The Vergecast - The great Evernote reboot

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

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. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Tools for Thought. That's another one of those like productivity nerd terms, by the way. And if you've never heard it before, you're probably better off.

I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the third episode in our three-part series all about productivity. Sorry, it's coming a couple of weeks late. It won't happen again. We've been looking into how people work in this series and how we should work and really not even just work. We're just trying to find ways to be more functional, sane, useful people in our digital lives. The more we do this, the more I'm hating the term productivity. But it's kind of the best way we have to talk about this.

For this last episode, we're going to talk about one of the all-time iconic productivity apps, Evernote. My guest today is Federico Simeonato, who now. leads work on Evernote for a company called Bending Spoons. But before we get into all of that, let me just quickly give you the brief Evernote story. Evernote has been around for more than two decades, but I think most people probably heard of it around 2008 when the app launched in the very first version of Apple's iPhone App Store. That was a huge deal.

Being in the store at the beginning was a big win for basically every app that was in there. So Evernote blew up and it became one of the biggest productivity apps on the planet. The biggest number I've seen was that in 2014, there were 100 million people using Evernote. I was one of them, by the way, and I loved Evernote. Many, many years ago, back when I was in college, I actually did some freelance work for the company, and I was a devoted user of Evernote for years. It was fast. It was cross-platform back when that was kind of a rare thing to be. It had a really great web clipper that made it easy to get stuff into the app. You could email into it. It was just great. It was like a,

digital filing cabinet, it just had all my stuff. I loved it very much. But Evernote never quite figured out how to keep going or where to go next. When it was really popular around that same time, it had this weird diversion into being a lifestyle company selling socks and notebooks and all kinds of stuff. It was like Evernote wanted to be Nike for nerds. It was very strange. The company also started making other apps like a scanner app and the image editing app sketch and generally just seemed like it kind of lost track of what it was actually for. Meanwhile, the app got bloated and slow. The company tried to kind of pivot to being a B2B app for people at work.

Multiple CEOs came in and tried to reboot the whole thing, but never quite figured it out. And Evernote just seemed like it was slowly dying. One of those apps that's still around, but stops getting better and just kind of slowly gets worse forever and ever and ever. Then, in late 2020, Evernote was acquired by Bending Spoons, which seemed odd. Bending Spoons is a kind of mix of tech incubator and private equity company. Basically, it buys products, integrates them all together, and tries to find ways to do things more efficiently.

Basically, by having them all in one company, you can share some resources, and in theory, then devote more resources just to the products. Anyway, a few months after the acquisition, Bending Spoons announced that it was laying off most of Evernote's staff and moving most of the company's operations to Europe, which is where Bending Spoons is based. This is a pattern for Bending Spoons. It does this with a lot of companies it buys. But at this point, I thought Evernote was dead for sure. I think most people did. But that's not actually what happened. Evernote eventually started shipping new stuff. It seems to have a new identity about what it was and what it was for. And for the first time,

frankly, in a really long time, the product started getting better. It also got a lot more expensive, which made a lot of people really, really, really mad. But we're going to get to that a minute. To start with Federico, we just went back to the beginning. He was an Evernote user himself for years and said he was psyched to have the company on board at Bending Spoons. It sounds to me like Bending Spoons was enticed by the combo of big brand, really popular app, just something in need of some serious product love. And as soon as they got the deal done, Federico and his team went to work. I think the first, yeah, 12 months, maybe like 11 months, were just about technology,

just about learning how the backend worked or the client architecture worked and trying to not rebuild it because we couldn't rebuild Evernote. You know, like it's 20 years of software, we couldn't rebuild it all, but trying to identify the most critical pieces and try to rewrite those.

And this is true of almost any app that age, right? Like, I feel like this is a story you hear. It's just what's going to happen. If you're building a thing in 2004 and then 2007 and then 2009, like the world changes every 18 months and it's very hard to keep up. And so I feel like anything of that kind of age is going to have these sorts of problems. Yeah, definitely. Even something that you write now, probably in like 10 years, people are going to look at the cold and say, yeah, where they think. And it's fair, it's fine.

But it was super complex. And so one of the first things we did when we arrived was to ship this huge, huge. project that the team already started working on, which was called RT, like real-time editing. And it was about synchronizing the note content, so the content of a single note, instantaneously between devices, both your other devices and devices of people that they were also in the same note with you. And you can see how this is like a completely different thing than what Evernote used to be.

Or like the, you can imagine how the way the note editor was built needed to change in order to to do this, to achieve this. And so I don't know how many months and tens of people went into making it a reality, but we were able to ship it in the first few months. And today we just launched Rent, which is the other thing which we worked on since. So after releasing RT, which is about synchronizing the note content,

we started working on Rent, which is a project to synchronize the metadata. So the note list, I don't know, even just the title, the snippet, the preview, the time it was last edited, not because I want to talk about that necessarily, but because you see how we started working on it after RTE, and now we are done after like more than a year. Right.

So, yeah, that's the reason. And the decision behind it is just, can we improve it in a way that it won't be a problem? Not anymore necessarily, like forever, but it's like something that we can actually touch and we feel like we own. And I would assume there's also a part of that process where you have to say, like, okay,

it's not whatever, 2006, when Evernote first came out, I think it was around then, somewhere in there. The landscape has changed, and it's a really different kind of world to be in. And you're in a position of saying, not we want to take this kind of old, crusty app and, like, bleed it for cash until it dies. You're saying, we want to, like,

we want to renovate this thing and make it new and modern and forward-looking, which I would think also means you have to kind of sit down and say, what is the job of an app, like Evernote now, as opposed to what it was then. And I'm curious, especially for you as somebody who had been using the app for a long time, what is that process like?

What were you talking about when you were thinking about, okay, what is the next thing for Evernote to be? Yeah, so there's a bunch of different things in that question. So the first one is, what does Evernote do? What I understood by talking to customers is that they see Evernote as a tool for individual nottaking. That's the core of what it does, so that people can organize their system.

there's different degrees of how organized you can be, but generally people who use such a software tend to be fairly organized and tend to have a system of some sort. And it's also interesting to think about what it doesn't necessarily need to do for the customers that are still millions of customers that still use Evernote every week.

For instance, it doesn't do a lot of project management, especially collaborative project management. They don't care about using Evernote for that. And so that's one point. part, which already tells you what Evernote will not necessarily try to be in the future. The other thing is where we think Evernote is kind of failing at being the best, and where we think there is space and even just like market need and customer necessity for such a tool. And I think that collaboration, even though people will still see Evernote as an individual

note-taking tool first, I still think that people would like for Evernote to be better at, like, note-sharing, collaborating real-time. people and stuff like that and so I'm excited to be working on that. Is it risky in that process to spend most of your time talking to people who have been using Evernote? Like what's the mix between thinking about the people who are part of the product and thinking about people who for one reason or another have not used it but you'd like to? Like who do you think about in those early days?

Well we we think mostly about existing customers. That's our main focus just because there are so many. And so we definitely don't want to piss them off. Then if we can add something to Evernote that makes it better for both them and new customers, that's great. But yeah, I don't think we will want to make Evernote Wars for people who are there in the hope that we can add some use case that maybe is enticing to somebody else. That's a tricky balance, though, because I think about, like we've had Microsoft executives tell us before that one of the hard things about building for Word or Excel is that if you, remove a feature that, you know, 1% of people use. That's still 10 million people who use it and love it and rely on it for work.

And it's the most important thing in their lives. And Evernote, I think, and really any tool like it, people are like pouring their most important stuff into it. Yes. And so if you mess with it, even in the service of making it ostensibly better, you're going to screw up some percentage of people's workflows and lives. And there's nothing you can do that will satisfy everybody. I definitely felt the responsibility initially.

Like I saw that people understandably like empathize with them. When somebody acquires the tool that you use like multiple hours per day, every day in a week, I mean, you're kind of in a scary situation, you know? So I definitely empathize with them. When we first joined, when we first arrived, some people in the team, I think, told me something like, Evernaut has a 5% problem, which like in a very simplified way means that every feature is used. at least by 5% of the people. It's not like technically true, but like it lets you understand how complex it is to think about

ever not with the thousand things you can do. Well, well, everything that it does is used by a non-negligible amount of people. So do you then have to just get to the point where you're comfortable pissing off 5% of users at a time because it's kind of inevitable? I mean, you try not to. So fortunately it wasn't 5%. There were some things that were used by fewer than 5% of people. So we were able to do some simplification.

So for instance, we removed the work chat, which was like a piece of everyone that wasn't very used. It wasn't also particularly powerful. So understandably, people use something else for it. And it allowed us to simplify some part of the product. But yeah, it's not like you can come and just say, okay, I'll remove everything except for that thing because that thing is the only thing people care about. No, no, that's not possible. I mean, and even if you take a button that's over here and you move it to over there,

five percent of people are going to absolutely lose the lines. Yeah. So the individual note-taking thing, I think is really interesting because I've talked to a lot of folks over the years who build a thing that is for something like individual note-taking or I have this like deep obsession with to-do lists or to-do lists or calendar apps or whatever. All of these kind of productivity tools start by being for people. And then you realize where actually the money is is by selling teams. And so they build the collaboration environments and you build out all the business tools. And all of a sudden you've changed the app entirely into something that is basically like a thing meant for lots of people to use it once, which becomes sort of the lowest common denominator kind of app and causes, it just changes, right? Like I think Notion is my favorite example, right? Like, Notion is a very good app that is completely different now that they mostly sell the companies than it was when they were mostly focused on individual users.

Not necessarily right or wrong. They make a lot more money because they sell the companies. But this idea of individual note-taking, both as a product and as a business, I think there are a lot of people out there who are not convinced. That's a thing with a big enough market to be worth it. Are you sure that it is? Well, the thing is, like, if you take into account what customers tell you, you'll kind of find the answer.

So if you tell people, yeah, I'm going to turn Evernote into a team's product. Which is kind of what Evernote tried to do, right? At some point, yes. There was a period of time, like the work chat thing you're talking about. There was a minute where Evernote was like, we are going to be a business tool. Yes, yes. I think they were seeing where the market was going and they wanted to follow that,

but still they had this huge use case of individual not taking that they couldn't ignore, and so they tried to do kind of both things. So I don't have like a perfect plan for how to achieve that. My North Star is you talk to customers, they tell you, I want this, you talk to enough customers and you notice if something that you're planning on building. goes against that direction. So I mentioned collaboration earlier because it's something that we would like to work on,

but it doesn't mean turning Evernote into a collaboration-only tool, for instance, or like a collaboration-first tool. You still need to keep into account what current people using Evernote think Evernor should do and try to make it good for that use case first, and then if you want, you can add some of that.

And the cool thing is that people are asking for that. It's not something that I came up with or we came up with at some point and said, yeah, it would be cool if Avernote was more collaborative and we'll do it against what people want. It's more like we sit down, we have countless conversations every week with customers and they tell us, yeah, but like sharing notes, sharing notes, notebooks is a pain. I wish it worked well. And okay, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah, what else were people asking you for? Because I feel like

there's a certain set of kind of big picture things that people build for stuff like this. Like collaboration is one of them. And I can't imagine you're sitting with a lot of people who are like, I'd like for there to be a real-time collaborative editor. Yeah. But it makes sense that people were like, it's annoying that I can't share notes with my partner. Like simple use case, that totally works. What else on those levels were people telling you about at the beginning? So we have this track, which is called Quality of Life, that goes a bit against what usually product management should be about, which is classically, product managers should be about identifying a metric and trying to optimize for that metric and building something to make

it to make that metric work better. Like the app is faster or people open it extra? time today or whatever. Exactly. Yes. Instead, this track, this quality of life track goes in the direction where we talk to as many customers as we can, either like in conversations that we have on Google Meet every week or through surveys, and we just try to quantify, first identify what they want, and then to quantify how many of them want what. And so we just like rank a list of things that people want, and we try to build them, of course, if something takes like six months, maybe we'll ignore it for the time being, but we try to make it as ranked as possible.

And so good examples of this are collapsible sections. People were saying, yeah, how can it be that after 20 years? Everyone still doesn't have collapsible sections. Okay, wait, I want to get to the rest of this, but can we actually pause on this for a second? Because I am one of those people. Okay. And the way I work generally is I think in outlines,

so I do a lot of bullets and I have very long lists and being able to collapse individual parts of those lists is just most of what I need from a note. And I have heard sort of vaguely over the years a lot of people say that is a strangely difficult thing to build. Can you explain to me why that's so hard? Why can't I have it? Well, so I don't know specifically how we implemented it,

but the thing is that the note you can imagine the note as a kind of a webpage. And so everything that kind of edits some part of that web page is kind of tricky to do, especially when you leave the rest untouched. And so I think that might be what they were referring to. But I don't think it was particularly difficult to build.

I think it was reasonably normal in terms of difficulty. Okay. So fascinating that that's the first one that you think of. It might not have been the top of the list, but like it's a good example of, I think there are a lot of like big kind of whiz-bang features that people are talking about. And we're going to talk about AI in a minute, like the whiz-bang-iest feature of all right now.

But my suspicion when I asked you that question was that, most of what people wanted from you was going to be things about the size of collapsible sections. What else was on that list? Well, slash comments was also a big one. So like you can do on Slack, you hit slash, and then you type a comment. So on Slack you do it's like...

It's fascinating that that's become like a universal thing now. People understand slash commands now. It's really great. Yeah, yeah. It's like, I don't know, it's like right click. You know, it's something that you do, no matter the operating system you're in. And so that's also something that people were asking.

It's a bit more of a niche feature. Collapsible section, I just bring it up because it's the obvious example of quality of life feature that everybody wanted. But slash comments was also a big one. Let me think. Well, image alignment is also like a classic, you know. Like you could not align an image in the center or right. You could only have it on the left and you cannot edit it. So yeah, we built it.

Another one that seems to mystify every document editor everywhere. Like why can't I put my photo where I would like it to be? Shockingly difficult text editing problem. You know, I think there are memes about Microsoft Word. Yeah. Like messing the whole layout of the document. Yep. Yeah.

All right. We got to take a break. But when we come back, I want to talk about what it means to build a productivity tool in 2024, instead of doing it in 2014 or 2004 whenever it was starting out. We'll get to all that. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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One of the things you really pushed on when you took over Evernote was to integrate things like tasks and calendar. And it feels much less to me like a sort of traditional notepad and more like a sort of stuff going on dashboard. I don't know if you've a better turn for it than that. But like, what is your sense of what people want from a note-taking system now as opposed to what they might have wanted a long time ago? What was it that pushed you to pull all that stuff in?

That's a good question. So most of it comes down to what people were asking for. And especially between advanced users, there was this need of having a better task manager. Being Evernote individual, most people who use Evernote either use it for their own organization, and not for a team organization, or they use it for very small projects or like projects with few people in And so we were asking people, what would you like us to do? And tasks was a big part of what they were asking for us to improve. I think it's because they were already there.

So I think that previous teams in the past built Evernote tasks. And given that Evernote is not a task management tool, they didn't give it like a lot of attention. And so I think that the reason why people were asking for better tasks was because they were already there. I think that maybe if tasks weren't there in the first place, maybe people wouldn't have asked for it. But I'm not sure. Okay. You've just raised the philosophical question about productivity tools.

That is my favorite thing to talk about. So I think the two schools of thought, as people are sitting there telling you, we want tasks inside of Evernote. One is to say people are inside of our app. There's lots of information inside of our app. We should give people more stuff to do. Right? Like, that makes sense.

Build in to-do list. Build in calendar. you'll eventually end up making like an email app inside of there you'll do work chat again right like you can go down this road of this is an app full of your stuff we should do more with it

and you eventually just recreate Microsoft Office right like that is one path the other path is to say we are going to avoid the kind of feature creep cruffiness that has plagued Evernote and other apps in the past we're going to slim it down

that actually what this app needs is to be more opinionated and simple and if you want a task manager awesome. There's a bunch of sick ones over here, one swipe or click away. And I actually have an opinion on which of those I think is the better answer. But I'm curious how you reason out between saying to people, like, I think one totally valid answer would be to say, Evernote is not a task management app. That's not what we're here for. If you want to write a checklist, we've got you. We're good at that. But if you are like a person who wants to do

like capital T tasks, that's just not whatever note is for. I think. I feel like that would have been a perfectly valid answer, even if it made some people mad. Why did you decide to go the other way? Man, that's such a hard question. I'm not sure I can answer that. So I can give you a few thoughts. The first one is it's the age-old question of bundling and unbundling. Totally.

Like, software history is full of people like bundling and unbundling products, and they always try to integrate more stuff, and then somebody new arises from like a little startup because they just focused on that thing and they do well. So I think it's an age-old question. And I think that on Evernote, on one hand, you want to do what people want to have. So you want to build what people need. And if it's tasks, why not? Like, you know, why collapsible sections?

Yes. And tasks not. So that's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is, as you said, being opinionated. And I think that there is a – I don't know if I'm being too, like, democratic or if I'm – I don't want to choose. We're about to talk about that. That's my next question. I think that the best way to solve it is through customization.

Okay. So that you don't want to use tasks, you just hide that part. Or you don't want to use calendar. You can just not use it and hopefully have some tools to make sure that the UI doesn't get too messy for you. And I think that might be the answer, but I'm not sure yet. Yeah, we're looking into it. I buy that theory pretty much entirely. Like I think that's right.

And I actually think with a lot of things, giving people tools to set something up for themselves is really cool and really powerful. I also think it leads to trouble because it's just really hard to do that in a way that is good and helpful. And also, most people don't touch the defaults. And so whatever weirdness is on by default, they're going to get regardless. But I also think, like, realistically, your team is only so big. You only have so many things to do. everything you add is going to make the app bigger.

It's going to make it more complicated. It's going to make it slower. And so I think the question of especially, I'm just like this thing where you're coming from this long history of Evernote where it kind of lost its way by trying to do too much, back to you don't want to try to do too much. But like one of my favorite things to do is go into the discords of productivity apps. Yeah. Because I'm a loser.

Hasn't know any friends. And just watch what people ask for. and everybody asks for everything all the time, right? And everybody has the one teeny tiny thing that works for their use specifically. And if you give it to them, they'll love your app forever and ever. But for every person on planet Earth, that thing is different. Yes. And I actually admire the impulse to give all those people what they want, but you can't.

You'll ruin your app, right? And I think we've seen what happens when you try. So, like, the strategy of sort of being democratic and giving people what they want makes a lot of sense to me. But I do wonder, like, do you have to have boundaries in your... head of... Absolutely. Like if enough people asked you to make an email client inside of Evernote, would you make an email client inside of Evernote?

It depends on how many they are and it depends on how good the U.S. that we can prototype is. So tell me what the boundaries are then. I think that the boundaries are always about what is Evernote, you know? And in order to answer that, you can just look at how many people use what inside Evernote. So of course, Evernote being what it is, the note editor is the most used part together with like lists somewhere in the app. So when we work on quality of life improvements, which is one of our biggest tracks and on

synchronization projects, which is also one of our biggest tracks, those are about note-taking. And to the core, I would say, I don't know, 80, 90 percent of the team is focused on the core note-taking experience. And so if you look at what we released this year, so this year we had this idealistic goal of releasing 100 quality of life improvements. We shipped, I think, 60 or 65, I don't know. That's pretty good. For now.

And it's late August. That's pretty solid. I think we're kind of on track. I think Evernote is going to be fine as long as we are very intentional with the fact that everyone's focus is on note taking. I think as long as we recognize that and we work with that in mind, I think everyone is going to be fine. Then if some people want to have a calendar client inside it, it's fine.

But I don't think, I don't see. a way for the team to be mostly focused on calendar going forward, even though, like, yeah, I would like to improve it. When you say note-taking, I'm curious what, what's your sense of what that looks like for people in 2024? Because I look back to, like, Evernote at the very beginning of the App Store, right? And its thing was like, it was very easy to put stuff into Evernote. And for years, the strangest thing about the productivity space to me

was that nobody built a web clipper as good as Evernote's. That was just like, I have a thing, and I need to get it into my Notes app. Evernote has always been better at that than everybody. Still is, which is bizarre. All these years later. But my sense is as we're in this space now where there's this renewed interest in second brain stuff

and everybody talks about like Zettlcastins on the internet and personal knowledge management and all this stuff. And then with AI, there is this sort of renewed sense of like here's how we organize our stuff and how we manage our digital lives. when you think about what note-taking means, how sort of broad or narrow is your definition of that at this point? It's super broad.

Like, I think we talked to hundreds of customers in the last year, and I don't recall two people telling me that they follow exactly the same, the same, like, flow or system. Yeah, maybe some people like mentioned, I don't know, some frameworks like para, getting things done, et cetera. but then they always customize it because they have one slightly different thing that they need to do and then there's people who handle everything like house related and ever not but also their work people who are consultants they have a bunch of projects etc and then people who are more or less

interested in in like saving everything they do and so yeah it's super broad it's like there is nobody who does it in the same exact way as somebody else does and so for that reason I think, but customization, again, is important, but also building the tools for them to do it. It's also important. So what are the buckets you think about when you think about, like, how to do note-taking really well? What does that require? Even at, like, a higher level.

I think it depends on what you do. So we kind of identified a few families of, like, categories of ways you could do note-taking. So, for instance, there's a category that we call the archivers. And they are people who basically save everything inside Evernote. and they, like, as you mentioned, the web clipper, there are people who automatically forward every email

they receive to Evernote. Whoa. Every email, even like newsletters and stuff. Every email. They have like a filter in Jamaica. L-LB and has a sale. It goes straight to Evernote. And so you see why

there are some people who have like... That is my nightmare. A hundred thousand notes. Yeah. So for them, you just need to build just like, as if it was easy, but you need to build a very good, like, organization tool.

Then there are some people who are writers. And they don't even write that many notes, but they write long notes and complex notes. And they want to have, like, they care a lot about the craft of how the note is structured and how it's written,

what they can add to the note. And different, like, for instance, when we created the quote block, which is nothing like incredibly, particularly, particularly, it's in every piece of software they know of, but it's basically a different way to look at a bunch of text,

a block of text, and you can just see as if it was a quote. And these people went crazy for it, even though it's so simple, you know, because they go crazy for how you can build a note. And then there are people who are particularly interested in personal knowledge management, as you said. And so they want to see Evernote as their one tool. And they would like to have their own life running on Evernote. So if Evernote did, like, I don't know, something weird, like banking, they would love it. They could just use Evernote for that.

Of course, that's crazy. But so, yeah, basically we tried to look at the interception of all these. categories and we try to build the things that are as effective as possible for as many people in these categories as possible and then if there's one of these groups that need something specific to them will still build it if it's important enough to their use case got it okay and how much do you think about the work of like doing some of that stuff for people versus sort of giving them a canvas to do it for themselves and I think organization is one really interesting one right where one of the things that's happening in a lot of

these tools that they're like, don't worry about organizing. We'll use AI to suggest tags or we'll just magically do the search and all this stuff for you. And I think I sense this sort of schism in this space between people who are like, what I want is like a really fast, really nice, really pleasant tool that doesn't tell me how to use it, that I can just use however I want. And then there's another set of people who are like,

what I want to do is spend a lot less time thinking about my notes. I just want to dump every email I get into Evernote. and have it make sense of all of those things for me. And I kind of feel like you can't be both of those things at the same time. Yeah, I don't think there is a way to build something that works in the perfect way for both. So I think that the perfect approach is to build both, kind of build a product that supports both use cases. So increasingly there are people who just want to dump stuff into Evernote and then like ask. AI search to retrieve the information they want.

So for instance, one of my favorite examples is one person, I think, uploaded the manual for their kitchen clock, I think, on Evernote. And then they wanted to know how to, I don't know, change from Celsius to Fahrenheit in the clock. And they just asked the AI search and it just scanned the PDF and just told him, like, you should do this, this and that. Which was interesting. Of course, this is not useful to somebody who uses Evernote, not even to collect stuff,

but to organize it in a way that mimics their mental map of how their content is organized. And so for them, it's much more important to build stuff like, I don't know, stocks for notebooks, for instance, or like multiple levels of hierarchy and stuff like that. So you see how you need to build different things for different use cases. That first use case, the like, I want to upload stuff to Evernote and have Evernote just kind of know it. Yeah. It's so new and so interesting to me. And I feel like in a certain way is like the obvious next step of this, right, where instead of searching for a note, I should just be able to search for information that I need and it doesn't really matter where it is.

Like as a person who likes to organize stuff, that kind of makes me itchy. But I also understand why that's really valuable. Is that, are we getting to that point? Like is that a thing you're investing in a lot? Because that also causes some really interesting privacy and data security questions. It changes like the literal cost of running the service. Are you, is there going to be more and more of that kind of put everything in and let the app make sense of all your information for you coming in Internet? Yeah.

It's something that's trending. So it's clearly something that people are starting to explore more, both because they are seeing how. how it could work because maybe they are getting familiar with chat GPT or other AI products. But also because I think that deep down, this is something that people always wanted. You know, you just want to talk to a computer and the computer just tells you what you want to know instead of like going through this like level of emulation, which is like I have to click on a mouse and then open a page and then I read the information out of that. I just want to know that information, you know.

My favorite example is always I have a note with all of my like account and loyalty number. for different airlines and car rental places and stuff like that. And every time I do it, if I just search Delta, it brings up too many notes because it has everything with the word delta in it. And so I have to remember like, okay, the thing is actually called accounts, space, slash, space, loyalty numbers. And then it's like, no, it's loyalty, something else. And so it's like finding this is a pain. And what I want is just to say, what's my Delta frequent flyer number?

And it just pops it up. Yeah. A feels like a terrific use case for a note tab. And B feels like in a funny way, actually a thing AI is able to do. I think we're at a place where a lot of people are like, I'm going to throw all these interesting links and Evernote or something else is going to make new insights out of them. It's like, no, it's not. But it might find information for you

that would otherwise take you several steps to find. Does that feel like the right frame for how you're thinking about some of this stuff? It is exactly why we built AI search a few months ago, like I think last year. I don't think we nailed it yet. I think we'll need to iterate again. on that, but it's exactly the vision behind it. So you have some information there, you don't need to care about where it is. You just look for your Delta account number and just tells

you, yeah, it's X, Y, Z. And it should already be able to do it. It's just a bit clunky. It's not easily, it's not easy to find inside Evernote because we want to make sure that we don't disrupt, like search. Search is a very important feature or whatever, so we didn't want to replace it. But it's already possible. You can already do it, I think. Okay. Well, and I think that goes back to the bundling and unbundling thing for me in a really interesting way because the last phase of software has definitely been unbundling, right? We're back. We're in this like best in breed, kind of take one slice of something, do it super well,

and it's all just apps on your home screen. So it's not like the switching cost is super high from thing to thing. But when I'm working with an AI system, having there be one place that knows everything, again, leaving all of the like privacy and security and terrifying dystopian things out, that's really valuable, right? And so for me to know every, every confirmation number, every loyalty number, all of my email,

knowing all of that is in one place, becomes really valuable. And so I think it seems to me that if you think AI is going to become a bigger and bigger part of this, that would sort of expand the boundaries of what you feel like Evernote has to do because in order for you to be able to, like, return that kind of information, you just need a lot of stuff from me.

Yeah. The cool thing is that you always have control over it, right? So if you're not comfortable with sharing, I don't know, some document, for instance, you can just not put it on Evernote or on any software, and it won't be scanned, quote, unquote. The other thing is that we take this stuff incredibly seriously. So one of the reasons why we weren't particularly bold into creating AI search is because we want to make sure that people who didn't want it on their content could just not use it and not worry about it.

So that's one way to approach it. I think we're maybe a bit too conservative and too careful with it, but I think it's a good attention to have. Wait, actually, walk me through that. How do you put that in the product? Because again, you have a lot of people who use Evernote who have been putting stuff into it,

including in many cases very sensitive things. Like you keep hearing about people who put all their passwords in Evernote and then like, don't do that, people. Just don't, don't do that. Or at least use end-to-end encryption. Like, there is an end-to-end encryption feature on Evernote. Okay, that's what, if you have to...

But don't do that. Just don't do that. But then, so then to say, it's one thing to say, you know, we have a new layout for the formatting buttons. It's another thing to say, we now have an AI tool that is going to index everything you've ever put into Evernote and make it searchable. There's going to be a subset of people who are like,

oh, neat. And there's going to be a subset of people who are like, who are like, you did what now? Yeah, yeah. Like, how do you sequence that for those people? How do you roll that out in a way that doesn't terrify two-thirds of your users? Yeah. So this is a great example on how we take this seriously.

So we literally didn't take this vision to its full potential because we didn't want people to be scared and to be, like, frightened by what this could become. So we were very careful in building it. So right now, the way it works is if you don't, opt in to use AI-powered search, your notes are not shared with any sort of like third-party AI, which is an interesting approach because we could have said, like, yeah, don't worry, like the privacy policy of this AI tool is that they don't train anything on your content,

et cetera. So you're still safe, but we'll still do it, you know. So for an eye works like this, now we're always trying to ask people what they're feeling for these things are, because it would be so. So I'm curious to know if there is a way to build it in such a way that it's both frictionless and it works like super well, super easy to use, etc. And also remain super private and stuff like that. I think there are ways.

We just didn't have time yet to work. Do you think there are ways? I'm not convinced there are ways, but I'm glad to hear that you think there are. Well, for instance, if you could run a model locally, you could do it without sharing it with anybody else, which is one way to protect it, so that at least you know that everything is still on your device. And it's not like there is one model that is ingesting everybody's content. That's one way, but there are maybe other ways.

All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to talk about price, we're going to talk about AI, and we're going to talk about the future. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

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All right. We're back with the rest of my conversation with Federico Simianato. But let's talk about the two things people hate about Evernote. Okay. Just the last two product things. And then I want to talk a little bit about the future and then we'll get out of here. Again, as I said, I like to go on the Reddit, to subreddit every once in a while and just see what people hate about Evernote. Yeah.

I would say thing number one is speed, real or perceived. I think in general it's very hard to build a fast app, but it also seems like Evernote has struggled to be a fast app over the years. Why is it so hard to build Evernote fast? So I'll give you an example. When we built the new mobile navigation, one of the reasons was people want to do two things when they are on mobile. They either want to create something new or they want to retrieve something that is existing,

that maybe they created a few days ago on mobile or that maybe they just created on desktop. The other reason why we did it is that the old homepage was painfully slow and understandably because it did a lot of things. Like you had, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but you had these widgets that you could customize, et cetera, but of course, like every widget is a different query

for content that needs to be populated. Every section needs to be populated through a query. So one of the big reasons why we did it is because we wanted to make it faster, especially at launch. Like, it was like, I think, like four or five seconds on good devices to launch in the past. And now it's down to like less than a second on some good devices. So that's a big thing. So the other thing is just like technology. We need to improve the technology and we are, we did like for the whole last year and we're still doing.

Like as I told you, today we're launching a rent, which is this new synchronization engine. which also speeds up synchronization. So yeah, it comes down to the technology that you have and the way it works. I mean, it isn't. Like, I both believe you and still don't care and I still think all the apps should be faster. I know.

Is speed a trade-off to some of this other stuff that you're thinking about? Like, does as you build in all these new features and bring in lots of new kinds of stuff and activities people can do, like you mentioned every widget on the homepage adds more response time? Yeah.

Does all of that stuff, fight against making the app faster? Not necessarily, but I'll give you a close example. So there's this trade-off of I want to ever know to be faster, but also for some reason, I'm running like MacOS 13, and for my own understandable reasons, I don't want to abandon that. And so that prevents us from abandoning that OS, if there's a meaningful number of people. using it. So it's not like to have an excuse. I'm saying that there are a lot of things that we

could do even though there are no trade-offs and we are doing them. But in some cases, there are trade-offs. And so we always have to balance, okay, like how many people are we preventing from using in the future in order to be able to update a library that drops support for that operating system? You see, so it's kind of complex many times. Okay. And then the other thing is the price. Yeah. Most of the people who are mad at Evernote, especially right now, are mad because you just changed the price. Yeah. And you just changed what people get who don't pay for Evernote.

And the number of people who are like, I haven't been paying for Evernote, I've been using it for 15 years. And now I'm quitting because they're charging me money. I have found myself wondering if you're sitting there being like, yes, yes, precisely that's the point. We have to make money. If you use this for free, we're just losing money. Part of what you did in a big way when you bought Evernote was you changed the business model, right?

Like it charges very differently than it did. Yeah. The free tier is very different than it was. How do you think through the business, especially for individual note-taking, which as we talked about is a business a lot of people run away from because they just can't figure it out. How do you think about what it takes to make that a business right now? Yeah. I empathize with those people because it's not something that I don't understand, right? So we all use many different software products and it's not like we are happy when prices increase and same applies to me.

So it's not like we are here saying, yeah, we're going to raise the price and it's going to be great. It's more about identifying the way to make Evernot the most successful that we can in order for it to be sustainable so that we can guarantee the glorious future. That's the point, right? The whole reason we increase prices is so that Evernote would have a glorious future looking ahead. And so what we try to do in this situation is to have like a rigorous scientific approach. where we, if you think of the extremes, if you charge $0,000, everybody's going to be happy, but then Evernote is going to be dead very soon.

Yes. If you charge $1,000 per month, nobody's going to use Evernote anymore, and so it will die, too. So, of course, you have to find a balance. What I mean that we try to be scientific is that Evernote's prices weren't raised for seven years before we adjusted the pricing, and so we tried to rebalance that in a way that, that basically tempted to piss off the lowest amount of people that we could while increasing the Avernote's revenue as much as we could. And so we had to identify that delicate balance.

And we take this stuff very seriously because it's not like we're happy when we read people who are pissed at Evernote. And so that was a tricky thing to do. But eventually the cool thing, I can give you two interesting data points maybe. One thing is when we talk to customers, as I told you, it's so cool to observe how reasonable they are. Like, most people we talk to who use Evernote a lot, they're saying, yeah, I saw the new prices.

It's not like I'm happy about it. It's okay. I get a lot of value out of Evernote far more than what you charge me. Now, let's go back to talking about how we can make Evernote better. Very quickly the conversation shifts to, yeah, but okay, the price is fine, but let's talk about how to improve Evernote. Right, which is the conversation I'm sure you want to be having, right? Where it's like, how make it worth my money?

Exactly. Let's go. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. The other data point is the numbers. So when we look at how many people like left Evernote versus not, et cetera, of course, we are always looking at that number in order to make these decisions. And the cool thing is that Evernote's retention has never been higher than today.

So, yeah, of course, like if you look on Reddit, you might imagine something different. But actually, like, the situation is kind of good. So, yeah. So are you going to raise the price more then? Did you go too low? No, we don't have. Should you've lost a few more people? Concrete plans to do that.

Well, part of the reason I ask is I think we're in a moment right now where, A, everything is becoming a subscription. And so subscription fatigue is pretty real. And B, all the prices seem to go up all the time. And I think there is a sense of I'd be willing to pay for this. But the more I invest in it, the more. you as the company are going to be able to essentially like blackmail me out of my money because you have all my stuff and the harder it is to get out the more you're going to be able to take from me before a millennia leave and I think the fear of that trade is very real because

people keep going through it right like yeah I sign up for a streaming service and I've been using Spotify for 10 years and Spotify gets more expensive like every 15 minutes now and it sucks but I don't leave because it would be a giant pain to leave Spotify and that feels bad yeah And I think with something like Evernote, especially, you've gone through all this change recently. And like, do you get to the point where you say, okay, we've done this. This is how we set this thing up. It was a painful change. And now we're going to stop making those changes.

Or does it make sense to say, you know, we're going to do this slowly and raise prices as we need to, but try to make it kind of less painful each time? Yeah. Like it's the sort of rip the band-aid off approach versus like hope nobody notices when you raise prices a dollar. No, it's generally expensive, quote-unquote, to raise prices because you don't want to piece people off. And so you want to do it the fewer times you can. So we did it once and we hope to be good for years now. So that's the approach. Of course, like every once in a while, every service needs to adjust prices, even just for inflation.

you know, every once in a while, like, it compounds, and so it becomes important after a few years. But yeah, they're like... The other thing is that I'm pretty optimistic about how this kind of things balances itself. Like, competition is strong, both on no taking, but also on other softwares. And people are starting to build a sense for how to handle these things. So I don't think there's the case where you can just, like, sneak in a price increase, and people will not notice. That's true.

I think people will notice and will notice. And they will be, I'm very optimistic that people know how much value they're getting out of a product. And they are kind of intentional in how they behave and if they want to stay subscribed versus not. How competitive does this space feel to you right now? Hmm. It's, we see it as not very competitive because we focus a lot on our customers. And we try to build stuff. because they need it rather than, oh, look, what that other product is doing, we should build that.

At the same time, there's no denying that there are a lot of products that compete in the same arena. So we need to be careful about both things. The cool thing is that by using the approach of only caring about our customers, quote-unquote, is that you can build something unique. So you don't necessarily need to participate to the race, which is cool. Who else do you look at that you feel like is doing cool stuff right now? I take a lot of inspiration from stuff that is not necessarily note-taking software. So, for instance, I'm a big fan of Slack.

Oh my God, you are going to build work chat again. Don't build work chat again. I don't think we are. I think there's very little reason to do that, especially because, like, getting a feature parity or even just like to a reasonable percentage of the feature set that software like Slack have. it's hard. So I don't think I want to compete with them. But like for instance, slash comments, it's such a great UX that it's just like obvious that every software should have it. Another thing I'm a big fan of is like, you know, I don't know how it's called, maybe quick switcher.

You know how on Slack you hit like CMDK and you can you can like switch from one channel to the other. The same thing exists on Evernote. It's just CMDJ instead of K. It should be J everywhere, by the way, to anyone who's listening. Do you think so? It should be J. Because K is how you insert links in most apps. And it should be, J should be for switching. K should be for links. You don't know how many people.

I have deep religion on this. There are a lot of people who believe it's K and they're wrong. We can switch links if we want to. But one should be J and one should be K. And the fact that one is K when you have some text selected and the other one is K when you don't have text selected. Yeah. Bad UI.

I agree. I think it should be the same everywhere. I don't have any strong opinion on which one it should be. Then it should be J. Get on board with me. Let's do this. Team Command J. It's already J. That's good.

Perfect. I think it could be even more powerful. So first of all, people don't know about it. And I think it's so powerful that they should. And so I would like for people to know about it. The second thing is that I think it could do so much more. Like right now on Evernaut, you can use the quick switcher to navigate to a note or something like that. But I think you could use it to like delete a note, for instance.

Like you're inside a note, CMDJ, Dell. You write like D-E-L and you hit enter and it deletes the note. And you could do a bunch of different things with that, like share or something like that. That's a cool idea. That's another one that like, you know, you mentioned the kind of universal slash command thing that's starting to happen. That sort of thing is starting to happen more and more places where you bring up the kind of universal command bar and it lets you do stuff. Exactly. I think that's very cool.

Like Raycast, right? Yeah, exactly. I'm a huge fan of Alfred Rakeast and that archetype. But that is the kind of stuff that is so power-usory. And I think about a lot of people who use tools like Evernote, who are the folks who are not even necessarily learning the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste. Right? Like most people don't do that stuff.

And so I think with any tool like this, and it goes back to kind of what you're saying about customization, trying to build something that starts very simply. Yes. And then scales all the way up to what the most power users want. It's like, that's the dream. But I feel like from a actual interface perspective, it's so easy to make that into just a gigantic mess.

That actually helps no one. I think in that direction, I think we did kind of well the mobile navigation. I think that you want to give a good default that people who are not power users and don't care about being power users, they can still use it in a satisfying way. And then you can customize it if you're a problem. user and you don't want the create page to be your default home page, then you can just customize it and make it so that the note list is your home page. And it took a while to nail it, because

I think we tested nine different iterations, I think, of the new navigation and homepage. And then after those nine iterations, then we added the customization setting. So you can customize which page opens when you launch the app and how the navbar looks. You can switch between not and shortcuts in the Navvore. So I think that's a good approach. It's not necessarily perfect or finished yet, but it's good. I think that we should aim at doing the same thing everywhere, like where you have, for every feature you have a strong default,

and then those who want more customization can customize it. Okay, I buy that. So it feels like you're in a good place where kind of the basic infrastructure of Evernote is in a solid place. You've built a bunch of new stuff. You've shipped a bunch of new stuff. As you think to like the next 18 months, What are some of the big, not, you don't have to tell me about features.

You can't if you'd like to. But sort of big picture things that are like top of your mind right now. Either the things that are still at the top of the list that customers are asking you for or just like interesting things you want to work on in the next year or so. Any note taking software, but especially Evernote, needs to like nail the basic really well. And it doesn't do it every time. And I would like it to be perfect every time. And then you have collaboration and AI.

I think both are promising. both are not, they're not necessarily core to have or not. So I would like to split between things that are like core and sort of non-negotiable, almost like the two that we just mentioned. And then things that if done well could be very cool. And you kind of want both, right? You want stuff that's non-negotiable to be done perfectly. And then you want some stuff that's just cool and you want to have it in your tools.

And so stuff like One Click Sharing. Do you think any of those things are the... the thing that go out and get all the people who don't use a notes app. Because I think it's easy to forget when you care about this stuff that most people don't. And that most people don't use any of these tools. They just live in chaos and like monsters. And I don't like any of them. You just live your life with a million open tabs until your computer falls apart.

And there you are. So I think like is the next phase of this like if AI search gets really good, maybe that's how we start to get to those people? Have you started thinking about the non-Evernote users much yet? Yeah, I think for them, the most important thing is, as we were saying, is of use and a strong default. I think that they were not trying Evernote because it was a bit cumbersome to learn. Like, you land on Evernote, and then if the first thing you see is a page with widgets

and you're expecting to write notes, you're a bit like uncomfortable. You're thinking, yeah, how do I write a note here? And like, why is it so complicated? So I think that in order to attract them, you need to have strong use cases that they might not find elsewhere, but especially like a very good user experience. And so we're also working on that. All right. I'm excited to try it. Yeah.

All right. Well, we should go, but thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to Federico for coming on and nerding out about productivity apps with me. And thank you, as always, for listening.

Thank you, by the way, for all of the nice feedback we've gotten on this series. I've had fun and I've learned a ton, and it's been great to hear from everyone. everyone else who has as well. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or ever note alternatives that you swear are better and I should totally try. You can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline. 866, Verge 1-1, we love hearing from you. Productivity. We got other mini-series stuff coming up this fall. Lots going on. Keep while our questions coming. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. The Verge cast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media

podcast network. We'll be back on Tuesday and Friday with our regularly scheduled programming. We got a lot of reviews to talk about. We got a lot of Apple stuff to talk about. We got a lot more events coming up. Lots going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.