Live post from LeWeb 2011: Phil Libin, CEO, Ever­note and Loic Le Meur, Founder, LeWeb

Orange announces that all their cus­tomers will receive a pre­mium sub­scrip­tion to Ever­note as part of their ser­vice, start­ing in Spring 2012.

 

Phil talks about build­ing Ever­note as a “100 year” com­pany. They were just named as Inc. Mag­a­zine com­pany of the year (“How It Got Great, Fast”). Loic asks for a show of hands and it looks like 90% of atten­dees are using the service.

 

Phil says that their com­pany is built on trust. If they want peo­ple to trust Ever­note with their most per­sonal notes, then Ever­note must also act transparently.

 

Ever­note has 20 mil­lion users (the com­pany was launched in 2008). The growth has been organic, there has been no adver­tis­ing. The ques­tion is, how do they behave?

 

After the first month, there is a big drop off. But once you use Ever­note after one month, you don’t leave. And then, after two years or about 27 month, peo­ple start to come back — because Ever­note con­tains their memories.

 

In the first month, only one half of one per­cent pay for Ever­note. But the longer peo­ple use Ever­note, the more peo­ple pay. After 3 years of use, about 20% of peo­ple are paid sub­scribers. There are about 750,000 pre­mium users, pay­ing $5 a month or $45 a year. The com­pany became prof­itable about 6 months ago, then raised about $50 mil­lion from Sequoia.

 

Two new and sep­a­rate appli­ca­tions were launched yes­ter­day: Ever­note Food and Ever­note Hello. On mobile, they want really sim­ple and evi­dent apps, rather than adding more but­tons to an exist­ing app.

 

Ever­note Food is a sim­ple way to cap­ture food expe­ri­ences in Ever­note. You take pic­tures of food and share them through Face­book, Twit­ter, email, or you just save them pri­vately to your own space. The app auto­mat­i­cally cap­tures the restaurant.

 

Ever­note Hello is a way to cap­ture the peo­ple you are meet­ing, so you can have a way to remem­ber them later.

 

Phil says that “Ever­note is built for me.” The apps are meant to work together, so you can cap­ture a pic­ture of din­ner, the peo­ple you were with, and notes from the conversation.

 

The goal is to reimag­ine pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware, which is oper­at­ing like it was 30 years ago. It’s time to refresh pro­duc­tiv­ity to the new era of mobile phones, social net­works, etc.