Evernote Will Shut Down Market, Its E-Commerce Effort, On Wednesday
Some more news from Evernote — the note-taking app and startup of the same name — that speaks to the company's current rough patch: today it announced that as of Wednesday at 6pm Pacific, it will shutter Market …
Context & Ripple Effects
Market's shutdown is the third cut in a pruning sequence that began with the retirement of the Evernote Food apps in September 2015 and continued with the decision to kill Skitch everywhere but Mac weeks later (Skitch shutdown). Each move narrows the company back toward its core note-taking product as its diversification bets are unwound.
The timing matters because the cuts cluster around a leadership transition: founding CTO Dave Engberg's departure was announced shortly after this story, followed by the CEO's confirmation of deeper job cuts in 2018 — an arc that ends with Bending Spoons acquiring Evernote and relocating operations to Europe.
First-order effects
- Merchants and buyers using Market lose their storefront as of Wednesday at 6pm Pacific, ending Evernote's direct e-commerce revenue line.
- Evernote's remaining staff absorb another product sunset, compounding the morale and focus strain already visible in the Food and Skitch retirements.
Second-order effects
- With merchandise sales gone, Evernote's revenue case rests almost entirely on premium subscriptions, raising the stakes for every subsequent pricing and product decision.
- Partners who had treated Market as a distribution channel must find alternatives, and the string of sunsets makes other companies warier of building on Evernote's platform surface.
Third-order effects
- A company that keeps shedding adjacent products while cutting staff — from the 2015 app retirements through the 54-job cut in 2018 — becomes a consolidation target rather than an acquirer, which is exactly where the Bending Spoons acquisition and Europe relocation landed it.
- If the pattern holds, standalone productivity apps that expanded into commerce and hardware during the 2010s funding boom get pruned back to single-product businesses before being absorbed by larger operators.
The trend: Consumer subscription apps of the 2010s funding boom are systematically shedding side businesses to survive as focused products, with the survivors increasingly absorbed by consolidators like Bending Spoons.