#leweb - Evernote gets into physical goods

Phil Libin is always good value at LeWeb. He’s not only witty and a charming presenter, but he’s also pretty open with how his business is functioning. And that makes his talks fascinating.

Today, he’s talking about the impact of Evernote Market on the business.

They now have three revenue streams:

• Evernote Premium
• Evernote Business
• Evernote Market

The three streams are designed to reinforce each other.

It tool 16 months for Evernote Premium to make $1m, and 5 months for Evernote Business to do the same. The market did it in 1 month. Three days before he launched the market, the worry was “would anyone buy anything?”. Three days afterwards, it was “how do we keep this stuff in stock?”. They launched unsure if it would be a sideline or a core part of the business.

In August their revenue was 89% from Premium subscribers and 11% from Business accounts. By November that was 61% Premium, Market 30% and Business 9%. Revenue is up 55% in that period, so Market grew the entire business, not just its own chunk of it.

The top seller of the 13 products is the scanner. The Jot Script Stylus is next, followed by the triangle bag from Japan. They’re more than 50% of their sales, and they’re supply-constrained on them. 49% of orders are from paid users, and 51% is from free users. 11% of sales are from totally new users.

@evernote I love the business socks I got at last year’s workshop, they’re one of my favorite pairs— Stephanie Booth (@stephtara) December 10, 2013

Marketing is, for them, understanding the community and making them the advocates – not traditional push marketing. There’s a place for push marketing, but you need to do it intelligently.

They will – eventually – go public. He feels that if people want to entrust the company with their information for 100 years, then they should be able to own part of it.

His side project? Investing in a research effort to bring back the woolly mammoths…