If you build something that's epic & cool, you don't have to localize it: Evernote

In 2010-11 Evernote had 20,000 users in the country. Today, the note-making app has about 1.6 million Indian users. This when the company does not advertise locally. Troy Malone, General Manager, Asia Pacific, Evernote, tells Shruti Chakraborty that the company is adding 4,000-4,500 Indian users daily, pushing the firm to formulate grander plans for the country.

Q: The customer base for Evernote in India has gone up exponentially. What has been done before and what is the plan on stepping up user acquisition from here on?
A: Our primary strategy is word-of-mouth. But from the perspective of user acquisition, we are doing more deals like the ones we did with Micromax and Spice Mobile in which the application was preinstalled on the phones along with a few months of premium subscription. We are doing other deals with Indian companies that can help us get noticed.

Deals like the ones with Micromax and Spice targeted customers who were first-time smartphone users moving on from feature phones. That is a great time to introduce someone to Evernote.

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In India we are focusing on sharing more use cases (ie: the various ways in which the app can be used) with our user base so that they can get inspiration on how to use it in different situations. That encourages people to talk about it. People don’t talk about Evernote to their friends on day one…it takes a little while.

Q: What do you think has driven the growth in the number of users so far, since these partnerships that you spoke about are rather recent?
A: There are have been a couple of major drivers of growth. Firstly, the rising tideof mobile phones. Many people are discovering smartphones for the first time. Secondly, it’sthe maturation of the market.

We had 20,000 users not too long ago and now we have 1.6 million. A lot of these 1.6 million are new users, about a year old, but others have been using it for a year or more now. That group of people is our core word-of-mouth engine.

Q: A large number of the users globally use the free app. The number of premium users is rather small. What is the ratio in India?
A: That’s right. Roughly 95 percent of our users use the free app. In India, the ratiois lower than the average. But it’s not way lower. One of the reasons for this is thepayments bit. We only accept payments from an international credit card. Not many people have those cards in India. It is rather difficult for customers here to go premium.

But the willingness and capability is there in India; that is something we have seen. We are working on making it comfortable to pay. We have used local payment methodologies in othercountries like Indonesia where one can walk up to a kiosk and pay cash to get a code that allows them to go premium.

Q: Is there something that you do at Evernote to localize the app according to where your users are based?
A: I will give you our philosophy on that. At a business level, we believe that if youbuild something sufficiently epic and cool, you don’t have to localize it. You may have to localize language or accents but you don’t really have to localize the product. You don’t have to change the product. The iPhone, the Lamborghini, the BMW don’t do anything to customize the product. We believe we are at that level in our industry.

That having been said, a speech-to-text option in India with an Indian company that ties into Evernote with our API…that is something we would do.

That’s the way we want to localize. We want to partner with Indian companies that have solutions that make sense for the Indian market place that can work with Evernote.

In fact, Bengaluru-based Innoz made a SMS client for Evernote using our API. But that’s an example of a hyper-local instance using a local partner. So it’s a two-tier thing, we believe at one level that we don’t need to change anything for any geography, but then at another level, we do have partners who can come in and help it become hyper-local.

Q: What is it that sets apart Evernote as a company? We have talked to Phil Libin (Evernote Founder) and we have his view. As someone who works there, what sets this firm apart?
A: A lot of us at Evernote have been entrepreneurs before. The companies that we built before were making products for someone else, a customer, a company etc. With Evernote, we think of it as…rather than building something for someone else why don’t we build something for ourselves first.

Evernote was built with a philosophy that we are our number one customer. It turns out that 75 million people around the world like what we do now. So we never ask a customer, what do you want now? We instead come up with ideas thinking ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this as well.’

We listen to our customers as well. We are open to new ideas…that drive innovation. That’s the culture we have at Evernote. We change and tweak things all the time to create a good product.

There are a couple of things we do at Evernote to achieve that open culture…we have a lobby where all our executives are all mandatorily trained on how to brew espresso.

So we do shifts and make coffee for anyone who needs it…that way anyone can talk with the executives. We never want to get to a point where it’s tough to talk to an executive.

This article first appeared in Entrepreneur India magazine.