Thoughts of a Product Guy

Competitive Analysis and Positioning: Quadrant Analysis, Disaggregate Choice Modelling, Perceptual  Mapping,  Conjoint Analysis, Cannibalization.

New Product Development and Design: Focus Group, Conjoint Analysis, BASES, Disaggregate Choice Modelling, Perceptual  Mapping.

Pricing:  Conjoint  Analysis, Regression.

Database  Marketing: Regression for customer scoring (forecasting), Customer Data (e.g.,  loyalty programs).

Segmentation: Clustering.

Value proposition is the value that your product will deliver to the customer. In essence it is the message that you want to convey to the customer as to “why should you buy this product”. It is a redefinition of the unmet need that he has.

Types of Value Proposition

1. All benefits: It conveys all the benefits of the product to the consumers.
2. Favorable points of differences: It conveys all the benefits of the product over the best alternative / competitor.
3. Resonating Focus: Understand the business issues of the customer and show your superiority on a few key pain points that matter the most to the customers. This keeps your value proposition clean, precise and thus effective. Another point to note is that the resonating focus can also include a point of parity (not just the superiority). This will happen when the supplier wants to counter the customer’s perception.

But the research for coming up with the resonating value proposition will go a long way in making the product strategy of a company, let alone an effective market messaging.

Value proposition should be:

• Distinct
• Measurable – Points of difference that can be quantified.
• Sustainable – The firm should be able to carry that value proposition for a significant amount of time.

Consider some of these examples:

1. Square: Start accepting credit cards today.
2. Paypal: Pay Securely. Here, there, anywhere.
3. Turbotax: Taxes done right, and your maximum refund, guaranteed.

Evernote is a note taking application (https://www.evernote.com/)

Value Proposition
Evernote is your external brain. It’s a service that lets you remember everything important that happens to you, and use that information in a way to make yourself more productive.

Unmet User Needs
As a user, I need a mechanism to store and recover all my analog and digital data. Where Evernote scores the most is, it’s all platform availability, use case coverage and amazing product design.

Strong Product, Stronger Platform
The native app in itself is available for various operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows. It also has a web interface. For the “geeks” / “Linux lovers” who primarily interact with their device with keyboards, for productivity, Evernote has third party command line interface applications like “geek note”. Evernote also has web browser add-ons which makes web clipping extremely easy. To Summarize: Flavor for all kinds of different tastes / user preferences.
Now, one of the key “vector of differentiation” comes from the fact that Evernote is not just a standalone product, but a platform. The platform supports third party application development in a bunch of popular development platforms like Android, iOS, Python, PHP, Java and others. Extensive documentation and a passionate developer community also increases the value and makes Evernote “Non-Imitable”.

Product Design – Minimal Yet High On Usability

Web interface of the product.

From the product design perspective, I personally feel that the design is very minimalistic yet bold. Some of the key points worth mentioning is:

• Constraint and Visibility: Despite being extremely feature rich, this application prioritizes key services over others and constraints the user with a basic set of a few. Most important being: Creating a Note, Searching, Collaborating, Quickly accessing recent notes.
• Mapping and Consistency: Using very relevant and universally used icons for these services makes them very intuitive from usability perspective.
• Affordance: Same controls used across different platform makes it really easy for the user to use it.

Similar design language can be seen on subsequent pages as well, which makes user onboarding easier.

Use Cases – Unlimited And Increasing

For different consumer segment and usage scenario the perceived benefits are different. Some of the prime use cases which I like the most are.

• Web clipping: Simplified, Full, Screenshot or Clipping of articles can be saved and tagged with one click.
• Click a picture of a business card and all the contact details are pulled from LinkedIn and stored in your contact. You can also add relevant note related to the contact.
• Take a picture of your handwritten post-it or of any document and a rich digital version of the same is available in your library which is searchable by text.
• Picture and PDF annotation using Skitch.
• Archive your favorite tweet on Twitter just by tagging.

Target Market And Revenue

Moderate to heavy note takers. Researchers and students who use notes for their research. Professionals who need to read or write a lot of documents. The product itself is freemium which means that it is only for the premium services that Evernote charges its users. Most of its users are free users.

Evernote has realized that it is this “Network Effect” and word of mouth that has created value/ ecosystem for the company. The company also notes that, as people use Evernote for a longer time, their likelihood of becoming a “premium user” increases. And so, the company focuses on “User Acquisition” and making its free version really good.
Lately they have also focused on user acquisition through partnership with telecom operators which provides premium subscription to its users.

Competitive Threat And Positioning

Some of the competitors of Evernote are “Google Keep”, “One Note” and “analog note taking”. Whereas “Google Keep” is targeted towards light note taker and has gone “Post-It” way, One-Note has targeted the consumer segment which needs filing and drawing capabilities. Evernote on the other hand, has created an all purpose application, targeted towards heavy note takers who also need other all round capabilities like “converting business cards to phone contact” etc. The wide variety of use cases makes sure that there is something there for every consumer segment.

Product Strategy 

• Product Line consists of Skitch, Scannable, Clipper and Penultimate which are all focused towards various use cases revolving around traditional note taking needs.
• App Center: Another vector of differentiation is the rich third party app support which makes Evernote super powerful. Evernote has partnered with bunch of these app makers to support Evernote platform which has increased the “barrier to entry” significantly and at the same time create a product which is not easily imitable. E.g. “FileIt” is an application which automatically fetches all your medical records, bills, bank statement and credit card bills etc and stores it in Evernote for easy retrieval. These applications hook on to an individual’s Evernote account and add value to their Evernote account.
• Marketplace: Merchandising is another way Evernote has added coolness quotient to its product line and also added revenue source. Evernote sells beautifully designed notebooks, stylus for tablets, scanner, bags and other office supplies.
• Future: The company’s recent focus has been on individual and team productivity, especially in business space. Next development area that the company has in the road map is 1. Improving collaboration in Evernote, 2. Making the notes “context aware”: The notes will be able to provide contexts drawn from your own note archive, from those of your team mates and those from your contacts on LinkedIn. This, I believe, has infinite potential given the advances in artificial intelligence in recent time.

Architecture

A simpler view

Evernote receives around 2M HTTPS request per day. 110M API calls per day and has more than 100M users today. In order to take care of this, over 500 shards are used which handle both the data as well as traffic. Critical point to note about the architecture diagram shown above are:

• Key Services: User’s Note management (create, edit, search), Image Processing / OCR (optical character recognition), twitter integration support.
• Key architectural components:
  • Load balancers: Distribute the incoming traffic based on preconfigured rules (e.g. User Id).
  • User Store: Contains user account database. Small database containing basic user information for quick access. High Available.
  • Note Store: All the users note and other information is stored at one shard which is also replicated for failovers (4x redundancy)
  • AIR (Advanced Imaging and Recognition) Servers: Highly specialized image processing servers which reads images of text and predicts matching word.

Sticky session model: Load balancers decide where a user’s data is, using inbuilt rules. Not much dependencies among the shards as each user’s data is completely localized to one shard host. This increases performance by reducing Network I/O.

Promotion, Community and further Increasing “The Barrier to Entry”

• Evernote does not spend a lot on marketing, and has primarily relied on word of mouth for its success. They run podcast, blogs, social media blogs, and organize developer conferences and meetups as a part of their promotion strategy. Their strategy to target the “Innovators” and “Early Adopters” have been really successful. They have an active social media presence.
• Ambassadors / “Influencers”: Evernote runs an ambassador program to highlight the improvement that can be brought to various aspects of a user’s life by Evernote. These passionate ambassadors share their knowledge about how to excel in various aspects of ones lives (May it be parenting, fitness, entrepreneurship, photography) using Evernote.
• They earned the favor of “Influencers” by making their products great.
• Most importantly their “Merchandising” strategy has added a coolness factor to the company. It has added a personality to an amazing software; software which was faceless earlier.