Reaching one million registered users is an important milestone for any startup. At the very least, it suggests that it is pointed in the right direction. Evernote, the app which helps you remember things you find on the Web or take photos of with your phone, just hit one million registered users a couple days ago, about a year after its public launch in June, 2008 and six months after it reached 500,000 registered users. The company raised $4.5 million at the end of last year.
Evernote’s growth is not rocket-like by any means, but it is steady and consistent. CEO Phil Libin shared some detailed stats on Evernote’s progress. You might know Evernote from its iPhone app, which won a Crunchie award and has been downloaded around one million times on its own. But the company also has Windows, and Mac clients, as well as a Web browser version. The breakdown by users is 36 percent on the Windows client (which is what Evernote launched first), 28 percent on the Mac, 20 percent on the iPhone, 11 percent on the Web, 2 percent on the Blackberry, and 1 percent on other mobile devices.
The desktop clients have been download about 1.7 million times and can be used in conjunction with the iPhone app. These numbers are instructive because the number of downloads (2.7 million total across all platforms) does not equal the number of registered users (1 million). So the next time a startup is touting how many downloads it has, cut that number by one half to one third just to get to signups.
Then you have to cut by another third. Registered users are great, but how many are actually active? Those are a company’s real users. Over the past 30 days, Evernote is tracking at about 360,000 active users, or a little more than a third of registered users. Evernote’s active users might be relatively small, but they are pretty active. Over the past year or so, they’ve created 36 million notes, or about 100 notes each. Notes can come in the form of Web clips (38 percent), text notes (35 percent), photos (17.5 percent), PDF documents (6 percent), voice notes (1.5 percent), digital ink (0.67 percent), and more.
The more active users Evernote gets, the more it can convert into paying premium subscribers. Premium subscribers get more storage, more support, more security, and no ads for $5 a month or $45 a year. Evernote has 13,755 paying premium subscribers, which comes out to about a 3.75 percent conversion rate. Both the number of premium accounts and the conversion rate is growing. Surprisingly, 82 percent of the premium subscribers opt for an annual account. That comes to an annual revenue run-rate of about $650,000, which is not much, but Evernote has other sources of revenues and Libin says he is ahead of estimates to become profitable. He just needs to get those premium subscriber numbers up a bit. If he can get premium subscribers up to 50,000, that would translate to about $2.2 million in revenues, 100,000 premium subscribers would bring in $4.5 million, and so on (I just used the $45 annual fee to calculate those numbers. Working in the monthly subscribers lifts the total a bit).
Now, if Evernote could ever get to one million paying subscribers, that would be a decent business.
I’m glad to see startups like evernote and Twibeo growing so fast. Very cool startups.
Jame,s could you please stop spamming the forums. twibeo is rubbish and so are your posts. Moderators: Could you please block that guy?
Jeezus H Kee-rist, are you retarded? Your constant spamming only makes everyone HATE your app, which by the way is garbage anyway.
So – out of curiosity I checked out Twibeo. GARBAGE… James – hopefully you are 12 and this is your first site, if so I say you have a good career in front of you. If you are over 12… sorry.
Erick – do you know at what point in time after signup EverNote’s user become paid user? Is it a 2 months lead time or more?
Wow, great view into Evernote. I love this kind of service.
I’m premium user since july 2008. But after 4500 notes and 1 GB the desktop version of Evernote get performance problems. 10s for search is too long…
But every week there is a new update at Windows or Mac, so I think they will solve it the next weeks.
I’m addicted to Evernote, I use it for everything. And it’s always backing itself up to the cloud and syncing between my iphone and computers.
Nice stuffs. What do you think is their churn rate?
Evernote is a true gem. I use it daily, and I haven’t taken the time to explore it fully, yet. I recommend it to all.
Well, i use Evernote from Onenotes since Feb. 2009
I love me some Evernote! All I need is a smartphone or Crackberry now to complete it’s total domination of my life.
One of my most used apps. Great search function. Love to be able to search all my notes taken on my MacBook Pro with my iPhone while traveling.
I love Evernote!!!! I became a premium user almost immediately. I only wish that the browser, windows and mac versions worked the same way – the interface changes somewhat. It’s a great service.
Great service, I wish the FF extension was more like clipmarks but overall Evernote is a way better service.
What are their “other sources of revenue?”
I’ve been using Evernote for about 4 months now and I love it.
I’m a heavy user of OneNote and I wasn’t that impressed with EverNote when I tried it a few months ago. If you moved from OneNote to EverNote, what were the reasons why? Maybe I overlooked some of it’s unique capabilities.
I use them both, and I think OneNote is much better for taking notes. EvernNote’s edge is in the synchronization capabilities. I have an iPhone, and EverNote can easily sync to it. No true for OneNote.
As soon as EverNote gets a decent WYSWIG editor for the desktop client, I’m all in.
1. iPhone app
2. Online access
what if someone doesn’t use iphone?
I tried Evernote and did note the online access, which was cool.
I don’t use an iPhone so that didn’t attract me.
And when I compared it with OneNote, it came up WAY short – EverNote, while cool, is just a clipper – save the little things you find; while OneNote is far more.
So, while I’m registered with EverNote, I’m one of those 2/3 who don’t use it.
I use OneNote with Live Mesh for sync. Absolutely awesome – I just keep OneNote open on every computer and it stays in sync.
To be fair it won’t replace Evernote’s iPhone capability (I don’t have one so it doesn’t bother me so much).
I wonder what ‘not like a rocket’ means? The growth is freaking amazing!
congrats guys from team dropbox!
O Hai Drew!
I was actually contemplating a post earlier today about a few of my favorite web things: Both DropBox and Evernote feature highly!
I use DropBox for sync’ing files & folders across multiple desktops, and EverNote to do the same but for text files/quick notes.
Are we going to see a Dropbox/Evernote integration anytime soon? Perhaps an Export to Dropbox button on Evernote? And have a subfolder in Dropbox called Evernote? (dropping any files in there will automatically make them available in Evernotes interface)
Single Service pricing?
“And have a subfolder in Dropbox called Evernote? (dropping any files in there will automatically make them available in Evernotes interface)”
That´s already possible with the “File Import Wizard” in Evernote. But I agree with you and would welcome a real integration of Dropbox/Evernote sometime soon. Also a Remember the Milk integration would be great.
Great to see a startup using the Freemium model and actually converting users to paid customers.
I would have recommended they have free + two paid offerings . . . such as (a) Free-30MB, (b) 5mo/45yr-230MB, (c) 9mo/90yr-530MB {subject to A/B testing}.
Curious to know if they did A/B testing along the way to arrive at their current offering.
Thanks for the post Erick, well done.
Eric, if you’d like to do a really helpful article for start-ups, talk about companies who don’t get funding and get good traction. It’s easy to buy users when you have money. But most companies don’t start off with $4.5M where large amounts go to advertising.
I talk to a lot of start-ups daily. The biggest problem they universally have is user traction, and relatedly, deciding where to spend limited marketing budgets. Some of them have no budget at all, or can’t afford to make a ‘wrong’ decision.
Considering that less than 1% of all companies who even seek funding actually get it, that’s a lot of companies out there doing amazing things without financial backing.
I love Evernote. The multiple ways of entering and managing information is great. Very flexible. I am not a premium user but considering it.
lol. i’m using evernote to clip this article
I use evernote all the time now for jotting down thoughts and even importing PDF’s for reference. Last time I used it, I took noted down the names of some items I was thinking of buying in a store, took the photos, synced evernote, then bought them online when I got home
One Million Registered Users, 360,000 Active, 13,755 Paid. It’s a big number.
Evernote and dropbox radically changed the way I work over the past 6 months. I’m glad Google Notebook got discontinued to shift my focus to evernote. Import of the G notebooks was seamless.
Thanks to these 2 services I can work from any PC/mac. Can’t imagine my work without it now.
Congrats to the Evernote team, those are pretty decent numbers!
I’m wondering how big the team is that is working on Evenernote? Annual $650,000 in, but not having reached break-even? Does anybody know what their biggest cost driving factor is?
Evernote is just a simple idea that makes life easier. The only thing I regret is that I feel I under use as they have so many functionality. could you recommend me any good video or tutorial? Thanks
As much as I like Evernote, I don’t like their PDF Trimming ‘feature’. The pages after 25-26 gets trimmed automatically. I know this happens for even premium users – a major reason for me not to upgrade.
Evernote is a great service! I wish them continued success.
I love evernote and their freemium business model
I’m a paid user and mostly happy.
Sync and mobile support are what grabbed me, and kept me.
evernote for the tablet – original product if i’m not mistaken – has been around for a lot longer than 1 year..was using it back in late 2005…obviously its come a longways but you’re discounting almost 3 years of learnings from the market
would be interesting to see cleaner picture of how the iphone version invigorated this biz
I’ve used Evernote in conjunction with my Pulse pen since Evernote started, but the free version is just fine for me. I can’t imagine getting to the level of usage where I would be required to pay.
I love Evernote and looking for ways to use it more efficiently. I can’t wait to figure out how to use the GPS function properly on my Blackberry or how to utilise that info in the web client or desktop client.
I clip everything including pictures (that have text in it). It is part of my life, and it is well worth the $45US a year. Pretty nominal amount if you ask me, thats US12 cents a day just to use the premium service! Who cannot afford that??
When the Evernote iPhone client was released I got interested, only to discover that there is no Evernote client for Linux.
No Evernote for me until there is a Linux client.
Of course there are going to be more downloads than registered users. I’ve downloaded it for my mac at work, my MacBook, my netbook, my Windows Mobile phone and my ipod touch. The great thing abut Evernote is that I can write notes on whatever client I have handy and it all stays in sync.
It really is an awesome service, especially since they keep the clients up to date (the missing Linux client is puzzling, but they’ve released the API so anyone can write their own client if they want).
I love evernote and glad they are growing, but this business of it only taking one year is crap. I’ve been using evernote since 1.x days in 2004.
Yep it’s true – Evernote has been around since 2004, check your facts before you report lies Mr. TechCrunch
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.evernote.com