Evernote was once on a verge of bankruptcy and got saved by an e-mail in the middle of the night. Today, they have over 80 million users, out of which over 1.4 million are paying customers.
But what is it, really? To me, it always was a “note taking” app, and even after I read up on the “smile curve” – I could not get myself to start using it on a daily basis. To be honest, even after talking to Phil Libin himself at our very own Arctic15 event, I was not convinced to give it another shot. After all, I had my Moleskine and it took notes just as well.
However, Evernote was relentless in trying to get me. First, they recruited Moleskine to sell Evernote branded notes, so that gave me a clue that perhaps I should give it a try. Yet, I stood strong and did not budge.
Neither did Evernote, as they sent the most powerful weapon they could my way – their users. It just so happens that my good friend from high school, learned that I had the chance to interview Phil Libin, after which he made it his mission to convince me to start using the app. To do so, he talked to me for an hour and then said he will make an instructional video on how one could optimize his or her life with Evernote. That, he did. He was such a fan that he made a 13 minute video, just to convince me.
In fact, he did such a good job that I now use it everyday both for work and personal matters. This is an excellent lesson for other startups that want to be successful, you need to make sure that your users are your biggest advocates, once you achieve that – the rest is easy.
Now that I was an avid user, I wanted to know more about what Evernote has in store for the Nordic/Baltic region. So when visiting this years Dublin Web Summit we got in touch with Linda Kozlowski, VP of International Marketing at Evernote and apparently the Nordic/Baltic region is somewhat of a special case.
According to Kozlowski, unlike anywhere else, a lot of the Evernote users in the region are focusing on business. There is a lot of knowledge workers, intellectual property and tech savvy people. In fact, they were surprised to quite how well the Evernote Business was adopting in the region.
“We see a lot of B2B startups in the Nordics that are engaging with Evernote, compared to some of our other markets. There is definitely a strong enterprise software startups using us. Which I think is quite cool and quite unique, compared to other markets.” says Kozlowski.
This, creates an interest for Evernote to work more closely with startups in the region both for feedback and as potential partners. Kozlowski told Arcticstartup that they “… have already had three customers from the Nordics come to [their] offices and sit down with [them] for a full learning session. ”
With that in mind, I wanted to see just how easy it is to get in touch with Evernote, should you have an idea or wanted to have a conversation and when I asked the question, Kozlowski said: “Please! I will give them my e-mail. We really want to develop third party relationships with Evernote. Something that is going to provide value to users, so they can certainly go and look at our developers page. But if they are interested in some more in-depth conversations, then the best thing would be to have them work directly with myself or Cristina Riesen or Emma Page to talk about what their ideas are.”
Oh and if you want to take your Evernote love to the next level, then you can always try to get a job and apparently the easiest way to do so is at events. Kozlowski told us that a lot of the people that they meet come to them at the events and start engaging with the company by providing feedback and suggestions. If there is a good match, you might just get the job.
