“How are you going to make something great unless you make it for yourself? How are you even gonna know that it’s great? You make something you love, and then you find the market that it fits.” That doesn’t make any sense: your only competitive advantage is to make something great,” he said. You can’t approach it that way: ‘What should I build? Let me go and see what the market needs!’. Product/market fit is kinda a bullshit concept. He said that Evernote’s own staff remain the main testing group for new features, and warned startup founders to trust their own instincts more when coming up with a new digital service. “What’s the biggest impact we can have? We realised that the biggest impact we can have is have work suck less.” We don’t really talk about Evernote for your hobbies any more,” he said. Last year we made he decision to really focus on work.

Libin said that Evernote has rethought the core of its business, drilling down on work and businesses, rather than consumer note-taking. Other companies have this love-hate relationship with developers. “If a third-party developer makes something great that gives people a great experience, we make more money. “We’re not worried about someone making something so great with Evernote as a developer that it pulls eyeballs away from Evernote,” he said. Libin added that Evernote’s business model also means it does not end up in conflict with its community of developers. If we were doing 42 revenue tricks, how could you possibly sustain that for 100 years?” It takes longer to get started, but ultimately it gives us a shot at building a 100-year startup. You can’t pull a lever and be all of a sudden ‘we’re going to show more ads’. Our fundamental belief is that we make money when our users say ‘we love this product and we want to pay for it’,” said Libin. “We don’t data-mine your information, we’re not selling you to anyone. “I think it can go up in some countries and probably down in some countries,” he said.Įvernote currently has between eight and nine million paying users, according to its chief executive, who reaffirmed his belief that premium subscriptions rather than advertising are the best business model for his company. Libin said that Evernote has spent the last few months “trying to work out what the right price is” and plans to announce its plans early in 2015. “I know it was the wrong price because we picked it at random seven years ago and never changed it, so our chances of getting it right were very slim!”

Evernote subscription price