from Hacker News

Evernote to be acquired by Bending Spoons

by taldo on 11/16/22, 2:23 PM with 344 comments

  • by awill on 11/16/22, 7:34 PM

    They must be incredibly jealous of all the successful note taking apps (Notion, Ulysses, Bear, Craft). Evernote were first, and blew it. No other way to describe it.

    I dumped Evernote when they restricted their free accounts to 2 devices. Ironically I'm now paying for Ulysses, money I might have give to Evernote had they not been so awful to early adopters.

  • by offtotheraces on 11/16/22, 4:45 PM

    This is going to be a disaster - Bending Spoons is not a good actor:

    “let’s talk about Bending Spoons’ business model. The basic concept is very simple:

    - Find a solid app that someone else built and buy it from them (see Splice (acquired from GoPro) and 30 Day Fitness)

    - Optimize the monetization of said app (by implementing from scratch or fine-tuning existing subscriptions), thereby driving higher lifetime value (LTV)

    - Take that higher LTV and use it to bid on expensive ad inventory (on Google, Facebook, Apple Search) where you can acquire more users (aka drive more downloads) - i.e. leverage performance marketing for growth

    - Convert those new downloads to paying users

    - Massively ramp revenues and cash flow by combining the new users + the better monetization

    - Use the new cash flow - plus the debt from those lovely Italian banks - to fund the next acquisition

    - Lather, rinse, repeat

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with this business model. What differentiates Bending Spoons, though, is how they do it.

    Remini - Bending Spoons’ new app that the press is gushing over - is $10 a WEEK. And Splice, the app that started it all? That’ll set you back a cool $5/week.

    Does anyone really think it’s appropriate to pay $10 a week for a photo editing app?”

    https://open.substack.com/pub/impassionedmoderate/p/ryan-rey...

  • by jef_leppard on 11/16/22, 4:02 PM

    I learned three things watching EN snatch defeat from the jaws of victory:

    1) There is almost never a case for a total ground up rewrite of your core product. Just don’t do it.

    2) Don’t abandon the users who made you successful in the first place. They’re the ones who advocate for you and get your foot in the door.

    3) real time google docs style collaborative editing is table stakes for this software category. Build your V1 with it in mind. Otherwise you’ll have to do a rewrite later. See 1.

  • by c-smile on 11/16/22, 4:49 PM

    Yeah.

    > And enterprises of great pith and moment, > With this regard, their currents turn awry, > And lose the name of action.

    Hamlet, William Shakespeare

    I was employee #3 at original Evernote, when we were just implementing that brilliant idea.

    Here is the photo of pretty much precise moment when Evernote was born: https://notes.sciter.com/2017/09/11/motivation-and-a-bit-of-...

    What a memory, I really miss that atmosphere ...

  • by dahdum on 11/16/22, 4:09 PM

    I loved Evernote and was a paying subscriber right up until they changed their TOS to let their employees read all my notes to work on ad targeting. They backpedaled after a while but trust was lost, I cancelled immediately. I have no sympathy for their failure.

  • by egypturnash on 11/16/22, 3:39 PM

    At long last, Evernote takes an Incredible Journey to be broken down for parts by its new owner. Can't get any more fucked up than it already has been, it went from being an important part of my daily workflow to a place of pain. The rewrite is part of why my last graphic novel ground to a halt, I was using EN to collaborate on scripts with my partner and it is just agony to use any more. I cancelled my subscription a few years back and really have not found anything to fill that hole. Every theoretical replacement is either a shitty sluggish web view, owned by a megacorporation I don't want to get involved with, or both.

    Personally I think the best thing the new owners could do would be to dig up the pre-EN10 codebase, get it compiling again, and make that available. I would resubscribe in a heartbeat.

  • by mblevin on 11/16/22, 4:43 PM

    The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.

    I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.

    From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.

    It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.

    Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.

  • by isaacfrond on 11/16/22, 3:16 PM

    I really liked Evernote. Yearly subscription instead of the monthly Netflix like prices that ever half baked app asks for these days. Integration amongst all my devices phone, table, various desktops. All nice. And no further dependency on Microsoft, Google or Meta.

    Product development stalled a long time ago though. I do hope this thing stays in the air, cause I got a lot of notes in there.

  • by gmoore on 11/16/22, 3:15 PM

    I do miss the old Evernote. Many of the 'enhancements' over the last few years just get in the way of the main benifit of the tool.

  • by gumby on 11/16/22, 3:47 PM

    Ah, I drove past their office just last week and noticed all the lights were out and the parking lot was empty.

    At the time I assumed they'd actually gone under, but now I realise that that would have been the "there is no spoon" scenario.

  • by pyrophane on 11/16/22, 11:31 PM

    Bit late to the thread. This is a hbit of a shame but also quite clarifying.

    I had been holding on to EN as there is no app that does quite what it does quite as well. I liked being able to mix notes, to-dos, captured images, web content, etc, and organize it into folders. The fact that they are working towards a Linux client helped, as well.

    What I didn't like was their prioritizing of features that were aimed at enterprise customers at the expense of everything else. The world didn't really need another collaborative text editor for teams with chat, and I never saw EN being anyone's choice for that.

    It is a shame. Seems like yet another company that could have made a nice living for its employees by servicing their natural customer base but was instead destroyed by the ambitions imposed on them by their investors.

  • by frans on 11/16/22, 8:46 PM

    These are mostly negative reviews of Evernote. Yet, I do like the product and I am yet to find a replacement that offers these must-haves:

    * Multiple tags per note

    * OCR/search on attachments

    * Web clipping (full page and individual sections)

    * Mail to Evernote (with attachments)

    * Decent WYSIWYG

    * Good scanning support ("scannable" app)

    It did have its problems and did lose 3 or 4 notes due to syncing issues but today's web version is usable and the product seems stable now. I agree that the acquisition is probably not good news. So, if anyone knows of a replacement with these features, pls reply!

  • by brailsafe on 11/17/22, 4:18 AM

    Wow, I'm sure I'm not alone in having completely forgot about Evernote after importing all my notes into Bear. They fell off my radar with such force that I literally haven't even thought of them in years, except for one moment months ago when I noticed their logo on maybe a physical notepad sitting in some old bookstore window. Other than that, I have not even seen the logo anywhere else. Like others, it was the device restriction, but also just terribly glitchy note editing/pasting etc.. Moving to Bear (which has also now stagnated pretty hard, but is still good) I was just stoked on the fact that editing was a smooth experience and it kind of got out of my way.

  • by arczyx on 11/17/22, 12:12 AM

    This is unrelated to the news, but does anyone here ever get unknown charge from "Google Play Bending Spoons"? It doesn't appear in the Google Transaction History, but my ewallet provider confirmed it was from Google Play.

    Someone has asked about it in Google Play Help and got no meaningful answer https://support.google.com/googleplay/thread/159064766/help-...

  • by dang on 11/16/22, 7:23 PM

    Related ongoing thread:

    Why Evernote failed to realize its potential (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33626047 - Nov 2022 (143 comments)

  • by hirundo on 11/16/22, 4:29 PM

    The only reason I've stuck with Evernote is because it scans all of my old paperwork and lets me search by the OCRed text. Without it, so many years of personal data would be locked in images I'd never have time to eyeball.

    Please someone release me from this foul daemon by suggesting an alternative with this key feature.

  • by whalesalad on 11/16/22, 3:16 PM

    imagine being at the local tech happy hour and someone asks you where you work and you have to yell over the loud music "BENDING SPOONS, I'M A L3 SRE" ... "what?" ... "BENDING. SPOONS."

  • by dpedu on 11/16/22, 4:08 PM

    I used to work for a company that rented a portion of Evernote's HQ, in Redwood City. Nice office and location. Evernote eventually recovered and kicked us out. Just my personal piece of nostalgia.

  • by ericd on 11/16/22, 4:32 PM

    Can we all please go back to buying stable desktop software without continuous upgrade nags, now?

  • by techky on 11/16/22, 9:00 PM

    I still hate that Evernote bought Skitch. Really wish the new team would revive it or sell it off to an interested dev.

  • by Vibgyor5 on 11/17/22, 5:06 AM

    For anyone looking for an INCREDIBLE note-taking app, check out UpNote. https://getupnote.com/

    - Sleek UX/UI. It does not overoptimize there either. Just the right amount of perfect for me.

    - Importantly, cross-platform: as someone on Android and Mac, it works seamlessly

    - $24.99 Lifetime pricing. No subscription BS.

    - Developers pay close attention to user feedback but they're also not dumping features there left, right, and center. Most updates are targeted at making this faster than bigger. (It is already fast enough)

    - No "Social/collaborative" BS. I want my notes to be mine.

    - Export capability to PDF, HTML etc.

    Disclaimer: No, I have no affiliation with the product. Just a super-happy user who'd like to recommend this to everyone. I have tried many note-taking apps out there but this one really hits it out of the park

  • by criddell on 11/16/22, 3:59 PM

    I guess Phil Libin's plan to make a company that could last 100 years didn't quite work out.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/how-evernotes-phil-libin-pla...

  • by nathanaldensr on 11/16/22, 3:12 PM

    How the mighty have fallen.

    Who the heck are Bending Spoons?

  • by fairity on 11/16/22, 6:34 PM

    Can someone educate me on the difficulties in raising money from your user base?

    It seems like businesses like this should give fair warning to their users before transactions like this occur to make sure they don't have a better option than shutting down or selling out.

    Evernote has tens of millions of paying users. It doesn't seem too far-fetched to believe that each user would fork over on average $50 (as an investment, presumably) to just freeze product development, fix bugs, and improve performance.

    Put another way, I'm pretty sure Evernote could have raised hundreds of millions from their user base.

    Why not try that approach? Are there regulatory issues that make it unfeasible?

  • by jdshaffer on 11/16/22, 11:20 PM

    I had enjoyed and even paid for Evernote for several years, until their "restructuring" and they dropped the export of everything but "Evernote Database"... I think they have since restored an export to HTML, but that always was the biggest problem for me... I want to be able to export (and backup) my notes in TXT or MD, not just HTML or their proprietary format.

    No idea if they've since added in more reasonable export features, but it was a dealbreaker for me (a big plain-text fan).

  • by xablau on 11/16/22, 7:57 PM

    "At Bending Spoons, we create our own cutting-edge technologies and products."

    https://bendingspoons.com/

  • by nathias on 11/16/22, 3:14 PM

    evernote was one of the programs that trapped me, it took some effort to finally migrate my data (I'm now using md files/ obsidian for mobile frontend synced with syncthing)

  • by amh999 on 11/17/22, 6:31 PM

    I'm adding here in case Evernote reads this thread.

    I used to use Evernote extensively, mainly for web clipping, but also filing things away.

    Nowadays I rarely use anything except the mobile apps, or the clipping browser plugins, but Evernote is essential to me for permanent filing which I can search at any time. I would be lost without it and am willing to keep paying for it. I'm sure other people want it for note keeping and I have no idea how well that works. What does work is their document/photo scanning app, which I use regularly.

    A long time ago, the founder made much of the fact that my data was fully portable and provided the api details to enable me to export it out of Evernote completely. I think this is very important, especially for a company that may be seen as less viable for a while. I was disappointed, the other day, that I could no longer use Evernote's published query language to search using a boolean query. This may well be because the facility is now a pay-extra feature. I have to say that adding on little features and then asking users to pay for them is the worst thing when I am already a premium user! Please stop doing this.

    That's my two penn'orth.

  • by filmgirlcw on 11/17/22, 12:48 AM

    I was a paid Evernote user who didn’t use the service much but paid anyway, partially because I liked the company, until they raised prices in 2016 by like 40% for the premium plan.

    I’m one of those whale customers that SaaS companies love because I’m fairly price insensitive and I often don’t have tons of usage or support needs. For a solid 5 or 6 years, I’d been giving Evernote $50 a year, even though I mostly used other services. But raising the price 40% (and neutering the free plan that was the only reason they had as many users as they did) was enough that even I took the time to cancel.

    It’s a sad end to what was at one time such a good (if significantly overvalued) product, but the writing has been on the wall for 6 years.

    OneNote is more than good enough for most people who want an Evernote sort of note system and for people who are more particular and want to pay, the new wave of single brain apps is just far, far better.

    When Evernote tried expanding into food and all these other areas, that was a sign things were getting out of control.

    I used to be mad about what happened to Skitch, but CleanShot has finally filled that void from me from back before Evernote neutered and abandoned it.

  • by ergonaught on 11/16/22, 4:12 PM

    Result being that today I'll migrate everything out of Evernote and cancel my subscription.

    That sucks.

  • by j-bos on 11/16/22, 3:30 PM

    Welp, guess it's time to finally cancel the subscription and move to Obsidian.

  • by gertrunde on 11/16/22, 5:25 PM

    I was a bit like "Bending Spoons? Who?", so I followed the link to their website and looked at the products page...

    Then vast amounts of scrolling down that giant page of marketing fluff looking for anything resembling useful information. Then the tab got closed as "Meh. Not for me then."

    Why must they make these pages pretend to be some sort of glossy coffee table magazine?

  • by Nursie on 11/16/22, 4:40 PM

    Evernote came preinstalled On my second android phone, I think a Galaxy Note 2. It could not be removed and demanded to be allowed to update itself constantly.

    I’ll never know whether it was any good, because it annoyed me from the word go.

    If you’re a cool, tech-crowd oriented tool, for god’s sake don’t let Samsung install you as a ‘system’ app…

  • by awinder on 11/16/22, 4:10 PM

    Looks like these folks raised a big round (for the first funding round no less) last month:

    https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bending-spoons-raises-340-mil...

    So fund-to-acquire?

  • by vxNsr on 11/16/22, 3:49 PM

    Bending spoon’s website is 100% bloat so that doesn’t bode well for a revitalized Evernote.

  • by SergeAx on 11/16/22, 8:54 PM

    I am a many years paying user of Evernote. Startup time on Android became painfully slow several years ago. On Windows I just keep the app always open. Otherwise I don't see any benefit of switching to another app.

  • by idlewords on 11/16/22, 3:21 PM

    gets checkbook ready

  • by 627467 on 11/17/22, 2:09 AM

    The main reason I never stopped using Evernote is that somehow I got "stuck" on a personal plan that never really got updated for at least 7 years.

    I live in a high inflation country and right now I'm paying the equivalent of 0.75usd/year.

    There's has been several moments through the years that I planned to at least backup my notes to another service but thought: I am paying, so surely I won't lose my notes?

  • by floatinglotus on 11/16/22, 10:07 PM

    Another lesson from Evernote: if your primary business is digital (ie software) don’t make a corporate strategy of selling physical things (notebooks).

  • by dotcoma on 11/16/22, 7:47 PM

    Any idea of how much Bending Spoons paid for Evernote ?

  • by nashashmi on 11/16/22, 8:46 PM

    I used to love Google Notebook. And then they shut it down. Evernote offered to take in that google notebook data and integrate it into their system.

    Now evernote is being bought. I need to migrate my data out. Evernote was a great company early on. Not sure why they lost the race. But I think it has something to do with task managers, like trello, and heavy data collectors like database in notion.

  • by pyrophane on 11/16/22, 4:56 PM

    I'm not familiar with Bending Spoons. Anyone able to give me a bit more context on what this will likely mean for the future of the product?

  • by mvkel on 11/18/22, 12:22 AM

    The biggest mistake Evernote made was not looking at how their customers used the product.

    They insisted on this to emphasize privacy (fair enough), but never stopped to consider 1. If their customers even cared 2. How they would learn how the product they were building was actually used.

    The result is a note app that tries to do everything good, so it does nothing well.

  • by another-reader on 11/17/22, 1:08 AM

    I opened up File Explorer I and I see I made a full dump of Evernote on 30 July 2019. I was a paying customer for a few years but decided at the time to dump it before it was too late.

    To this day, the one thing I truly truly miss from Evernote was the web archive. They had the best at the time, and I have yet to see it matched.

    So, it seems from the thread that I should give it a try again?

  • by rfreiberger on 11/17/22, 2:27 AM

    I used to be a huge fan of Evernote, but a few things made me look at other solutions. One issue is the capturing of code was automatically formatted and I was burned a few times keeping my code snippets for reference.

    Been using Notion for a few years but I prefer the tree view and there's not many note apps that work well with this method.

  • by lenova on 11/17/22, 3:12 AM

    Everytime Evernote gets mentioend on HN, I love to promote my favorite replacement:

    https://getupnote.com/

    Right now, it's more of Bear app replacement than an Evernote replacement, but I feel like they're heading in the right direction.

  • by mehrzad on 11/16/22, 3:34 PM

    Interesting to see this now, I was thinking of switching to a new platform for tasks and notes because Evernote’s free tier is quite limited and Apple Reminders often doesn’t even show the correct reminder if there are multiple open. I was just reading about Evernote’s profitability last night.

  • by Manjuuu on 11/16/22, 8:54 PM

  • by rvbissell on 11/16/22, 9:55 PM

    As much as I love (and still pay for) Evernote, I've just now realized that I haven't added to my collection there over 6 months. Without intending to, I seem to have largely switched to just saving websites with the "SingleFile" extension for Firefox.

  • by jshaqaw on 11/16/22, 10:10 PM

    Evernote is still the only product that meets my workflow needs. Hope they don’t mess it up.

  • by rodolphoarruda on 11/16/22, 9:09 PM

    EN (happy) customer since 2014 here. I just hope the acquiring company won't kill it.

  • by irrational on 11/16/22, 8:18 PM

    I stopped using evernote when it kept having some sort of syncing issues and lost what I had written over and over again. Maybe they have fixed it, but I've lost any trust in them, so, I'm not willing to risk it.

  • by deafpolygon on 11/17/22, 10:55 AM

    Looks like the acquisition is for the customer base and data (for AI training). Bending Spoons is leaning on AI tech and Evernote has both customers and data they need for training their AI.

  • by Kye on 11/16/22, 4:59 PM

    Good thing I moved off Evernote years ago. I use Simplenote since it seems to be in good hands with Automattic. They use it internally, so it's not likely to go away.

  • by RefSnow on 11/17/22, 3:29 AM

    I used evernote for a long time. I migrated to Joplin seeking greater control and security. I use it to this day and never thought about going back to Evernote.

  • by tzury on 11/17/22, 12:38 AM

    a) Happy for Evernote and hope they have found a new home. This app was pioneering the realm and leading for quite some time!

    b) Obsidian [1] simplified the zettelkasten [2], that anyone must give it a chance. Just like you must give Vim.

        1. https://obsidian.md/

    2. https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

  • by skilled on 11/16/22, 10:17 PM

    Is that an announcement or a marketing jargon dictionary? I had forgotten this app even exists, but I can see why.

  • by hk1337 on 11/17/22, 12:30 AM

    If you didn’t know “Bending Spoons” was an organization, the title would come across a bit differently.

  • by calabaza222 on 11/16/22, 5:06 PM

    I use paper & pencil. Works fine :D

  • by woofwoofwoof on 11/17/22, 8:09 AM

    They were such a cool company to work for in the Valley when they started started.

  • by jbaczuk on 11/16/22, 4:11 PM

    I didn't realize you could acquire a company just by bending some spoons...

  • by etempleton on 11/16/22, 4:47 PM

    on MacOS/iOS, Bear was the best note taking app I found. If you need cross platform capability and/or want free and open source I like Joplin a lot as well.

  • by unixhero on 11/16/22, 7:34 PM

    I for one released on simplenote.cpm for my noting needs

  • by imwillofficial on 11/17/22, 1:52 AM

    Remember when Evernote was the shit? Oh how the mighty have fallen

  • by dools on 11/16/22, 7:50 PM

    Ever-ishNote