The First Million is Always the Hardest

May 21st, 2009

crowd

I’m delighted to announce that, less than a year after leaving closed beta, Evernote now has more than one million registered users! That’s a lot of people. It’s enough to make us the 10th largest city in the US or the 155th largest country in the world (take that, Djibouti)! Think of it this way: if you queued up every Evernote user single-file, there would be a million people in that line.

We wanted to make Evernote useful to anyone who values what’s in their brains, people that have substantive things that they want to remember for work, school or play. I’m really happy (and relieved) that there are enough of you out there to give us such a quickly growing business.

It took New York City 250 years to grow to a million people. It took AOL nine years. Twitter got to a million users in about a year and a half. We did it in less than one.

And, of course, we got here the hard way.

The conventional wisdom on how to make a fast-growing Internet service goes something like this: (1) make it web-only, (2) load it up with active social and viral features, (3) go after the young people who’ll try anything new, and (4) don’t worry about revenue. We did the exact opposite: native downloadable software, nothing inherently social (yet!), a user base made up of college students and older professionals, and a business model that’s got us pointed at profitability in the not-too-distant future.

So, if you’re one of the thirty people who works at Evernote: thanks for the insanely hard work this past year! You just built something that a million people use! How cool is that?

If you’re one of the million people who use Evernote: we can only say thank you for finding us and for sticking with us! We’ve got a ton of great stuff coming out soon, which will make your external brain the envy of all your friends.

If you’re one of the other six billion, six hundred and thirty three million people on the planet: come on in, we’re saving you a spot.