Jason M. Lemkin reflects on Evernote’s early disruption and later decline—noting its acquisition and perceived loss of ability to re-innovate after leadership turnover—and compares it to more continuously evolving products like Notion. He raises a strategic question about whether speed remains paramount before product-market fit, arguing faster iteration enables more market tests and quicker discovery of product-market fit.
Chapters
And then the mediocre teams like nothing happens and the product is frozen in time and. And you know Evernote, we know Evernote just got acquired, right? We just watched that after all these years. And Evernote was so. Maybe it was before you were using it. It was so disruptive when it came out. Everyone in the Internet used Evernote especially for clippings. Like every smart person. It was the notion of its day. Not just because they're similar, but because it was so cool and probably because the founder turned over and there are other turnovers. It was never able to re innovate ever again. Like it lost innovation. But the best ones keep going and not notion is nothing like it was when we started using it for our team. Can I ask pre product market fit is speed still everything? Because there's the idea of crafting, testing, making sure you hone that customer message. And then when you get product market go it is what you actually say it is. Because the faster you can iterate, the faster you get into market and the more tests you can run.
