Evernote Closes Market Down, Will Link To Actual Manufacturers
Evernote calls it focusing on its core business. Others might see it as signs of trouble. The once popular startup, considered to be a unicorn in Silicon Valley, has shut down many of the products and services it has considered dead weight. The latest to get the ax isn't even a product technically speaking but a marketplace. Evernote Market, the place where you can order and buy physical products and objects related to the note-taking service, is shutting down, freeing Evernote to concentrate on what it does best.
Truth be told, Evernote Market probably didn't make much sense when it launched, and probably still doesn't to some. Some of those products even seemed antithetical to Evernote's goal of storing everything in digital form. Longtime but now former CEO Phil Libin justified this by saying that reducing paper use was never the goal. Reducing stupid paper use was. So hello Evernote Moleskine notebooks and Evernote Post-its and even an Evernote commuter bag!
That said, the products themselves may not have been the problem for Evernote. The startup reveals that it was able to sell 800,000 Moleskine notebooks, 300,000 Adonit Jot Script styluses, and 20,000 ScanSnap scanners, just to name a few. No, the problem was that Evernote was actually the one doing the brunt of the work selling and fulfilling orders, the stuff that retailers and product makers are better at doing.
Evernote, however, is a software company, not a retailer. So instead of selling these products itself, it will just let its partners do so, which they already do anyway. So Evernote "Smart" Moleskine notebooks aren't going away. Evernote will just stop selling them itself directly to customers. It says it looks forward to get more partners for future integrations. That is, if there are still partners willing to jump aboard at this rather turbulent time for the company.
Evernote itself is undergoing a transition, one that is seeing it shed off not just products but even people, willingly or not. Over the past few months, Evernote has closed different products, both loved and unknown, calling into question the future of the company itself. For now, however, it has rid itself of yet another excess baggage that could hopefully lighten its burden, enough to pick up the pieces and bring back its glory days.
SOURCE: Evernote