This is the biggest mistake most of the people make. If it worked that way, every weekend app released here would be making tons of money. (We have better apps here as weekend projects than out there in market).But this is NOT app v/s app game. This is business v/s app. And you can't take down a business with an app. You need to create a business.Sure you can build a better 'app' then Evernote or make a better burger than McD's (one of the best in my country at least) but you can't make a better business, the day you do - you are in game.There are many other dynamics too. But just a quick note.(Note to self: write a detailed essay about that)

Great point. A mistake often partly based on not understanding marketing well. I hear things from clients similar to "Our ad looks like their ad—how come we got zero sales?" If you're still asking questions like that, you don't understand what you're doing yet.

Are you implying business primarily comes down to distribution?

I think that's what Catch (formerly Snaptic) (https://catch.com/home) is trying to do, to be the alternative to Evernote. There are probably a few others as well.

Considering now many to-do list websites and apps there are out there, I'm surprised the isn't more competition for this kind of note-storage app.

Yep I've moved largely from Evernote to Catch because having stuff work properly on my Android phone ended up being the deal breaker, Evernote's first Android client couldn't be used in offline mode at all. If Catch had a decent desktop interface then it would be basically perfect, but I can live with the web client for now.

I think the current Evernote Android client will do offline if you're a paid Evernote user. I don't know though, I'm still only using the free service so far. I'm not ready to commit to a note service yet

I've actually had a note (in Evernote) for a while now to "find replacement for Evernote or write my own."

Every time they release a new version I see item after item that's of no interest to me. I really just want a simple place to store to-do lists, notes, etc. and have it available on every machine and phone I use.

They do a lot more than that now, but yet you still can't edit a to-do list with checkboxes on the iPhone!

I'm working on a (hopefully) potential solution to this right now. It may take me months upon months to complete, but if I ever finish it, I think you'll be somewhat impressed.

Doesn't Remember the Milk do exactly what you want? (not a user myself, but a friend is and he likes it a lot)

Check out SimpleNote.

Especially with Notational Velocity which is a joy to use and OSS.

http://notational.net/

At the moment, I think you'll probably have to use two different programs for that. I've yet to find a program that does a good job for todo lists, notes, and has a good mobile apps. So far the best combo I've found is Evernote for notes, RTM for lists.

Can't you just use Google Task for it? I do. And I don't need any evernote or whatever. I can edit from web or phone.

Try http://workflowy.com/

I don't follow your train of thought. Why would a stat $800k revenues per month make you conclude that users must be quite dissatisfied?

Because an app with that many users always has a chunk of dissatisfied users.

I must admit I would have never got to that conclusion without this clarification :)

Though it is an interesting perspective. It just says that market is large and like in all large markets there is a niche of users who are dissatisfied because top solution doesn't fit their specific needs. So yes for a startup looking to enter the market, it is great to solve that specific need and then grow from there.

I am probably one of such users. I would need something like Evernote, but more lightweight. I tried ResophNotes, which basically maintains a list of plain text notes, but that was already too lightweight, since I realized that I need at least basic formatting (bold, italics) to structure the text visually.

I wonder if someone could take Evernote API and create text-only client with more polished editor?

Notational Velocity + Simplenote perhaps? That combination works really well for me

That's what I use, but it's still just a list of text notes with little or no formatting. I think hyperlinks exist but that's it, unless I'm missing the other features.

I'm in the same boat, and use this: https://github.com/panicsteve/nv/downloads

This fork of Notational Velocity adds a third pane which shows formatting using markdown.

If you are willing to learn markdown, and it's pretty darn easy, you can add formatting while maintaining raw text format.

I like markdown enough though that I find I write in markdown, and just hide the preview pane that includes formatting. I just don't really need it.

Cool, thanks. Easy after being on reddit for so long. My only complaint is that the last update was in April... hopefully it will stay up-to-date with NV, which apparently hasn't been updated since February anyway.

Have you looked at PlainText?

When I see products like Evernotes, i see geeks like us as the non target market. So many of us will never pay a penny for such service.

Here's a few, "I could solve this in a weekend" solutions:

* Write notes with vim and archive them with git. If using github, you get website publishing for free.

* Write notes with nano and automatically upload to S3 using inotify (Python: http://pyinotify.sourceforge.net)

* Write notes with emacs and mail() it to your gmail account.

* Write notes for future reminder (+dates) with ed. Via cron, parse the dates using GNU date, and mail() yourself a reminder.

If we are the target market, so few of us are willing to pay for the service.

Just my 2 cents...

None of these solutions allows me to scribble notes on my graphic tablet, OCR my lousy handwriting, and make it searchable on my phone.

Beyond MVP, with a couple of extra weekends:

* Rudimentary search is solvable with OSS tools nowadays (Solr, Sphinx, Lucene).

* OCR however, seems fun! I never pay attention much on character recognition software. I wonder how good is this project: http://code.google.com/p/ocropus/

You're unlike me in that you would spend a couple of extra weekends to save $5.

Evernote's OCR ended up being a non-feature as far as I was concerned because you can only search within the OCR'd text, you can't extract it and do anything else.

What about gmail?

  + nicer writing facilities
  + accessible from any computer/phone (like evernote)
  + searchable (like evernote)
  + can save any filetype (but they aren't searchable...)
  + 7GB storage

  - not collaborative (maybe google docs?)
  - can't search handwriting (v. cool - but is it often used?)

GMail is great for, well, email. It is quite bad for saving files and ideas.

Yup, it can save any filetype. However that doesn't mean much if you have to download every file before you can find out what they contain. With 200 different images and documents for example, it is much easier to find the right document when you either can look at the thumbnails or search directly in the content.

I have an Evernote account, but also find it too cluttered. Here's what I do:

Install Dropbox's linux client on my Ubuntu slicehost instance (could be one of the free Amazon instances, now).

Create a home/Dropbox/t/ .

Keep all my active notes as textfiles in there. Have an archive/ subdirectory. Spend most of my time in t/todo.txt.

I'm always logged into the slice with screen running. Terminal 0 is always todo.txt, which is just a text file open in vim with foldmethod=indent: I only unfold my current tasks, and move anything I've done to a fold for today's date.

I can search this with grep (or spotlight from my mac). I can get into it from anywhere, though: blackberry, iPad, or any web browser. The Dropbox clients will all display textfiles natively.

There's not tagging. There's no categories. There's no web clips or OCR. I can get to it from anywhere.

Works great, and theoretically free if I ditched Slicehost for Amazon.

I've been using the PlainText iOS app, which integrates nicely with DropBox. This gives the flexibility to use any text editor you want. (I use TextMate)

Me too and I want to kick Evernote's ass