You’ve heard of cult movies. Cult bands, too. But did you ever hear of a business app that had its own cult following? Now you have, owing to a recent story by BloombergBusinessweek. The story highlights the incredible popularity of Evernote, a five-year-old organization and note-taking app that has swiftly grown its own cult of fervent users. These users aren’t shy about praising the application to the uninitiated. And Evernote’s chief executive officer isn’t boasting when he says he’d one day like his organization app to boast more than 1 billion followers.
Devoted fans
According to the Bloomberg BusinessWeek story, Evernote currently boasts more than 50 million users, amazing for an app that’s only been around for five years. Even more remarkable is the fact that new users are signing at a pace of 100,000 a day. That makes chief executive officer Phil Libin’s goal of reaching 1 billion users across the globe seem more feasible than farfetched.
Why the praise?
Why so much praise for what is, essentially, a simple note-taking application? The key might be the way Evernote allows us to manage increasingly busy lives. With Evernote, users can enter a note, image, Web page, video or audio recording into one column, save it in a notebook in another and search for it in a third. And fans of Evernote praise the app’s search function. It even allows you to search for words embedded in images. With this simple set-up, then, it’s easy to search for upcoming meetings, phone calls, anniversaries and your son’s piano recital.
The secret
This popularity might seem unusual to people who still take notes on pen and paper. However, fans of Evernote point out that new users become devotees quickly for just one reason: Evernote helps make sense of increasingly busy lives. It’s tough to keep track of children’s football practices, work meetings, lunch with friends, and family outings. Evernote, though, allows users to get this done efficiently, all with, basically, just three columns on a screen. The Evernote promise is a simple, but powerful, one: If you use this app, you’ll never inadvertently forget a phone call, meeting or anniversary again. Looking at it this way, that goal of 1 billion users doesn’t seem so farfetched.