Green Elephant in the Land of the Rising Sun

We often say that Evernote is an American service with Russian DNA: the company's founder Stepan Pachikov is from Russia, many employees, including the general director, have great and powerful, and besides, the Russian version has become our first experience in localizing the product. However, if you look at how our service developed in the last year, it can be noted that another country with which Evernote has a special relationship has become a mysterious Japan. We would like to tell about this relationship.

Cult elephant

This country has radically changed our plans for international development and even development, unexpectedly greatly affecting almost all aspects of our company. Moreover, Japan extremely quickly conquered us with the softest and most effective force in the world - stunning loyalty. On Evernote, almost on the day of its appearance in Japan, there was a huge demand among the widest segments of the population. It was unexpected and made us think that our concept of external memory, which helps us remember everything, is very close and in demand by the mentality of the Japanese.
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Our popularity in the country is well illustrated by statistics. For example, in October, the number of visitors to our site from Japan exceeded the United States! They accounted for 33% of all visits, while for American visitors only 29%. (Russia, by the way, is also in the top ten - in seventh place, with 3% between Canada and Spain.)

Also surprised by the rapid growth of active users. Now the Japanese are second in number of daily users (21%) and are second only to the United States (55%), while they have moved ahead of the rest of the countries by a significant margin: in the third place is the United Kingdom with 3% of the daily audience.

But, perhaps even more eloquently than statistics, the books speak about the popularity of Evernote in Japan.



There are already about a dozen editions about our service in the country, a separate shelf in the bookstore (!) Is allocated for them, and the circulation of the first book (cover below) has already been reprinted several times.



Another vivid example is the event Evernote Meetup , which was conceived as a meeting of fans of service around the world. In Tokyo, participation in this event had to be paid ($ 20 per entrance) in order to keep the number of participants within some reasonable limits: we naively rented a very small room. Still, after about 120 people bought tickets for a couple of hours, we had to stop registering. Phil Libin joked then that next year they would have to rent Tokyo Dome (this complex can accommodate 55,000 people).

Counter steps

It is clear that we could not but respond to such signs of attention and intensively began to build up cultural and business ties.

The first sign was a major partnership with Sony, which began to pre-install our application on almost all Vaio laptops. Then there were a lot of such partnerships, both with electronics manufacturers and with application developers. As a curious example, in our opinion, we can mention the special N-TRANSFER device from NTT, which allows you to send the received images from the scanner directly to the Evernote server, bypassing the computer.





Recall that one of our investors was DOCOMO Capital - the financial division of the country's largest mobile operator, for which the mass fascination of subscribers with the service also did not go unnoticed.

At this point, we decided to settle down thoroughly in Japan and opened our office in Tokyo. He became the third, after Mountain View and Moscow.

Here is the entrance to our still modest office:

Big deal

And finally, the event that triggered the writing of this review: at the annual DOCOMO press conference, we announced the launch of a new joint project. Evernote is now pre-installed on every Android phone and tablet that is sold to DOCOMO - which is about a dozen models. This is a very important transaction, which in a matter of days has already brought us a large number of new users.







Moreover, every DOCOMO customer who purchases a device from Android until May 2011 can count on a year of free premium Evernote subscription. This was taken care of by the operator. Well, we have timed this release release of the updated client Evernote 2.0 for Android. We tried very hard! We really hope that we could thank at least a little to the Japanese users for allowing Evernote to become part of their culture.

あ り が と う!