The path of Evernote growth

Evernote is a pretty good note-taking software. Although it has not yet flown into the ordinary people's home, but in the IT circle, but already has a considerable visibility, like Dropbox, this is another way to earn a reputation by free model.

Recently, at an entrepreneur conference in the United States, CEO Libin outlined Evernote's undertaking and its product philosophy, and revealed the latest operating data, very well worth seeing:

The best products are sure to succeed

The trend of the Yun Yu, fast-changing science and technology seems to have a famous saying, "The best products are not necessarily successful", opportunities and market opportunity is sometimes more important. Libin doesn't think so, he says, for entrepreneurs:

"It's sinister, it's all nonsense, and who's to tell you that he just wants to watch you fail"

On the surface, the best product does not necessarily succeed. In fact, when people say this to an entrepreneur, the real meaning is that you need to allocate resources and time to good products and other things, such as marketing. Evernote the contrary, we put all the money and energy into doing good products, when there is a good product, "everything else is free", the company has a very simple business model:

1. Make a great product

2. Make money from it

For a product, free may be a disaster, but also may be a great decision, how to grasp this degree, is the art of free.

Provide core value to users

Note-taking software Evernote is a model for implementing a free model. The product launches a free version on multiple platforms (multi-platform support: IPhone, Mac, Windows, Web, Android) and charges 5 USD/month for paid members who need more features.

(Evernote for IPhone)

Evernote helps you keep track of all the valuable things, summaries, articles, pictures, handwritten notes, audio clips, etc. When you need, you can use keywords, tags, notebooks or other categories to search, data in mobile phones, PCs and other platforms at any time synchronization.

Although similar products include Google Notebook, Microsoft OneNote, and so on, Evernote's multi-platform, instant sync, ease of use, and so on are still enough to keep it competitive, and as people get more and more used to moving data, Old OneNote and Google no longer update notebook.

Add value to product with time

Evernote's 1th free version of the June 2008 online, users began to grow steadily. The product interior does not design like Dropbox virus invite mechanism, the new user is through the word of mouth to spread more and more, this kind of development pattern determines the user's high quality.

Libin a brief review of Evernote's history: As of May 2008, a total of 31,334 users registered. It lost 50% in June, and about 11,000 of the remaining users became loyal users and logged in at least 1 times a month.

Over 30% of the retention rate proves the attractiveness of Evernote to users, and the Libin approved tool value is:

The more you use it, the greater the value it brings to you.

For a two-year Evernote user, it will be the first choice to get information. Libin joked that some heavy user dependence on Evernote could already be compared to the home car.

Long-term charging scheme

10 months after the launch of the product, that is, in March 2009, Evernote ushered in the 1th instalment of paid members, a total of 60 users, that is, 300 U.S. dollars.

' Our users are like fermented cheese or wine, and as the time to use the product increases, each month becomes better and more likely to pay for the product, ' says Libin.

The key to attracting old users to pay is to continue to introduce new features. March 2009, paid members only 0.5%, 6 months later, rose to 1%, 1 years later, 2%, 16 months later, 4%. Now 20% of Evernote's first members have evolved into paying subscribers.

Cost control

Initially, the average maintenance cost for each active user was 50 cents. Now it's down to 8-9 cents. These variable base costs include: server hardware, software, mainframe, network, storage backup, power, etc., accounting for about 21% of the total cost. Customer service accounted for 27%, network operations accounted for 52%.

The company started making profits in January 2009, and now each active user contributes 11 cents a month, which may be why it can successfully finance 3 rounds.

PostScript：

At present, although Evernote is very large, but also small software, write this article before, a little bit worried about the introduction of foreign excellent service, perhaps a bit of this ambivalence. Remember just read Nanyi introduction Dropbox's entrepreneurial experience, a few days later it on the "link is reset."

Using the Evernote process, I still have to be happy and trembling.