Evernote on track to hitting 100M users by end 2013, looks to engage SEA developer communities more

Dmitry Stavisky, VP of International Operations at Evernote. (Credit: datahaber)

Evernote is on track to cross 100 million users by end of 2013 and is continuing to support the regional developer communities.

When e27′s cofounder, Thaddeus Koh, attended IDEAS Show in Taiwan, we had a chance to meet up with the guys at Evernote. Fromt the event, we followed up with an email interview to find out more about what they had in store for the Asian region. Dmitry Stavisky, Evernote’s international operations vice-president, was kind enough to bring us up to speed with what’s happening with the note taking and archiving service.

How well is Evernote on track to hit the targeted 100 million users in the next year and a half since announcing it about a month back?

Evernote is growing exponentially, so it’s hard to predict when exactly we’ll pass one or another milestone. But it looks like we are well on track to something like 100 million users by the end of 2013 – we have over 34 million users now.

What is Evernote doing in Southeast Asia to grow users?

The most important thing we do in Southeast Asia is the same as everywhere else in the world – we build great products. Just last week we released a major update for Android with completely new user interface for tablets; a new Evernote for Mac with support for new Mac Retina displays and for Activity Stream, which lets you see what’s happening inside of your account; and Safari Web Clipper with some nice new smarts.

We localized our products into Bahasa (Indonesian and Malay), Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional).

We are also starting marketing in Southeast Asia. Our marketing in the region will be very product focused, as it is everywhere. We educate non-users about the benefits of Evernote and teach existing Evernote users how to get more out of it. Evernote spreads by word of mouth, and our users are our best marketers. We just need to get them the tools, like user stories and tips. You can find a lot of these in our English-language blog. We’ll start Bahasa-language blog with lots of local content shortly, other regional languages will follow. We’ll also be doing user and developer events, go to conferences and events.

In fact I was at a conference in Jakarta last month with our GM/Asia-Pacific Troy Malone. It was a great event. We were happy to meet so many passionate Evernote users! Southeast Asia is a very dynamic region, with fast growth of Internet population and smartphone users, wide and growing popularity of social media, and vivid interest in technology and all things new. This is a fertile ground for Evernote!

Evernote has been doing quite a lot of outreach in Southeast Asia. Are Southeast Asian developers interested/active developing apps using the Evernote API?

We are just starting this outreach and we see a lot of interest from Southeast Asian developers. We did a developer event in Singapore, a hackathon in Taipei, and will be doing more.

What partnerships is Evernote looking to build in Asia and Southeast Asia?

Device manufacturers and mobile operators are our natural partners. We already have relationships with many international OEMs that our users in Southeast Asia benefit from. This includes HTC, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Dell, HP, and many others. Evernote is also very popular among educators and students, so we are exploring some ideas there. And of cause we work closely with hundreds of software developers who build apps and services on Evernote platform.

Where does Evernote sees its role in the Southeast Asian developer community and how can they support the growing ecosystem?

There are a lot of talented developers in Southeast Asia, and we want them to apply their creativity to Evernote platform with its tens of millions of users worldwide. I believe it’s a great opportunity for Southeast Asian developer to go global, provide value to Evernote users, and promote their careers and businesses.

We put a lot of effort into growing Evernote’s ecosystem. We documented and opened our API to third-party developers soon after the launch. It’s the same API that Evernote engineers use to build our apps for different platform. We don’t charge any royalties and encourage developers to build alternative solutions. There are scores of third-party Evernote clients for iOS and Android. We support these developers with technical expertise and also help market their solutions through Evernote Trunk (http://evernote.com/trunk ), email newsletters, and our other channels. We also organize developer meetups and hackathons.

Recently we ran a developer contest, Devcup, with over US$100,000 in prizes - http://devcup.evernote.com . We got great submissions, lots of really innovative and well engineered solutions for Evernote platform. I encourage e27 readers to take a look and vote for them at http://devcup.evernote.com/submissions . The winners will be announce at Evernote Trunk Conference in San-Francisco on 24 August, 2012. I hope to see Southeast Asian developers among them.

Featured Image Credits: Wikinoticia