For so many years, the Evernote The elephant was a truly iconic logo. Evernote was one of the first productivity apps to be built into smartphones, allowing cross-platform syncing and making it incredibly easy to store and create just about anything. That’s why Evernote was so successful.
But Evernote's heyday came about a decade ago. Since then, the product has felt stagnant (or worse), the company has changed executives and business plans, and it seemed like Evernote was slowly turning into a zombie app. It wasn't gone, or even forgotten, it was just… there.
In 2022, when Bending Spoons acquired the company and soon after laid off nearly all of its staff, millions of Evernote users were confused about what the future held for the tool they had relied on for so long. Things got even worse when the company virtually went silent for months. But since then, the narrative and pace around Evernote has changed pretty drastically. In 2024 in particular, Evernote has released a long list of new features, redesigned its layout, added some new core functionality, and made the app feel modern again. With all that change has also come a change in pricing, and not everyone is thrilled.
In This episode of The VergecastIn the third and final installment of our series on productivity and digital life, we sat down with Federico Simionato, Evernote’s Product Lead at Bending Spoons. We talked about the acquisition process, how he sees Evernote in the current landscape, what it took to start shipping new products again, why Bending Spoons changed subscription pricing, and much more.
We also talked about the future of Evernote, and productivity tools in general. Evernote is more than two decades old, and as such, it's full of old ideas about what people want and how they want to use it. Simionato and his team are tasked with figuring out how ai fits into Evernote, how the product should integrate with all the other tools that currently exist, and turning Evernote into something that works for old users and appeals to new ones.
If you want to learn more about the topics we discussed in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
