How brands can leverage Evernote

Launched in 2008 by founder and CEO Phil Libin, Evernote is at heart a note-taking and archiving app that allows users to save notes and clippings in an online archive. Although the company picked up a small but devoted following in the early years, things were “a little tough” until it received its first round of venture funding, US$6.5 million from Troika Dialog  and DoCoMo Capital in 2009, the company's vice-president of international operations, Dmitry Stavisky, told Campaign Asia-Pacific.

“There was a time near the end of 2008 when we came close to closing, there were just 30 of us then, and there was a real threat that we won't be able to make the next paycheck,” he recalled.

Today the company has more than 34 million users, about 5 per cent of whom are paying for premium accounts. Evernote recently (3 May) received further funding of US$70 million from Meritech Capital and CBC Capital based on a US$1 billion valuation. It now has around 200 employees and offices in seven countries including China, Japan and Korea. On 9 May, Evernote launched a dedicated Chinese-language version, Yinxiang Biji.

Libin wrote in a blogpost that Evernote plans to use the funding to “Ramp the speed of product improvements, expand internationally, and make future strategic acquisitions”.

There never was a ‘watershed’ moment for Evernote, Stavisky said. The company enjoyed an influx of users when Google shut down its online notetaking and archiving tool, Google Notebook, in 2010. Otherwise it saw steady growth tied to the rise of the smartphone, as users turned to Evernote to synchronise and save data gleaned from multiple devices. “A mega-trend we’re riding right now is BYOD [bring your own device], which means users are desperate for ways to keep their data available across multiple devices,” he said.

According to Stavisky, Evernote has no intention of selling either data or advertising. The company intends to build its business around a 'freemium' model—making the bulk of its income purely from premium subscriptions. Its strategy is built around being a “100-year” company that performs an essential service for hundreds of millions of users over their lifetimes.

“We aim to be as useful as we can possibly be to as many people as we can reach,” Stavisky said. With this goal in mind, Evernote has created features to “make memory searchable”, such as its mobile apps and searchable-image functions. Images saved to Evernote are scanned for text, which allows users to find archived notes by searching for text that appears in the images.

Evernote’s entire marketing strategy is built around word-of-mouth recommendations. It publishes user testimonials on the many ways they use Evernote to travel, cook, research and even run businesses. It appoints everyday people who use Evernote effectively as ambassadors and even organises live events such as tutorials to help spread the word.

Evernote’s main avenue for user growth is mobile (75 per cent), but according to Libin, about 45 per cent of mobile users also use the company's desktop service.

The window of opportunity for brands lies in Evernote’s developer ecosystem, in which Evernote has invested to help increase its usefulness. The same API (application programming interface) Evernote uses for its mobile apps is made available to developers, and so far more than 10,000 third-party API developers have launched more than 1,200 public integrations.

Brands are free to tap into this ecosystem at no charge. And if their apps are good enough, Evernote will promote them via Evernote Trunk, where it highlights new and notable apps, and via small banner ads across in Evernote desktop ads (the only ads Evernote runs).

“We don’t mine user-data, but a survey in the US has indicated that Evernote users are tilted toward being more educated, more affluent, technology-savvy and younger,” said Stavisky.

Some apps created by brands include Muji’s Notebook, which true to its brand promise of simplicity, is an easy-to-use notebook app for iPad that allows freehand sketches and text notes. It’s also able to convert handwriting directly into text and save notes to the user’s Evernote account.

LG, Canon, Fujitsu and Brother have developed apps that allow users to send scanned images from their scanners directly to Evernote, while HTC and Nokia’s apps sync their mobile devices with Evernote. Evernote also has a partnership with Sony. Each Sony Vaio computer comes with a special version of Evernote preinstalled.

Quoting Phil Libin, Stavisky said, “The easiest way to get 1 million people paying is to get 1 billion people using,” and as long as brands create apps that make Evernote useful to more people, they’re perfectly welcome.