Localizing Evernote for Japan

There are a number of factors that play into deciding which languages and which markets to localize for.

Some of if is where we see a lot of user activity, so if we notice that a lot of people are posting on forums or blogs, or posting events about Evernote in a specific country, that can lead us to do some exploration in that region or that market, to see if it makes sense to put localization resources towards that.

So back in 2008, when we had no localization in any languages, we realized that there's a growing activity in a few regions in Japan.

In the beginning, when we didn't have a lot of resources for market research, we just listened to people. We found out in Japan people were using Evernote without us actually doing any of the marketing towards them, and we found out they're using it in interesting ways, and they were using it in English, which was really interesting to us. And a few months later, all of us flew to Japan to meet them in person.

We had a legendary dinner for all those influencers and disclosed about the plan for globalization, and got a lot of feedback and extra opinions, unexpected usage of Japanese users, and we decided to accelerate the localization for Japanese market. When we localized Evernote for Japan, we saw an uptick not just in conversion, but also in great benefits of working with and being with the people who use Evernote.

So for instance, the people in Japan that love Evernote, have written, dozens, literally dozens of books about different ways that you can use Evernote at work, at home, in your life. Evernote has become the go-to app for personal organization in Japan, and that is all a result of us really listening to the needs of the market and localizing for them. Meeting with active users in person became Evernote's custom. Every three to six months, key members of Evernote flew to Japan and had multiple meetings, meetups, dinner, with the actual users. That's when we realized that we have a lot of learning from users. Lot of learning from Japanese cultures, Japanese industry, Japanese players.

In Japan, we know that organization is a big value that people hold, and so in the App Store, one of the things that we did was rewrite the actual description of the app to focus more on things like that, that resonate in Japan versus the U.S., where something like "search" might be a more powerful term that people want to search for.

So that's one piece of it. Then the other thing is to make sure that an app really feels right for a given place.

Part of it is making sure that it appears in their local currency, so even something as simple as changing from U.S. dollars to Yen, we saw significant uptake in how people took to Evernote. One of the easiest things you can do when getting started with the localization is to focus on the App Store itself.

So whether it's screenshots or even things like meta data, making sure that those make sense in local language will be critical to the success of finding your app, so spending some time on those simple things can make a big difference down the road. What is most important is your attitude.

To learn from the user. Learn from the culture. Learn from the market.

And you actually go and meet and talk, and you have to say that you want to learn. You're learning.

That will be the source of love for your product from the user.