Features
As Evernote's Cult Grows, the Business Market Beckons
(Corrects in fifth paragraph the rate at which Evernote is adding users)
Photograph by Damien Maloney for Bloomberg BusinessweekZerkel, a productivity consultant, recommends Evernote to nearly all of his clients
It happens gradually, devoted fans insist. Once you get it, they say, you live and die by Evernote, the five-year-old, everything-in-one-place personal organization application that is hyped by its creators as your “external brain.”
Joshua Zerkel has seen it happen again and again—and he’s lived it to some degree, too. The 37-year-old San Franciscan came across Evernote a few years ago and was attracted to its ability to work across platforms more cleanly than the note-taking software he’d been using. Today he’s one of several dozen “Evernote Ambassadors”—power users who volunteer to spread the word about its wonders. Zerkel is a productivity consultant for businesses and individuals, and he recommends Evernote to almost all his clients; leads Evernote training sessions; and just published his second e-book about best Evernote practices, Evernote @ Work. The company pays him nothing, yet even he finds some users a little over the top. “There are definitely Evernote junkies,” he says.
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Ted Barnett is one of them. A serial entrepreneur who now works as chief operating officer of digital publisher Byliner, Barnett answered questions about his Evernote usage before they could be asked, with a crisp outline he’d created in Evernote. He heard of the app from a friend in 2009 and was attracted to the idea that he could enter and access his data, stored in the cloud, from any smartphone, tablet, or computer. His first entry recorded vital health statistics he entered via his phone during a doctor visit.
“I have a terrible memory,” Barnett says, explaining that he used to rely largely on physical notebooks to keep track of ideas, until he started adding those to Evernote. Then he added a cheat sheet of parents’ names at his daughter’s school. Now, at the end of a work meeting, he’ll photograph the whiteboard, store that picture in Evernote, add some thoughts and questions, and send it around to his team. On his recent vacation in Istanbul, he used Evernote to create a one-man Fodor’s guide to the city for friends. Basically, the more Barnett used Evernote, the more he thought of new ways to use it.
Evernote says it has 50 million users around the world (a third in the U.S.) and is adding 100,000 a day. Operating on a “freemium” model, the company makes money primarily from the sliver of that user base that pays $45 a year, or $5 a month, for a souped-up version with more storage capacity. It has been profitable, and though it’s investing heavily now, it expects to be profitable again soon. But with $251 million in venture backing and a valuation estimated at $1 billion, Evernote has greater ambitions. Chief Executive Officer Phil Libin talks about reaching a billion users; others at the company freely throw around the phrase “the Evernote lifestyle.”
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That’s a lot of expectations for an experience that boils down to three columns in a browser window. You type, or clip or upload a new “note” (an image, a recording, or a Web page) into the right-hand column; store it in a “notebook” listed on the left-hand side; and browse or search in the middle. The promise is that Evernote saves your ideas, documents your meetings, archives articles, reminds you what your kid wants for Christmas, and coughs up the business card of Plaid Jacket Guy from that conference in Scottsdale. In addition to segregating such material into notebooks, users can organize it with tags, but don’t have to.
Evernote’s search function, with optical character recognition that even picks up words within pictures, is impressively accurate and speedy. The effectiveness of this function is crucial, because the willingness to dump work and personal material in one place is central to Evernote’s worldview.
“I always hated the term life/work balance,” Libin, 41, declares during an interview at Evernote’s offices in Redwood City, Calif. “I never had a distinction between work and personal life. I had a BlackBerry (BBRY) from Day One, and people would say, ‘This is terrible, now you check your e-mail at 11 o’clock at night.’ Yeah, but that’s great! I love that I can check my e-mail at 11 o’clock at night.”
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