is going to make the app bigger.
23:29It's going to make it more complicated.
23:31It's going to make it slower.
23:33And so I think the question of,
23:35especially I'm just like this thing
23:37where you're coming from this long history of Evernote,
23:39where it kind of lost its way by trying to do too much,
23:42back to you don't want to try to do too much.
23:45But like one of my favorite things to do
23:47is go into the discords of productivity apps,
23:50because I'm a loser, doesn't have any friends,
23:53and just watch what people ask for.
23:55And everybody asks for everything all the time, right?
23:57And everybody has the one teeny tiny thing
24:00that works for their usage specifically.
24:02And if you give it to them,
24:03they'll love your app forever and ever.
24:04But for every person on planet Earth,
24:06that thing is different.
24:08And I actually admire the impulse
24:10to give all those people what they want,
24:11which you can't, you'll ruin your app, right?
24:13And I think we've seen what happens when you try.
24:16So the strategy of sort of being democratic
24:20and giving people what they want
24:21makes a lot of sense to me.
24:22But I do wonder,
24:23do you have to have boundaries in your head of,
24:26like if enough people asked you
24:27to make an email client inside of Evernote,
24:28would you make an email client inside of Evernote?
24:30It depends on how many they are.
24:31And it depends on how good the UX
24:33that we can prototype is.
24:34So tell me what the boundaries are then.
24:36I think that the boundaries
24:38are always about what is Evernote.
24:42And in order to answer that,
24:43you can just look at how many people use what
24:44inside Evernote.
24:45So of course, Evernote being what it is,
24:47the note editor is the most used part,
24:50together with, I don't know,
24:51like lists somewhere in the app.
24:53So when we work on quality of life improvements,
24:56which is one of our biggest tracks,
24:58and on synchronization projects,
25:00which is also one of our biggest tracks,
25:03those are about note taking.
25:05And like to the core, I would say,
25:08I don't know, 80, 90% of the team
25:10is focused on the core note taking experience.
25:12And so if you look at what we released this year,
25:14so this year we had this idealistic goal
25:17of releasing 100 quality of life improvements.
25:21We shipped, I think, 60 or 65, I don't know.
25:24That's pretty good.
25:25For now.
25:26And it's late August, so that's pretty solid.
25:28I think we're kind of on track.
25:29I think Evernote is going to be fine
25:32as long as we are very intentional
25:35with the fact that Evernote focuses on note taking.
25:38I think as long as we recognize that
25:41and we work with that in mind,
25:42I think Evernote is going to be fine.
25:44Then if some people want to have
25:45a calendar client inside it, it's fine.
25:48But I don't think, I don't see a way for the team
25:52to be mostly focused on calendar going forward.
25:55Even though, yeah, I would like to improve it.
25:58When you say note taking, I'm curious,
25:59what's your sense of what that looks like
26:02for people in 2024?
26:04Because I look back to Evernote
26:06at the very beginning of the App Store, right?
26:08And its thing was like,
26:09it was very easy to put stuff into Evernote.
26:12And for years, the strangest thing
26:14about the productivity space to me
26:15was that nobody built a web clipper as good as Evernote's.
26:18That was just like, I have a thing
26:20and I need to get it into my notes app.
26:22Evernote has always been better at that than everybody.
26:25Still is, which is bizarre, all these years later.
26:29But my sense is, as we're in this space now
26:32where there's this renewed interest
26:34in second brand stuff,
26:36and everybody talks about Zettelkastens on the internet
26:38and personal knowledge management and all this stuff.
26:42And then with AI, there is this sort of renewed sense
26:45of like, here's how we organize our stuff
26:46and how we manage our digital lives.
26:48When you think about what note taking means,
26:51how sort of broad or narrow
26:53is your definition of that at this point?
26:55It's super broad.
26:59I think we talked to hundreds of customers in the last year.
27:04And I don't recall two people telling me
27:07that they follow exactly the same flow or system.
27:11Yeah, maybe some people mentioned, I don't know,
27:13some frameworks like Para, getting things done, et cetera.
27:16But then they always customize it
27:18because they have one slightly different thing
27:20that they need to do.
27:21And then there's people who handle everything
27:23like house related than Evernote, but also their work.
27:26People who are consultants,
27:27they have a bunch of projects, et cetera.
27:29And then people who are more or less interested
27:32in saving everything they do.
27:36And so, yeah, it's super broad.
27:38It's like, there is nobody who does it
27:41in the same exact way as somebody else does.
27:44And so for that reason, I think customization,
27:47again, is important, but also building the tools
27:49for them to do it is also important.
27:51So what are the buckets you think about
27:53when you think about how to do note taking really well?
27:56What does that require?
27:57Even at a higher level?
27:59I think it depends on what you do.
28:01So we kind of identified a few families of categories
28:06of ways you could do note taking.
28:08So for instance, there's a category
28:09that we call the archivers.
28:11And they are people who basically save everything
28:14inside Evernote.
28:15And they, as you mentioned, the web clipper,
28:18there are people who automatically forward
28:20every email they receive to Evernote.
28:24Every email, even newsletters and stuff.
28:27Every email, they have a filter in Gmail.
28:28So everything has a sale, it goes straight to Evernote.
28:30Yeah, absolutely.
28:31And so you see why there are some people who have like-
28:34That is my nightmare.
28:35100,000 notes on Evernote.
28:37So for them, you just need to build,
28:40just like as if it was easy,
28:41but you need to build a very good organization tool.
28:44Then there are some people who are writers.
28:46And they don't even write that many notes,
28:48but they write long notes and complex notes.
28:51And they want to have, they care a lot about the craft
28:54of how the note is structured and how it's written,
28:57what they can add to the note and different,
28:59like for instance, when we created the quote block,
29:02which is nothing like incredibly particular,
29:06it's in every piece of software that I know of,
29:08but it's basically a different way to look at
29:10a bunch of text, a block of text,
29:12and you can just see as if it was a quote.
29:15And these people went crazy for it,
29:16even though it's so simple,
29:17because they go crazy for how you can build a note.
29:20And then there are people who are particularly interested
29:23in personal knowledge management, as you said.
29:26And so they want to see Evernote as their one tool.
29:29And they would like to have their own life
29:31running on Evernote.
29:32So if Evernote did like, I don't know,
29:34something weird like banking, they would love it.
29:38They could just use Evernote for that.
29:39Of course, that's crazy.
29:40But so yeah, basically we try to look at the interception
29:44of all these categories.
29:45And we try to build the things that are as effective
29:48as possible for as many people
29:50in these categories as possible.
29:51And then if there's one of these groups
29:53that needs something specific to them,
29:56we'll still build it if it's important enough
29:58to their use case.
29:58Got it, okay.
30:00And how much do you think about the work
30:03of like doing some of that stuff for people
30:07versus sort of giving them a canvas
30:09to do it for themselves?
30:10And I think organization is one really interesting one,
30:12right, where one of the things that's happening
30:14in a lot of these tools is they're like,
30:15don't worry about organizing.
30:16We'll use AI to suggest tags,
30:19or we'll just magically do the search
30:22and all this stuff for you.
30:23And I think I sense this sort of schism
30:26in this space between people who are like,
30:27what I want is like a really fast, really nice,
30:29really pleasant tool that doesn't tell me how to use it
30:34that I can just use however I want.
30:36And then there's another set of people
30:38who are like, what I want to do is spend a lot less time
30:40thinking about my notes.
30:41I just want to dump every email I get into Evernote
30:45and have it make sense of all of those things for me.
30:47And I kind of feel like you can't be both of those things
30:50at the same time.
30:51Yeah, I don't think there is a way to build
30:54something that works in the perfect way for both.
30:58So I think that the perfect approach is to build both,
31:03kind of build a product that supports both use cases.
31:07So increasingly, there are people who just want
31:10to dump stuff into Evernote and then ask AI search
31:15to retrieve the information they want.
31:17So for instance, one of my favorite examples
31:19is one person, I think, uploaded the manual
31:24for their kitchen clock, I think, on Evernote.
31:28And then they wanted to know how to, I don't know,
31:30change from Celsius to Fahrenheit in the clock.
31:35And they just asked the AI search,
31:38and it just scanned the PDF and just told him,
31:41like, you should do this, this, and that,
31:43which was interesting.
31:44Of course, this is not useful to somebody
31:46who uses Evernote, not even to collect stuff,
31:50but to organize it in a way that mimics
31:54their mental map of how their content is organized.
31:58And so for them, it's much more important
32:00to build stuff like, I don't know, stocks for notebooks,
32:04for instance, or multiple levels of hierarchy
32:07and stuff like that.
32:07So you see how you need to build different things
32:10for different use cases.
32:11That first use case, the like,
32:15I wanna upload stuff to Evernote
32:17and have Evernote just kind of know it,
32:20is so new and so interesting to me.
32:22And I feel like in a certain way,
32:25it's like the obvious next step of this, right?
32:27Where instead of searching for a note,
32:30I should just be able to search for information
32:32that I need, and it doesn't really matter where it is.
32:35Like as a person who likes to organize stuff,
32:37that kind of makes me itchy,
32:38but I also understand why that's really valuable.
32:41Are we getting to that point?
32:43Like, is that a thing you're investing in a lot?
32:46Because that also causes some really interesting privacy
32:49and data security questions and changes,
32:50like the literal cost of running the service.
32:53Are you, is there gonna be more and more
32:55of that kind of put everything in
32:57and let the app make sense of all your information
33:00for you coming in Evernote?
33:02Yeah, it's something that's trending.
33:04So it's clearly something that people
33:06are starting to explore more,
33:08both because they are seeing how it could work,
33:11because maybe they are getting familiar
33:13with ChatGPT or other AI products,
33:15but also because I think that deep down,
33:18this is something that people always wanted.
33:19You know, you just want to talk to a computer
33:21and the computer just tells you what you want to know
33:23instead of like going through this level of emulation,
33:28which is like, I have to click on a mouse
33:29and then open a page,
33:30and then I read the information out of that.
33:32I just want to know that information, you know?
33:34My favorite example is always,
33:35I have a note with all of my account and loyalty numbers
33:40for different airlines and car rental places
33:42and stuff like that.
33:43And every time I do it, if I just search Delta,
33:46it brings up too many notes
33:47because it has everything with the word Delta in it.
33:49And so I have to remember like, okay,
33:51the thing is actually called
33:51accounts space slash space loyalty numbers.
33:55And then it's like, no, it's loyalty something else.
33:57And so it's like finding this is a pain.
33:59And what I want is just to say,
34:00what's my Delta frequent flyer number?
34:03And it just pops it up.
34:05A, feels like a terrific use case for a notes app.
34:08And B, feels like in a funny way,
34:09actually a thing AI is able to do.
34:12I think we're at a place where a lot of people are like,
34:14I'm going to throw all these interesting links
34:16and Evernote or something else
34:17is going to make new insights out of them.
34:20It's like, no, it's not.
34:21But it might find information for you
34:24that would otherwise take you several steps to find.
34:27Does that feel like the right frame
34:29for how you're thinking about some of this?
34:30It is exactly why we built AI Search a few months ago,
34:33like I think last year.
34:35I don't think we nailed it yet.
34:37I think we'll need to iterate again on that.
34:39But it's exactly the vision behind it.
34:41So you have some information there.
34:43You don't need to care about where it is.
34:45You just look for your Delta account number
34:48and it just tells you, yeah, it's X, Y, Z.
34:51And it should already be able to do it.
34:53It's just a bit clunky.
34:54It's not easy to find inside Evernote
34:57because we want to make sure that we don't disrupt search.
35:00Search is a very important feature in Evernote,
35:01so we didn't want to replace it.
35:03But it's already possible.
35:05We can already do it, I think.
35:06Okay, well, and I think that goes back
35:08to the bundling and unbundling thing
35:10for me in a really interesting way
35:10because the last phase of software
35:13has definitely been unbundling, right?
35:15We're back, we're in this like best in breed,
35:18kind of take one slice of something, do it super well,
35:21and it's all just apps on your home screen.
35:22So it's not like the switching cost
35:25is super high from thing to thing.
35:27But when I'm working with an AI system,
35:30having there be one place that knows everything,
35:34again, leaving all of the privacy and security
35:38and terrifying dystopian things out,
35:42that's really valuable, right?
35:43And so for me to know every confirmation number,
35:47every loyalty number, all of my email,
35:50everything is all, knowing all of that is in one place
35:53becomes really valuable.
35:54And so I think it seems to me that if you think
35:57AI is going to become a bigger and bigger part of this,
36:00that would sort of expand the boundaries
36:01of what you feel like Evernote has to do
36:03because in order for you to be able to return
36:06that kind of information,
36:07you just need a lot of stuff from me.
36:10Yeah.
36:11The cool thing is that you always
36:12have control over it, right?
36:13So if you're not comfortable with sharing,
36:15I don't know, some document, for instance,
36:18you can just not put it on Evernote or on any software
36:21and it won't be scanned, quote unquote.
36:24The other thing is that we take
36:25this stuff incredibly seriously.
36:26So one of the reasons why we weren't particularly bold
36:31into creating AI search is because we wanted to make sure
36:33that people who didn't want it on their content
36:37could just not use it and not worry about it.
36:39So that's one way to approach it.
36:42I think we're maybe a bit too conservative
36:45and too careful with it,
36:47but I think it's a good intention to have.
36:49So-
36:50Wait, actually, walk me through that.
36:50How do you put that in the product?
36:51Because again, you have a lot of people who use Evernote
36:53who have been putting stuff into it,
36:56including, in many cases, very sensitive things.
36:59Like, you keep hearing about people
37:01who put all their passwords in Evernote
37:02and like, don't do that, people.
37:04Just don't, don't do that.
37:06Or at least use end-to-end encryption.
37:08Like, there is an end-to-end encryption feature
37:10on Evernote.
37:11Okay, that's one-
37:12If you have to-
37:13But like, don't do that.
37:14Just don't do that.
37:15But then, so then to say, it's one thing to say,
37:18you know, we have a new layout for the formatting buttons.
37:22It's another thing to say, we now have an AI tool
37:25that is going to index everything you've ever put
37:27into Evernote and make it searchable.
37:29There's gonna be a subset of people who are like, oh, neat.
37:31And there's gonna be a subset of people who are like,
37:33you did what now?
37:33Yeah, yeah.
37:34Like, how do you sequence that for those people?
37:37How do you roll that out in a way
37:38that doesn't terrify two-thirds of your users?
37:40Yeah, so this is a great example
37:44on how we take this seriously.
37:45So we literally didn't take this vision
37:48to its full potential
37:50because we didn't want people to be scared
37:52and to be frightened by what this could become.
37:57So we were very careful in building it.
37:58So right now, the way it works is
38:01if you don't opt in to use AI-powered search,
38:07your notes are not shared with any sort of third-party AI,
38:11which is an interesting approach
38:12because we could have said, like, yeah, don't worry.
38:14Like, the privacy policy of this AI tool
38:18is that they don't train anything on your content, et cetera.
38:21So you're still safe, but it will still do it, you know?
38:25So for now, it works like this.
38:26Now, we're always trying to ask people
38:29what their feeling for these things are
38:31because it would be so useful.
38:33So I'm curious to know if there is a way
38:36to build it in such a way that it's both frictionless
38:40and it works super well, super easy to use, et cetera,
38:45and also remain super private and stuff like that.
38:49I think there are ways. We just didn't have time yet to work.
38:51Do you think there are ways? I'm not convinced there are ways,
38:53but I'm glad to hear that you think there are.
38:55Well, for instance, if you could run a model locally,
38:58you could do it without sharing it with anybody else,
39:01which is one way to protect it so that at least you know
39:05that everything is still on your device.
39:07And it's not like there is one model
39:10that is ingesting everybody's content.
39:13That's one way, but there are maybe other ways, yeah.
39:16All right, we got to take one more break,
39:18and then we're going to talk about price,
39:19we're going to talk about AI,
39:20and we're going to talk about the future.
39:30All right, we're back with the rest of my conversation
39:32with Federico Simeonato.
39:34Let's talk about the two things people hate about Evernote.
39:36Okay.
39:36Just the last two product things,
39:38and then we're going to talk a little bit
39:39about the future, and then we'll get at it.
39:39All right.
39:40Again, as I said, I like to go on the Reddit,
39:43every once in a while,
39:44and just see what people hate about Evernote.
39:46I would say thing number one is speed, real or perceived.
39:51I think in general, it's very hard to build a fast app,
39:54but it also seems like Evernote has struggled
39:57to be a fast app over the years.
39:59Why is it so hard to build Evernote fast?
40:05So I'll give you an example.
40:07When we built the new mobile navigation,
40:09one of the reasons was people want to do two things
40:13when they are on mobile.
40:14They either want to create something new,
40:16or they want to retrieve something that is existing,
40:18that maybe they created a few days ago on mobile,
40:21or that maybe they just created on desktop.
40:24The other reason why we did it
40:26is that the old homepage was painfully slow,
40:30and understandably, because it did a lot of things.
40:32You had, I don't know if you're familiar with it,
40:34but you had these widgets that you could customize,
40:38but of course, every widget is a different query
40:41for content that needs to be populated.
40:45Every section needs to be populated through a query.
40:47So one of the big reasons why we did it
40:50is because we wanted to make it faster,
40:51especially at launch.
40:53It was, I think, four or five seconds
40:56on good devices to launch in the past,
40:59and now it's down to less than a second
41:00on some good devices.
41:02So that's a big thing.
41:03So the other thing is just technology.
41:07We need to improve the technology,
41:08and we did for the whole last year,
41:12and we're still doing it.
41:12As I told you, today we're launching Arent,
41:15which is this new synchronization engine,
41:17which also speeds up synchronization.
41:19So yeah, it comes down to the technology that you have
41:22and the way it works.
41:24There's a lot of work to do.
41:25That's the answer.
41:25I both believe you and still don't care,
41:28and I still think all the apps should be faster.
41:30I know, yeah.
41:31Is speed a trade-off to some of this other stuff
41:34that you're thinking about?
41:35As you build in all these new features
41:37and bring in lots of new kinds of stuff
41:39and activities people can do,
41:40like you mentioned, every widget on the homepage
41:42adds more response time.
41:45Does all of that stuff fight against making the app faster?
41:50Not necessarily, but I'll give you a close example.
41:53So there's this trade-off of,
41:56I want everyone to be faster,
41:58but also, for some reason, I'm running Mac OS 13,
42:04and for my own understandable reasons,
42:07I don't want to abandon that.
42:09And so that prevents us from abandoning that OS
42:14if there's a meaningful number of people using it.
42:17So it's not like to have an excuse.
42:21I'm saying that there are a lot of things
42:22that we could do even though there are no trade-offs,
42:24and we are doing them.
42:26But in some cases, there are trade-offs.
42:27And so we always have to balance,
42:29okay, how many people are we preventing
42:31from using Evernote in the future
42:33in order to be able to update the library
42:35that drops support for that operating system.
42:38You see, so it's kind of complex many times.
42:40Okay, and then the other thing is the price.
42:44Most of the people who are mad at Evernote,
42:46especially right now,
42:47are mad because you just changed the price,
42:48and you just changed what people get
42:50who don't pay for Evernote.
42:52And the number of people who are like,
42:54I haven't been paying for Evernote,
42:55I've been using it for 15 years,
42:57and now I'm quitting because they're charging me money.
43:00I have found myself wondering
43:02if you're sitting there being like,
43:03yes, yes, precisely, that's the point,
43:05we have to make money.
43:06If you use this for free, we're just losing money.
43:09Part of what you did in a big way
43:11when you bought Evernote
43:12was you changed the business model, right?
43:13Like it charges very differently than it did.
43:16The free tier is very different than it was.
43:18How do you think through the business,
43:21especially for individual note-taking,
43:23which as we talked about is a business
43:25a lot of people run away from
43:26because they just can't figure it out.
43:28How do you think about what it takes
43:30to make that a business right now?
43:32Yeah, I empathize with those people
43:36because it's not something that I don't understand, right?
43:38So we all use many different software products
43:41and it's not like we are happy when prices increase.
43:45And the same applies to me.
43:46So it's not like we are here saying,
43:48yeah, we're going to raise the price
43:50and it's going to be great.
43:51It's more about identifying the way
43:54to make Evernote the most successful that we can
43:56in order for it to be sustainable
43:58so that we can guarantee the glorious future.
44:01That's the point, right?
44:02The whole reason we increase prices
44:04is so that Evernote would have a glorious future
44:09looking ahead.
44:10And so what we try to do in these situations
44:13is to have like a rigorous scientific approach
44:16where if you think of the extremes,
44:19if you charge $0, everybody's going to be happy,
44:22but then Evernote is going to be dead very soon.
44:26If you charge $1,000 per month,
44:29nobody's going to use Evernote anymore
44:30and so it will die too.
44:33So of course you have to find a balance.
44:35What I mean that we try to be scientific
44:36is that Evernote's prices weren't raised for seven years
44:40before we adjusted the pricing.
44:42And so we tried to rebalance that in a way
44:46that basically attempted to piss off
44:49the lowest amount of people that we could
44:51while increasing the Evernote's revenue
44:55as much as we could.
44:56And so we had to identify that delicate balance.
44:59And we take this stuff very seriously
45:01because it's not like we're happy
45:02when we rate people who are pissed at Evernote.
45:04And so that was a tricky thing to do,
45:06but eventually the cool thing,
45:10I can give you two interesting data points maybe.
45:12One thing is when we talk to customers, as I told you,
45:16it's so cool to observe how reasonable they are.
45:18Like most people we talk to who use Evernote a lot,
45:22they are saying, yeah, I saw the new prices.
45:25It's not like I'm happy about it.
45:26It's okay.
45:27I get a lot of value out of Evernote,
45:30far more than what you charged me.
45:33Now, let's go back to talking about
45:34how we can make Evernote better.
45:37Very quickly the conversation shifts to,
45:40yeah, but okay, the price is fine,
45:43but let's talk about how to improve Evernote.
45:45Right, which is the conversation
45:46I'm sure you want to be having, right?
45:47Where it's like, make it worth my money.
45:50Exactly. Let's go.
45:51Exactly, exactly.
45:53The other data point is the numbers.
45:55So when we look at how many people
45:58left Evernote versus not, et cetera,
46:00of course we are always looking at that number
46:03in order to make these decisions.
46:05And the cool thing is that Evernote's retention
46:07has never been higher than today.
46:09So yeah, of course, if you look on Reddit,
46:12you might imagine something different,
46:13but actually the situation is kind of good, so yeah.
46:18So are you going to raise the price more then?
46:20Did you go too low?
46:21No, we don't have.
46:22Did you've lost a few more people?
46:23Concrete plans to do that.
46:25Part of the reason I ask is I think
46:26we're in a moment right now where,
46:28A, everything is becoming a subscription,
46:30and so subscription fatigue is pretty real.
46:32And B, all the prices seem to go up all the time.
46:36And I think there is a sense of,
46:38I'd be willing to pay for this,
46:40but the more I invest in it,
46:42the more you as the company are going to be able
46:46to essentially blackmail me out of my money
46:49because you have all my stuff.
46:51And the harder it is to get out,
46:52the more you're going to be able
46:53to take from me before I'm willing to leave.
46:55And I think the fear of that trade is very real
46:58because people keep going through it, right?
47:00I sign up for a streaming service
47:02and I've been using Spotify for 10 years
47:04and Spotify gets more expensive every 15 minutes now.
47:07And it sucks, but I don't leave
47:09because it would be a giant pain to leave Spotify.
47:11And that feels bad.
47:13And I think with something like Evernote,
47:15especially you've gone through all this change recently.
47:18And do you get to the point where you say,
47:21okay, we've done this.
47:22This is how we set this thing up.
47:24It was a painful change.
47:25And now we're going to stop making those changes.
47:29Or does it make sense to say,
47:32we're going to do this slowly and raise prices as we need to,
47:35but try to make it kind of less painful each time?
47:38Like it's the sort of rip the bandaid off approach
47:40versus like hope nobody notices
47:42when you raise prices a dollar.
47:43No, it's generally expensive, quote unquote,
47:47to raise prices because you don't want to piss people off.
47:51And so you want to do it the fewer times you can.
47:56So we did it once and we hope to be good for years now.
48:02So that's the approach.
48:03Of course, like every once in a while,
48:05every service needs to adjust prices,
48:07even just for inflation.
48:09Every once in a while, like it compounds.
48:11And so it becomes important after a few years.
48:15But yeah, they're like...
48:17The other thing is that I'm pretty optimistic
48:20about how this kind of things balances itself.
48:23Like competition is strong,
48:26both on note-taking, but also on other softwares.
48:29And people are starting to build a sense
48:31for how to handle these things.
48:33So I don't think there's the case
48:35where you can just like sneak in a price increase
48:38and people will not notice.
48:40That's true.
48:40I think people will notice and will notice.
48:44And they will be...
48:46I'm very optimistic that people know how much value
48:49they're getting out of a product
48:50and they are kind of intentional in how they behave
48:54and if they want to stay subscribed versus not.
48:56How competitive does this space feel to you right now?
48:59Hmm.
49:03We see it as not very competitive
49:05because we focus a lot on our customers
49:07and we try to build stuff because they need it
49:11rather than, oh, look what that other product is doing.
49:14We should build that.
49:15At the same time, there's no denying
49:17that there are a lot of products
49:19that compete in the same arena.
49:21So we need to be careful about both things.
49:24The cool thing is that by using the approach
49:26of only caring about our customers, quote unquote,
49:29is that you can build something unique.
49:32So you don't necessarily need to participate to the race,
49:37which is cool.
49:38Who else do you look at
49:38that you feel like is doing cool stuff right now?
49:41I take a lot of inspiration from stuff
49:45that is not necessarily note-taking software.
49:48So, for instance, I'm a big fan of Slack and...
49:51Oh my God, you are going to build WorkChat again.
49:53No, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not.
49:56I don't think we are.
49:57I think there's very little reason to do that,
49:59especially because getting a feature parity
50:01or even just to a reasonable percentage
50:04of the feature set that softwares like Slack have is hard.
50:08So I don't think I want to compete with them.
50:10But for instance, Slash Commons,
50:11it's such a great UX that it's just obvious
50:17that every software should have it.
50:18Another thing I'm a big fan of is,
50:21I don't know how it's called, maybe Quick Switcher.
50:22You know how on Slack you hit CMDK
50:25and you can switch from one channel to the other?
50:28The same thing exists on Evernote.
50:30It's just CMDJ instead of K.
50:32It should be J everywhere, by the way,
50:34to anyone who's listening.
50:35Do you think so?
50:36Because K is how you insert links in most apps.
50:38And J should be for switching,
50:42and K should be for links.
50:42You don't know how many people
50:43have told me the opposite.
50:44I have deep religion on this.
50:45There are a lot of people who believe it's K
50:47and they're wrong.
50:48We can switch links if we want to,
50:50but one should be J and one should be K.
50:52And the fact that one is K when you have some text selected
50:55and the other one is K when you don't have text selected,
50:57bad UI.
50:58I agree.
50:59I think it should be the same everywhere.
51:01I don't have any strong opinion on which one it should be.
51:03Then it should be J.
51:04Get on board with me.
51:05Let's do this.
51:06Team CMDJ.
51:07It's already J, so Evernote is good.
51:08Perfect.
51:10I think it could be even more powerful.
51:12So first of all, people don't know about it.
51:14And I think it's so powerful that they should.
51:16And so I would like for people to know about it.
51:18The second thing is that I think it could do so much more.
51:21Right now on Evernote,
51:21you can use the quick switcher to navigate to a note
51:25or something like that.
51:28But I think you could use it to delete a note,
51:30for instance.
51:31Like you're inside a note, CMDJ, Dell.
51:33You write like D-E-L and you hit enter
51:36and it deletes the note.
51:36And you could do a bunch of different things with that,
51:39like share or something like that.
51:41That's a cool idea.
51:42That's another one that,
51:43like you mentioned the kind of universal slash command thing
51:47that's starting to happen.
51:48That sort of thing is starting to happen
51:50more and more places where you bring up
51:52the kind of universal command bar and it lets you do stuff.
51:56Exactly.
51:57I think that's very cool.
51:57Like Raycast, right?
51:58Yeah, exactly.
51:59I'm a huge fan of Alfred Raycast and that archetype.
52:02But that is the kind of stuff that is so power user-y.
52:06And I think about a lot of people
52:08who use tools like Evernote,
52:09who are the folks who are like,
52:11not even necessarily learning the keyboard shortcuts
52:14for like copy and paste, right?
52:16Like most people don't do that stuff.
52:20And so I think with any tool like this,
52:23and it goes back to kind of what you're saying
52:24about customization,
52:25trying to build something that starts very simply
52:28and then scales all the way up
52:30to what the most power users want,
52:32it's like, that's the dream.
52:34But I feel like from a actual interface perspective,
52:39it's so easy to make that into just a gigantic mess.
52:42That actually helps no one.
52:43I think in that direction,
52:45I think we did kind of well the mobile navigation.
52:47I think that you want to give A, a good default,
52:51that people who are not power users
52:54and don't care about being power users,
52:56they can still use it in a satisfying way.
52:59And then you can customize it if you're a power user
53:02and you don't want the create page
53:04to be your default homepage,
53:05then you can just customize it and make it
53:07so that the note list is your homepage.
53:10And it took a while to nail it
53:11because I think we tested nine different iterations,
53:16I think, of the new navigation and homepage.
53:19And then after those nine iterations,
53:21then we added the customization setting.
53:25So you can customize which page opens
53:28when you launch the app and how the nav bar looks.
53:30You can switch between notebooks
53:32and shortcuts in the nav bar.
53:33So I think that's a good approach.
53:34It's not necessarily perfect or finished yet,
53:36but it's good.
53:37I think that we should aim at doing
53:39the same thing everywhere,
53:40like where you have for every feature
53:42you have a strong default,
53:43and then those who want more customization
53:46can customize it.
53:47Okay, I buy that.
53:48So it feels like you're in a good place
53:50where kind of the basic infrastructure
53:54of Evernote is in a solid place.
53:56You've built a bunch of new stuff,
53:57you've shipped a bunch of new stuff.
53:58As you think to the next 18 months,
54:02what are some of the big,
54:04not you don't have to tell me about features,
54:06you can if you'd like to,
54:08but sort of big picture things
54:09that are top of your mind right now?
54:11Either the things that are still at the top of the list
54:13that customers are asking you for
54:14or just interesting things you want to work on
54:16in the next year or so.
54:17Any note-taking software,
54:18but especially Evernote,
54:20needs to nail the basics really well.
54:23And it doesn't do it every time.
54:26And I would like it to be perfect every time.
54:28And then you have collaboration and AI.
54:30I think both are promising.
54:31Both are not, they're not necessarily core to Evernote.
54:34So I would like to split between things
54:36that are like core and sort of non-negotiable almost,
54:40like the two that we just mentioned.
54:41And then things that if done well could be very cool.
54:45And you kind of want both, right?
54:47You want stuff that's non-negotiable to be done perfectly.
54:50And then you want some stuff that's just cool
54:52and you want to have it in your tools.
54:55And so stuff like one-click sharing.
54:58Do you think any of those things
55:00are the thing that go out and get all the people
55:03who don't use a notes app?
55:05Because I think it's easy to forget
55:07when you care about this stuff that most people don't.
55:10And that most people don't use any of these tools.
55:13They just live in chaos and like monsters.
55:16And I don't like any of them.
55:18You just like live your life with a million open tabs
55:20until your computer falls apart and then there you are.
55:23So I think like is the next phase of this,
55:26like if AI search gets really good,
55:29maybe that's how we start to get to those people?
55:32Like have you started thinking
55:33about the non-Evernote users much yet?
55:35Yeah, I think for them the most important thing is,
55:38as we were saying, ease of use and a strong default.
55:40I think that they were not trying Evernote
55:44because it was a bit cumbersome to learn.
55:47Like you land on Evernote and then if the first thing
55:49you see is a page with widgets
55:51and you're expecting to write notes,
55:53you're a bit like uncomfortable.
55:55You're thinking, yeah, how do I write a note here?
55:58And like why is it so complicated?
56:00So I think that in order to attract them,
56:02you need to have strong use cases
56:04that they might not find elsewhere,
56:05but especially like a very good user experience.
56:08And so we're also working on that.
56:10All right, I'm excited to try it.
56:11All right, well, we should go,
56:12but thank you so much for doing this.
56:13This was really fun.
56:14Thank you, thank you very much.
56:16All right, that's it for the Verticast today.
56:17Thank you to Federico for coming on
56:19and nerding out about productivity apps with me.
56:21And thank you as always for listening.
56:23Thank you, by the way, for all of the nice feedback
56:26that we've gotten on this series.
56:26I've had fun and I've learned a ton
56:28and it's been great to hear from everyone else
56:30who has as well.
56:31As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings,
56:34or Evernote alternatives that you swear are better
56:36and I should totally try,
56:37you can always email us at verticastatheverge.com
56:40or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11.
56:43We love hearing from you.
56:44Productivity, we got other mini series stuff
56:46coming up this fall, lots going on.
56:47Keep all your questions coming.
56:49This show is produced by Liam James,
56:50Will Poore and Eric Gomez.
56:52This episode was edited by Xander Adams.
56:54The Vergecast is a Verge production
56:55and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
56:57We'll be back on Tuesday and Friday
56:59with our regularly scheduled programming.
57:01We got a lot of reviews to talk about.
57:02We got a lot of Apple stuff to talk about.
57:04We got a lot more events coming up, lots going on.
57:07We'll see you then.
57:08Rock and roll.