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The Evernote Blog

The Evernote Blog

The First Million is Always the Hardest

Product updates | By Phil Libin
 

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.

  • http://www.calidui.com California DUI

    evernote is one of the best application i have ever used

  • Andrew Vevers

    Congratulations for what is rapidly becoming a must have “birthright” tool for me and my PC. Only been a user for 6 months but already finding it indespensible. I look forward to future innovations.

    Thanks for an excellent service and interesting podcast!

    Andrew

  • http://www.vidasassin.com/ Ernest London

    Every time that I use the application I find better ways, either by myself or by coming back to learn new “tricks” from the community.

    Thanks,

    Ernest

  • http://www.enlightenmentpathsir.com Arnaud

    This is the first time I hear of Evernote. Congrats for the GOOD work done!!! I do not know whether it is available in India, will check out.

  • http://www.richesofthemind.com Subconscious Mind

    Congrats guys. Great site, great content, great community. So I guess the ‘race’ is on to hit the 2 million mark. Or is it the 10 million mark? lol. At this rate that won’t be very hard to do.

  • http://www.howtocontrolboils.com marketing psychology

    Your app is definitely filling a need in the market. Please don’t sacrifice any current features as you bring on new ones. Speed and portability are your strong points, so amplify on them even more.

    I’m one of those “young” retirees who use your product to keep market news where I can get to it and analyze it quickly to make buy and sell decisions. It definitely works for me.

  • mark foley

    Putting back some of the features removed from EN Version 2 would add further to the user base (me, for example!) Lots of that million probably don’t know what they are missing out on.

    Cheers

  • http://www.somanydoors.ca Spencer

    Awesome software. I love the desktop frontend with the cloud/web interface backend. It is exactly what I want out of cloud software. I just wish there was a Linux client. I’m on a Mac right now, but I have Linux machine’s I’d love to integrate into my Evernote experience. Surely source could allow this?

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