Why Evernote had to scale back

Launched in 2008 by Phil Libin and Stephen Pachikov, Evernote quickly became the darling of the productive-tech world. By 2011, it had 11 million users and was named "the 2011 Company of the Year" by Inc Magazine. Fast forward five years and Evernote has announced another year of office closings (in South Korea) and head count reductions (in Tokyo and Latin America). How does instant and expansive success lead to another year of centralization?

The answer: Libin's vision, his story for Evernote, was too vague. Even in that 2011 Inc Magazine article heralding his genius, Libin's vision was not articulate.

Libin has different ways of explaining it: It's your brain offloaded to a server. It's Google for the Web of your life. It's a spotlight on the dark matter of your universe. It's a tool for converting your smartphone from a time killer to a time saver. OK, so Evernote is a little hard to explain...

In short, the company tried to run without having a tangible destination in mind. Over the years, they launched Evernote Peek for studying flash cards, Evernote Work Chat for instant messaging, Evernote Food for storing recipes, and Evernote Hello for adding context on how you met the contacts in your phone. They added products assuming that the Evernote brand was established enough to extend beyond its flagship note-taking product.

Today, under the new leadership of CEO Chris O'Neill, Evernote is centralizing the company's operations on a path to profitability, shutting down offices while keeping head count stable globally. He proudly touts that its number of paying subscribers is growing about 40 percent each year. This confirms the founders' original hypothesis that the company would grow from product stickiness and customer retention; that freemium customers would become paying customers the longer they used Evernote and the riskier it became for them to lose their volume of stored notes. Cheers, Chris!

But most importantly for its future, Evernote has refined the brand's story, which is now front and center on the company's website.

REMEMBER EVERYTHING.

Inspiration strikes anywhere. Evernote lets you capture, nurture, and share your ideas across any device.

While the story is intentionally broad, it is not vague. The tagline has a key action verb, "remember," and the subtext clarifies that Evernote will focus on connecting your thoughts across devices. Evernote Food, Hello, and Peek line extensions technically fit under this vision, but the company is smart to focus on integrating all of your thoughts into one product rather than separating them into multiple products. My suggestion for Chris is to continue leveraging the core technology for more customers and customers' needs to generate brand and business scale. This should accelerate the stickiness and retention of customers of the existing product without generating more project complexities.

Along these lines, IFTTT could become Evernote's best ally. Already, IFTTT offers numerous ideas on how to utilize the core Evernote product as a platform for remembering everything. With IFTTT, epic Twitter tweets from your favorite celebs, Shazam'd songs from summer 2016, Spotify'd songs from that party you met your boyfriend, and Gmail emails with your travel reservations can all make their way into your "Remember Everything" notebook.

In closing, business leaders can learn from the Evernote story. A vaguely ambitious vision, as inspiring and energizing it may seem to the dreamers, does not set a solid business strategy. Find your story, articulate it simply, and build a business model to support it. Your brand can have leverage beyond the core product, but that core must be captured for everyone to remember. ;)

--

David Sylvia, this post's author, is the founder of Crusoe World, a brand consultancy with all-in-one life and business strategies for leaders of a new world. After traveling to 23 countries and growing billion-dollar brands, David and Crusoe coach bold leaders with life advice, business model, and brand story frameworks so one day they may make a mark on the world. #findyourstory and #exploremore