/Interview/ Q&A: Phil Libin
15/10/2009 | Filed under Discover > Interview
Evernote is a note-taking service that aims to become the “external brain” of its millions of wordwide users. CEO Phil Libin reveals how the company plans to build on its runaway success
.net: What are some of the best uses of Evernote you’ve heard of?
PL: The longer people stay with Evernote, the more uses they find for it. I use it for just about everything myself: remembering where I parked my car, taking pictures of people and name badges at conventions, storing all my work documents so I can access them from any computer or phone, clipping all my web research, keeping track of birthdays and gift ideas, etc. Most of my favourite use examples come from our community, especially the incredibly creative professional applications. I know a home designer that uses Evernote to research and present room concepts, a minister that uses it for sermons, a best-selling author that’s writing his next book in Evernote, a chef that uses it for everything food-related. But my two favourite overheard-on-Twitter uses-cases are more personal: there’s a guy who uses our voice notes to record his newborn daughter’s first words and someone else who uses Evernote, “to remember my sins, so I can confess them at Church.” I guess someone needs to balance out the minister.
.net: What distinguishes Evernote from other note-taking services, for example Microsoft OneNote, Zoho Notebook and Yojimbo?
PL: To be honest, we are not experts in other companies' products. Microsoft OneNote, Zoho Notebook, and Yojimbo are excellent and each has a very vocal and excited user-base. We’ve focused on creating a new category with Evernote: your external brain. Evernote is not really a note taking application; “notes” are an important but relatively small part of all the stuff that people put into Evernote. We want to be the permanent, trusted and ubiquitous place for all of your memories. Every time something happens that you want to remember, just pop it into Evernote and rest assured that you’ll always be able to find it a day, a week or a decade later. From any phone or computer. Wherever you are. For the rest of your life.
.net: What kind of technology is involved in the tool?
PL: There’s lots of technology under the hood, but we try to make it as unobtrusive as possible and really focus on the user experience. Still, the vast majority of our time, money and energy go into developing and improving our technology in four main areas:
(1) Capture - Grab any memory using whatever device is at close at hand in whatever format is the most natural. We don’t wan’t you to think, “should I bother putting this in Evernote?” If you got that far, it should already be in there!
(2) Sync - Stop thinking about computers, platforms, phones, cameras, files, or networks. Just grab the nearest device and chances are you can use it to capture a memory as it happens or find anything you have stored in Evernote. This is *really* hard to get right, but I think Evernote has the most hassle-free sync technology on the market.
(3) Find - We let you search by just about anything you can think of: text, tags, words in images, geo location, time, etc. Our image search capability in particular is unequalled in its ability to deal with real world images - handwritten and printed text strewn about poor-quality camera phone snapshots. This part is a black art, there’s over a decade of work in it.
(4) Integrate - We have a robust and complete API, along with all of the associated services, so that other developers can build Evernote-enabled applications. There are over 500 third-party developers currently working on Evernote apps and some really great ones have just been released.
.net: Which feature are you most proud of and why?
PL: Without question our sexiest feature is Evernote’s amazing ability to recognise printed and handwritten text in real-world images. However, I think I’m most proud of the synchronisation. I can literally reach out my hand and take any device and access my notes on it. Lots of big companies talk about transparent and heterogeneous synchronisation, but we really got it working. Going one step further, our API has extended that synchronisation to new devices. For example, with the Eye-Fi integration, I can take a photo with my digital camera and instantly see that image on my iPhone or laptop.
.net: How successful has Evernote proven since the launch?
PL: We’ve had a blast and greatly exceeded our own expectations. It has been a year and a half since our first closed-beta launch, and we’ve just passed 1.6 million users! We’re adding new servers to the data centre every other week to keep up with demand. We’re getting to be pretty popular all over the world. I’m heading over to Japan next week to figure out why Evernote usage there has been spiking in the past couple of months, sign some contracts, and drink some sake.
.net: How many users are taking advantage of Evernote’s mobile capabilities?
PL: More than half of our users use Evernote from both a desktop and a mobile client. We’re one of the very few real “convergence” apps, but it makes sense: half of your life happens to you while you’re sitting in front of your computer an the other half happens when you’re out and about with your phone - Evernote is there for all of it. The third half happens while you’re sleeping, but I’m bad with fractions.
.net: What percentage of users is going for the paid-for version?
PL: One half of one percent of everyone who uses Evernote buys the premium version in their first month. After a year, it’s up to about 8%. After a year and a half, it’s over 12%. I’ll let you know the two-year stats when we get there. The longer you use Evernote the more likely you are to sign up for premium. That’s the best sign I have that we made a good product.
.net: How’s Evernote doing financially?
PL: We’re doing well. The “freemium” business model is also firing on all cylinders; we’ve been running at a positive gross margin - covering 100% of our variable costs, including user-scalable salaries - for the past eight months and our revenue is growing faster than our users. We’re ahead of schedule to be profitable late next year. We’re mostly spending venture capital on coffee.
.net: You’ve struck a lot of deals with companies like Eye-Fi, Sony Ericsson, and Fujitsu. How much convincing did they need?
PL: We’ve got a great one-man biz dev department named Alex, but we don’t actually do a lot of outbound business development. Most of the time, we get a call from someone inside of a big company who says, “I’m a big fan of Evernote and have an idea of something we can do together...” I’m very optimistic about our partnerships - there are some really compelling joint products about to be launched! Eye-Fi are our next door neighbours and we steal their public Wifi connections when ours is flaky. I never used to carry a point-and-shoot camera around before, but the Evernote / Eye-Fi partnership has made my camera an indispensable part of my backpack.
.net: In your opinion, what are the main problems with the service at the moment that you’d like to improve?
PL: A major goal for us over the next few months is improving the initial experience. As with most free products, many people that try it do so only once and don’t return. Our statistics show that if a person uses Evernote two or three times, then our long-term retention rate is almost 100%. So, we’re looking for ways to make Evernote more accessible and understandable to the first time user.
.net: What’s next for Evernote?
PL: We’re going global! We will be launching versions of Evernote in French, German, Italian, and Spanish this year - that’s in addition to Russian, which we already launched. After that will be Japanese and numerous additional languages. We’re also rolling out a *major* upgrade to our Windows client and new versions of Evernote for Android and other mobile phones (we already have iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Palm Pre). A couple of months ago we took the first steps towards having robust sharing and collaboration features and we’ll be doing a lot more of this down the road. Everyone can benefit from having a second brain.
Phil Libin
Job CEO of Evernote
Age 37
Education Computer Science at Boston University
Previous career Founder and president of CoreStreet; founder and CEO of Engine 5; principal architect and chief technologist for applications at Vignette Corporation; software architect at ATG; software engineer at Exchange Applications
Online twitter.com/plibin
Bookmark with:
