Man, if I get hate mail I can only imagine what Evernote receives. Phil Libin wrote an article on the topic for Inc Magazine over a year ago. In it he says how complaints are his favorite kind of comment:

On the night before we first released the Evernote service, in 2008, I made a quick screen capture movie pointing out the features. Apparently the audio of my voice was not satisfactory, because the first comment we received was, “Whoever did the voiceover in this video ought to be found and beaten to death.”

I respectfully disagree, but even in a comment like that, there was an element of truth. The audio was bad. My narration was sloppy. We fixed it.

Classic Libin humor, too.

He’s right, though. I receive tremendous value from negative feedback and we have made many improvements to our products based on it. But all the same, I’ve seen negativity done well and negativity done poorly. Frankly, Phil, that feedback is negative done poorly.