The Mahabharata Psychology Behind Why My Favorite Product Is Evernote — Prachi Kashyap

Karna, the most controversial warrior in Mahabharata, forgets all his knowledge of weapons when he needed them the most. This turned fatal to him when Arjuna attacks him in the Kurukshetra.

All I am attempting to direct you into thinking…what if Karna had a note-taking app! Yes, what if he wrote and organized his lessons while he was training under Parashurama? Likewise, an organizer would be helpful too for him to design every one of his conflicts, you realize he was a Chief Commander.

This is the gap that Stepan, founder of Evernote, attempted to close — ‘an extension of your brain’.

Indeed! my favourite product is Evernote.

Evernote is an established leader and one of the early movers in the note-taking space. I use it to manage my tasks, gather and sort out texts, pictures, audio recordings and videos. I utilize it for taking class notes and as a web clipper during my masters (which as of late completed). Every one of the information is upheld in the cloud and I can access it from any platform — mobile or desktop app or web. There a portion of its qualities I would like to highlight-

• Excellent search feature
• Cross-platform and a good third-party integrations repository (ex- Slack, drive, Teams, etc.)
• Availability of Organizational tools — tags, folders and whatnot
• Customizable dashboard
• OCR images and documents, supports stylus for writing and drawing
• 2-factor authentication

Let’s move on to the user segments of Evernote

1. The warriors — People like Karna, Arjun and even Lord Krishna are the key user segments. <<But Prachi we are not in Treta Yug (historical age) anymore!>> Yes! I am discussing about corporates in the business war. They use Evernote for business plans, brainstorming sessions, meeting notes, strategic budgeting, performance tracking and so forth by utilizing templates inbuilt in the application.
2. The Gurukul — Students can ingest the lessons of Guru Dron successfully utilizing productive note taking formats
3. The Kingdom — People overall use it for habit tracking, goal tracking, writing daily journals or grocery list

The shortcomings I could collect by experiencing the app considering different points of view are:

• To be straightforward the UI is a bit clunky or old-fashioned as compared to many emerging note-taking apps like Bear
• Evernote does not support Markdown or syntax for quick formatting
• The experience lacks the delight moment, which is generally liked by the Socials and the Gurukuls

The Hardcore competitors of Evernote are:

The enhancements that can be made to improve Evernote

• Karna needs to be more cautious when he is using his desktop, what if his Evernote app stayed open and he forgets to unlock his laptop during the night at warzone?Any of the Pandavas helpers would see his notes on the app. Thus, password protection for specific notes is crucial
• Don’t be boring please tell a story! Mahabharata, albeit written to teach people how to live was loaded with heaps of interesting fables and narratives. Evernote can embrace something very similar by displaying quotes, sayings or proverbs in its templates and it also won’t hurt to give that elephant a life by bringing him in the story.
• Bring Sanjay to the platform. Give a voice feature to Evernote and also can make the elephant tune in. Actually like Drithrashtra, had the privilege to ask Sanjay ‘where is my dearest son Dhuryodhan?’ just to hear that he is dying under the burden of his wrongdoings.😈

Over and above, Evernote is a good app. I believe they are zeroing in on the warriors or the corporates. It can be assumed that most of the monetization comes from this segment. Nevertheless, to capture more market share in the Socials and the Gurukuls, Evernote need to make changes to their interface and make it more sticky. There are young professionals who are living in metro cities with roommates and many millennial couples who are new to family life. Some positioning and messaging need to be targeted towards them in addition to telling them how easy it is to manage things through Evernote.

Originally published at https://prachikashyap.com on November 30, 2021.