The company is passing 15 million users, with users signing up at the rate of more than a million a month. And this for a company that doesn't have any salespeople. Evernote doesn't do anything to encourage people to pay it, which is one of the reasons it's so popular. "When you eliminate trying to get people to pay you, your goals change," says Sinkov. "Our role is educational, not promotional. All we need to do is tell people what Evernote does."
The irony and genius of that nonsales strategy, of course, are that so far, at least, it has resulted in terrific sales. The long-term conversion rate can now be tracked out to three years, and it turns out to be more than 15 percent. Will new users keep upgrading at these rates? Kuperman, the entrepreneur and early Evernote user, thinks Evernote has adopted the right approach. "People end up feeling they need to pay as a thank-you for having such a great product," he says. "And Evernote has the benefit of not having to spend much money marketing. Every time I use Evernote, someone asks me what I'm doing, and then they want to try it out. I'm doing their marketing."
One thing Libin says he refuses to worry about is competition. And there are, in fact, vaguely competitive products and services. Most notable among them is Microsoft's OneNote, which has some of the same features and comes with Microsoft Office. But it doesn't provide Evernote's effortless toss-in-any-kind-of-note-on-any-device environment and hasn't achieved nearly the traction that Evernote has. Nevertheless, it's inevitable that more and better competitors will emerge. When that happens, Evernote users will be able to painlessly take their memories and leave, because Libin has insisted that the information be made easy to export, so that no one feels locked in to the service. "We used to have a saying in the Soviet Union: 'Any country that you're free to leave, you're free to live in,'" he says. "We want our users to feel free to leave."
Instead of defending the company's flanks, Libin is forging ahead into new markets. "There are millions in Thailand who will be getting smartphones next year," says Dave Engberg, the CTO and another CoreStreet alumnus. Japan has already been an unmitigated triumph for the company. It now accounts for 20 percent of Evernote's user base, compared with 35 percent in the U.S., and Japanese users are on average twice as active as are U.S. users. "There's an archival culture there," says Hitoshi Hokamura, who heads the company's Japan efforts.
Evernote is a cult in Tokyo. Bookstores have Evernote sections—there are 32 Japanese books on Evernote—and when Libin is there, he is sometimes stopped in the street by fans. NTT Docomo, the largest cell-phone service provider in Japan, provides Evernote's premium service for free with its Android phones, a big draw. (And Docomo's VC arm invested $2 million in Evernote.) Elsewhere in the world, the adoption of Evernote tends to parallel the growth in smartphones, which would suggest a pretty steep growth curve internationally over the next several years.
What's more, a vast ecosystem of products and services has sprung up around Evernote. Computers, phones, tablets, printers, and scanners have Evernote compatibility built into them, in some cases via a physical, dedicated Evernote button. (It doesn't hurt that many leading electronics vendors are based in Japan.) When you take your brand-new HTC tablet out of the box and turn it on, it immediately asks you to sign in to Evernote. Some 6,000 software developers have tied or are working on tying their apps and services into Evernote.
And as an unusual tribute, Boston University has taken to listing Libin as a distinguished alumnus, even though he never graduated. Libin is being a good sport about it but with an ulterior motive. "I'd like to be the first person in history to get an honorary bachelor's degree," he says. It would be easier than mastering chess or the violin.
For now, Libin, who is truly serious about the 100-year thing, is thinking hard about how not to end up another flavor of the month in the fast-churning world of Internet apps. Part of the answer, he believes, is to expand the company beyond simply being a way to remember stuff. "We want to go from being one app to being a family of apps, all of which have something to do with memory," he says. "Our test for whether we should build something is: Will 100 million people use it right away?" This year, the company released its second product, Evernote Peek, an iPad app that turns the tablet into a flash-card system for studying. It became the most popular educational iPad app virtually overnight. (K-12 schools are already going gaga over Evernote, and many that provide laptops to students are installing Evernote—it's never too early to start recording those memories.)
More products will be coming. The company announced in September that it's opening a studio in Austin—the term studio is borrowed from the computer-game industry, which tends to set up fairly independent shops to develop new games. Libin says he wants to follow that model. "It will be a local team that can develop pride in what it does," he says. Libin plans to open additional studios in Singapore and somewhere in Europe—presumably he will be trying out the food in different countries there to make his choice.
In the long term, Libin wants to figure out how to do more to help people remember, learn, understand, and communicate. Noting that images can be more evocative than text, he would like to see Evernote be able to recognize objects and faces in photographs, and perhaps one day even recognize smells. "Your own brain," says Libin, "might end up being the last place you search for information."
