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The Evernote Blog

The First Million is Always the Hardest

Product updates | By Phil Libin
 

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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.

  • Mitja

    Congratulations from Slovenia! Can’t function without you! P.S. Any chance for a native s60 application?

  • Ed

    Uhm, guys, you released Evernote 1.x in 2004. That means 5 years to grow to 1M. I am glad you are growing and love the product – I am one of the paid subscribers, but you don’t get to call it ground zero just because 3.x was new a year ago. MS is releasing a new search engine next week. Do they get to claim millions of new users the day after because all of their existing users will be on the new version?

    • Phil Libin

      Ed,

      I’m glad you remember Evernote for Windows 1.x, but we started again from scratch in 2008 and changed pretty much everything except the name :) . We’re really happy that many of our “original” users have made the switch, but they only represent about 2% of our current base – they were far-sighted, not numerous! Even if we subtract out all of the people who used Evernote before 2008, we still get over one million new users in less than a year!

  • Darren Lim

    This Is Awesome!

  • http://petandmeds.com Carl

    Nice job guys and gals at Evernote, keep up the good
    pace. :)

  • Bhavesh Patel

    Just want to say congratulations. I’ve been an EverNote user for a while, but stopped using it for a while because it wasn’t feeling like a total solution to me. However, I just decided to get back on to it and having watched the new Intro Video, I’m totally excited about it again. The web based functionality, and the handwriting recognition are awesome. Can’t wait to integrate this into my workflow.

    Thanks for making a great product. I’m sure I’ll find a way to integrate this into a GTD type system very nicely.

    Bhavesh

  • http://www.copano.blogspot.com copano

    CONGRATS! but please development a version for TIGER OS! i need it!!!!

  • http://www.LACriminalLawyer.net Los Angeles Criminal Lawyers

    congrats!i love evernote very much

  • Allen

    My computer crashed and I am unable to install Evernote on my new computer. When I try to download, I get a message stating that my email address and my password are taken. I need to keep my email address, but could, if necessary, change my password. How can I install Evernote on my new computer? Thanks

  • Chris

    hmmm… so you got there the hard way… Interesting… I wonder if Techcrunch had anything to do with it… hmmmmmm…

  • Chris

    One word…. Android.

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