Evernote Market hits $1 million revenue in its first month
Phil Libin, CEO of the note-taking app and cloud storage company, says his Evernote's e-commerce business accounts for 30 percent of revenue. In the future: an IPO and reviving the wooly mammoth.
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
PARIS -- Evernote's online marketplace, for products like Fujitsu document scanners and Moleskine notebooks, reached $1 million in sales in its first month and now accounts for 30 percent of the company's revenue, Chief Executive Phil Libin said Tuesday.
That's a lot faster than Evernote's two earlier businesses, which specialize in storing notes and other documents online for people who have a lot of information to manage, Libin said at the LeWeb conference here.
Premium subscriptions, the first product Evernote offered, took 16 months to pull in $1 million in revenue. Evernote Business, which launched a year ago, took five months. He said each new service grows faster because it builds on the others, as well as on the large number of free-service users.
In November, Evernote Market brought in 30 percent of revenue, compared to 61 percent from the premium subscriptions and 9 percent from business subscriptions, he said. The top three Evernote Market products are the Fujitsu Scansnap scanner, the Jot Script Stylus tablet, and the Triangle commuter bag.
Libin said Evernote will hold an initial public offering, but an IPO won't come soon. "Two or three years from now, we'll go public," he said. "It's not something we're rushing toward."
The company will do it eventually for the customers, he said.
"We have a moral obligation to be a public company," he said. "We're asking the world to trust us with 100 years of their most important information. It's important that we reciprocate, so anybody who wants to be an owner can be an owner."
Libin said he wants to make a difference in the world -- actually, more than just the world.
"I want the universe to notice I lived in it, and this is a cool way to do it," Libin said.
To that end, he's also working with the Long Now Foundation to try to reintroduce wooly mammoths after their extinction by rebuilding them from their DNA.
"In a few years, there will be real-live wooly mammoths roaming around," he said. "We made them extinct. We should bring them back."