Libin and his team moved from Boston to Silicon Valley, where Libin found the culture vastly more welcoming of his offbeat, high-tech entrepreneurial style than Boston had ever been. After the teams merged, the new company was left with enough money for a year or so. That would be long enough to get a product up and running, if everyone was focused. To that end, Libin cut loose most of the projects Pachikov's team had been working on to concentrate on the key characteristics of his revolutionary memory aid: free-form capture of any type of information, simple associative retrieval, super-smartphone-friendly, fun to use.
In 2008, the company launched a "private beta" version of the software intended mostly for Silicon Valley insiders. The night before, at 3 a.m.—apparently the time at which he produces his key insights—Libin realized that the team had forgotten to put together any sort of tutorial. So Libin threw together and narrated a quick demo and put it on YouTube. "I've gotten death threats over it," he says. "I've been said to have the most annoying voice ever heard anywhere in the world." That video would eventually get more than a million hits.
Word started to get around pockets of Silicon Valley about this cool new app that helped you remember stuff. It worked more or less as Libin had envisioned. Most types of information can be added to Evernote in a few seconds, from any computer or smartphone. You can type in a note, handwrite a note on a touchscreen, take a photo with your phone's camera, record an audio conversation, put in a Web address, save all or part of a webpage, or forward an e-mail to Evernote. The software takes it from there, sucking the data into Evernote's servers, which are backed up religiously, as well as storing it on your computer. The system also labels the incoming data with any information that could come in handy, including when it was added and where you were when you added it. Thanks to the software developed by Pachikov's team, any visible text in a photo becomes searchable. "Before I go to the supermarket, I take a snapshot of the list my wife has on the refrigerator," says Daniel Kuperman, CEO of Aprix Solutions, a Silicon Valley Web start-up focused on helping companies manage marketing efforts, and an early user of Evernote.
You can add titles or tags to the notes, though you don't have to. You can also file notes—any piece of information in Evernote is a "note"—in different "notebooks," and share these notebooks or individual notes with others. To find your note later, you need recall only one key point about it and then search on that. Want to remember that restaurant you went to? Search on French toast, because that's what you had there, and you took a picture of the menu. Or on Seattle, because that's where you were. Or on Janet, because she was with you, and you took a picture of her. Or on black holes, because you remember clipping an online article about them that day, and once you know the date, you can bring up other notes from that day. "It's the electronic version of having something at the tip of your tongue," says Libin.
To the delight of Silicon Valleyites, the tool is a boon at meetings. You can type notes while recording audio and cap it off by taking a picture of the whiteboard. And all of it winds up in Evernote, ready for easy recall. By tying Evernote into other services, you can have even more ways of finding things: Audio recordings can be transcribed (at extra cost) to allow searching by anything said at a meeting, and one add-on tool even allows for searching photos by color—if all you remember about a meeting was that the other fellow was wearing an orange sweater, you will be able to dig it up. "Evernote finds the way your mind works and gives you more and more hooks into your memories," says Andrew Sinkov, a childhood friend of Libin's who worked at CoreStreet and now heads up Evernote's marketing.
No wonder the Silicon Valley crowd loves it—these are people who grew up navigating constant multiple streams of information. "So many things are happening in life that make me end up with more data," says early Evernote devotee Jason Freedman, who co-founded FlightCaster, a Web-based travel-information service, and recently launched an online real estate start-up, 42Floors. "Evernote is the technology version of what the Container Store does for my bedroom," he says. "It's a simple solution that brings sanity to the situation."
Despite the enthusiastic reception for Evernote's beta version, which went public in mid-2008, the company's cash was running out fast, and Libin struggled to raise more. VCs confronted him with a host of concerns. For starters, Evernote didn't play off social networks at a time when Silicon Valley was looking for the next Facebook. Plus, Evernote eschewed the widespread wisdom that everything was moving to the cloud. It relied on native apps—software that does most of the work while running on your computer or smartphone instead of letting an Internet server somewhere else handle the job. Though there's a Web version, Evernote is mostly intended to run as a native app, because it runs a lot faster that way, and Libin was convinced that a snappy response was critical to delivering a satisfying memory-retrieval experience.
There was one more concern, and it was a big one. Evernote was being pitched as a so-called freemium service. In other words, people could either use it for free or upgrade to a paid premium version, which is how the company would make money. So far, so good; the freemium model was seen as a smart one. The problem was that, unlike virtually all other entrepreneurs relying on that model, Libin refused to cripple the free version, removing the incentive to upgrade to the paid version. You could pay $5 a month and get additional file storage, but why would anyone do that? asked the VCs. The free version was full featured and offered generous storage.
