The Cult of Evernote
How to explain the cult following behind Evernote.
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 extraordinary popularity of Evernote, a five-year-old organization and note-taking app that has swiftly developed its own cult of enthusiastic users. These users aren’t shy about praising the application to the uninitiated. And Evernote’s CEO isn’t boasting when he says he’d one day like his organization app to boast more than 1 billion followers.
Booming popularity
The BloombergBusinessweek story makes a persuasive case that a real cult continues to grow around Evernote. This may seem odd; after all, Evernote is just an organizing app. It’s a very effective and helpful organizing app. But apps that don’t involve angry birds or farms don’t normally attract such devoted and vocal followers. Nevertheless Evernote has, with its fans voluntarily promoting the program and promoting it to other people. Have a look at tech forums, and you’ll unavoidably find posts from users praising this app.
Why the praise?
Why so much admiration for what is, essentially, a simple note-taking application? The key could possibly be the way Evernote allows us to organize 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 enthusiasts of Evernote praise the app’s search function. It even lets you 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 violin recital.
Why the popularity?
And that might be the secret to Evernote’s popularity. It’s very easy to forget meetings, appointments and deadlines when you’re juggling the responsibilities of family and work. In the BloombergBusinessweek story, Libin says that he never thinks of the work/life balance because he views work an essential part of life. And a increasing group of us think the same way. Consequently, when life becomes so busy and cluttered, we need something which will help us get through it efficiently. That something, increasingly, is Evernote.