'Everything was done with intent,' he said.

None of that structure existed at all.”īut another former employee notes that the seemingly scattershot approach was not as random as it appeared. “There was no prioritization circled down. “It was kind of like move on to the next shiny thing, let’s just talk about the next thing we’re going to do,” another former employee said. Skitch, an app that lets you add captions or markups to photos, has a three-star rating (out of five) on the Apple App Store, while Work Chat, the new messaging feature it released last year, is seeing a lot of negative feedback on its own forum.Įvernote Food, a standalone app that lets users share recipes and food photos, entirely shut down last month, as did other experimental products like Evernote Hello and Peek. PenUltimate, a handwriting app Evernote acquired in 2012, received a lot of complaints when it rolled out an updated version for the first time in 2014, causing the company to issue an apology and another update within a week. That resulted in inferior products with lots of bugs, drawing bad reviews and heavy criticism from its users. Instead of focusing on its core note-taking product and on converting users to the paid service, Evernote spent more time releasing a bunch of new products and features that only helped it grab news headlines, they said. Several former employees believe a lack of focus hampered Evernote's growth.

It's a sobering reality check about the business challenges that can derail even the hottest tech sensations. But most people we spoke to seem to agree that the company has failed to take advantage of its red-hot growth and make enough money from much of its huge user base - and is starting to show early signs of being an ailing unicorn. “They want to go public, and, to do that, the focus on revenue now has to be a ruthless prioritization on things that make money.”ĭepending on where you stand, Evernote is either a sinking ship or a maturing company going through a normal transition cycle. “It’s going to be a tough road ahead,” one source familiar with the matter told us.

Earlier this year, it replaced its long-time CEO Phil Libin with former Google exec Chris O’Neill. Evernote has laid off roughly 18% of its workforce in the past nine months, and said it will shut down three of its 10 global offices last week.

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