The Disappearance Test: Would the World Be Different Without Your Product?

Certain things must be clarified before a startup can develop smoothly. 1. How strongly do your target users need your product? If they can take it or leave it, gaining traction will be difficult. 2. How much do your product and company affect target customers? If your product disappeared from the world today, could those customers easily switch without much inconvenience? 3. If the world would be very different without your product and company, and target customers would experience great inconvenience, then the less replaceable you are, the more valuable your company will be. ---- Below is Wu Jun’s response to a reader asking why Evernote has struggled. His thinking is not very different from mine. XD Reader: Why has Evernote failed to take off? Wu Jun: Evernote is a good product, but it has struggled to establish a stable market position. The company does not lack technology or talent. Its founder and founding team have solid technical ability and product awareness. Its first problem, however, is that the product is not particularly essential. It is an excellent office tool, especially for small companies with extensive internal collaboration. It can do more than write and share documents; it can also manage daily work well. Yet it is not irreplaceable. Google Docs offers similar or substitute services. Microsoft’s Office suite is generally PC-based, inconvenient for sharing, and expensive—approximately ten times Evernote’s price. But people are accustomed to it, so most are unwilling to switch to the more convenient Evernote. Had Evernote appeared before Google Docs, its position would have been much better. Once Google Docs existed, Evernote was less necessary. That was a failure of timing. As for your question about what happens if it goes out of business: An Evernote collapse would inconvenience users greatly, but it probably would not be the end of the world. A company with more than 200 million users would attract a buyer. After an acquisition, the new owner might spend considerable time integrating Evernote’s users into its existing products. When IBM acquired database company Informix, for example, it initially retained the team and supported the existing products. Later, it gradually moved enterprise users onto the DB2 product line. IBM helped with the migration, of course, and Informix then disappeared. You can imagine Google or Microsoft taking over if Evernote dies. A few years later, the product lines would be merged, and another company and product would pass into history.