How Evernote introduced and converted me to Notion
Software is hard. You have to have a super-appealing, easy-to-use service that gets out of the way and meets and solves a great human need and/or goal.
For the longest time, there was no such thing as freemium. It was pay to play, all the way, baby. See how well that worked out for Adobe in the 90’s and early 2000’s golden age of web design? Argh matey!
Thankfully, many SaaS orgs wised up and introduced the freemium option. Meaning, yes you can use this software for free in more of a limited fashion. This opened up opportunities for users to freely explore without commitment which in turn opens up many more business opportunities after users get invested enough.
For example, I’m not sure I can ever leave Spotify, even though I suffered through their horrible UX for quite a while until they actually started caring more about it than merely fonts and icons. After starting out as a freemium user and converting to a paying customer for nearly 15 years now, it’s worth noting that just one of my 30+ playlists has over 101 hours of my favorite hand-selected, curated songs on it!
Evernote was an instrumental note-taking tool
That being said, I̵’̵v̵e̵ ̵b̵e̵e̵n̵ I was an Evernote user since 2010. In fact my very first note was created May 28, 2010 and it was an audio recording of a job hunt app idea I had.
I started using Evernote as a freemium user, and it quickly became instrumental in helping me capture my thoughts and ideas on the fly for my then fledgling UX podcast, User Defenders. As the podcast grew and the value I gained from having Evernote on multiple devices, I became a paying premium subscriber for years. Evernote was a companion for me in the creation of vital systems (we live and die by them) and templates which I leaned heavily upon through my complete production lifecycle of every single episode.
After pausing my show in 2022, I no longer needed to be a premium subscriber, so I downgraded to freemium which at the time only limited my device access count from 3+ to 2 for the nearly 2k notes I had already created.
Let the Fleecing Begin
My deterioration of trust with Evernote began last year when they started bombarding me to become a paying subscriber again…every. single. time I opened and closed the app, on whatever device I was on.
I understand business constraints, so I’m not harping on the fact that they need to make money, what really bothered me was the employment of dark patterns and fake urgency they used to try and make me feel like I’ll never be able to get that enticing upgrade offer back…
…until tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that.
I called Evernote out on this on LinkedIn last year after finally being annoyed enough by the hundreds of clicks on the essentially “No thanks, I prefer a life with limits” button.
The two comments I received on that post were pure gold:
“The worst kind of urgency is fake urgency.”
“I believe this is called confirshaming.”
When Evernote realized their annoying, literal no-brainer “strategy” obviously wasn’t working, they decided to become more heavy-handed and forceful in their tactics.
I can almost hear the CEO’s big-idea declaration in the board meeting,
“Let’s just not let our free users make any more notes until those cheapskates pay up!”
And all the yes-men join in one chorus singing,
“♪♪ Hell, yeah! ♪♪”
And with that, my limit and trust of my previously favorite note-taking tool had been reached.
I’m just super-surprised that the money-hungry CEO/C-Suite over there didn’t think about actually grandfathering in folks like me who’ve been long-time faithful users and evangelists of their product instead of spontaneously combusting my trust and championing of their tool.
Under New Ownership
Some of this may have to do with the fact that Evernote’s data management has been taken over officially by their external group of companies, for example the Italian one called Bending Spoon, or as I refer to them, Silver Spoons. I’m cautious to assume all the problems aforementioned are because of this. Again, the dark pattern pushiness started last year before they announced this takeover. Just thought it’d be important to mention this here, and so you can pat me on the back for my valiant research efforts.
A sudden Notion to discover a better note-taking tool
I had heard of Notion before, but never felt compelled to try…until now.
I was blown away at how simple it was to migrate all of my Evernote notes to my free account I had just created (after they worked with me to fix the migration bug in their import that I discovered and reported immediately).
I was pleasantly surprised at the level of excellence and thoughtful design in the UI. It’s WAY better in every way (e.g. creating, organizing, tagging, filtering, editing, etc.) Where’ve you been all my digital note-taking life?! It’s device agnostic, including no device limit with free account as it’s all web-based (think Figma). So far, no limits on my note count either.
If/when the time comes, I would actually gladly pay for this service based on just how much better my note-taking experience has been and now is with Notion.
Had I not had such a bad experience and been left with such a bad taste in my mouth with Evernote’s greed and lack of user-centric philosophy, I would never have sought out and experienced a world’s better note-taking tool known as Notion.
Thanks, Evernote! 🙏
In Conclusion
At the start of this article, I touched on how hard it is to have a successful SaaS company. I know first-hand because I’ve worked for many SaaS companies, and currently do now. You have to constantly balance user needs and business needs.
In Evernote’s case, the current business needs are far outweighing any and all user needs, and as a result, they are now actually repelling their users (in my case, for good) with this move to again without warning, completely shut out and shut down their existing users.
Since this move is recent, it may take a while to bite them right in the @$$, but I assure you…it will. Especially when there’s much better products and offerings out there.
Remember QuarkXpress? Exactly.
In closing, I really just want to ask two very important questions:
- What’s the cost of keeping an existing user, vs gaining a new one?
- What are the odds a company can ever win back a disgruntled and dejected user, especially again after they find a superior (in every way) product offering?
I hope these are pondered by any SaaS company, but especially for Evernote…I hope it’s been duly noted.
Every word, image, article title and idea presented here was generated with real intelligence from a real human.
