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cs702 1 days ago [-]
Bending Spoons is a company that acquires SaaS companies/products that are not growing or losing users but have a well-known brand and customers who stick around.
The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
danabrams 1 days ago [-]
There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.
There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.
alexpotato 1 days ago [-]
> There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle
I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).
Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
pigeons 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, gotta call out the "There's nothing wrong with that".
NuclearPM 1 days ago [-]
“ There's nothing wrong with that”
Debatable
The-Bus 1 days ago [-]
There's skill in being able to manage a declining or non-growth business in a way that still pleases your consumer base (and therefore reduces your attrition rate). Not everyone does it well.
NuclearPM 1 days ago [-]
What you said is not synonymous with “maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.”.
JumpCrisscross 22 hours ago [-]
There's nothing wrong with it per se. Plenty of great products were ruined because management refused to accept that it wasn't in a growth market anymore and should be run for minimising customer losses, not gaining substantial new ones. That, in turn, means laying off a lot of the design, engineering and sales talent that was necessary for the previous configuration.
You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.
lovich 21 hours ago [-]
Can a business not just reach a steady state after maximizing its market?
hollerith 20 hours ago [-]
It makes no economic sense for AOL to stay in a steady state after having been thoroughly disrupted by newer products.
cess11 1 days ago [-]
Is this practice good for the workers in the organisation?
mavelikara 23 hours ago [-]
Definitely, no.
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
And the article tries to spin this positively:
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
That last line has me wondering who wrote this.
everybodyknows 3 hours ago [-]
> building a live portfolio
The portfolio grows -- "live", and faster than each of the businesses within it shrink. As they all do, by Bending Spoons' strategic design.
IncreasePosts 1 days ago [-]
Renowned author C. H. Atgpt
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
I don’t feel like the article was sortballing the company. They brought up things like the WeTransfer founder criticizing Bending Spoons’ decisions.
As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.
In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.
For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
People are framing this like they're creating sustainable businesses, but if you look into the details, what they're consistently doing is stagnating on any kind of feature development, making the apps and sites more difficult to use and have more nags, and they're increasing prices, sometimes by 10x or 100x. When I look for a company that I think I would admire, I'm looking for customers that are satisfied and recommend the product to their friends.
Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.
I certainly don’t find any of that positive, either, but sometimes what a lot of these companies need to survive is to increase prices and only worry about the feelings of the customers who find those higher prices to be worth it.
The $20,000 price plan wasn’t a real price, that was just a not so gentle nudge to move to a different offering. Maybe it feels bad but that plan effectively doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.
It’s got fewer features for the dollar, but if the previous company was not sustainable in the first place, it is what it is.
A company raising prices or cutting service quality is only a problem if they’re in a monopoly situation with no other market alternatives. None of the companies Bending Spoons has acquired are in that position. Many of them are far from being the market leaders.
The point is that Bending Spoons isn’t buying companies and saddling them with unsustainable debt like they’re Toys R Us. They’re buying companies that need drastic operating change and implementing that change so that they can exist in perpetuity.
rpdillon 20 hours ago [-]
> Things change.
This is true, but there are choices you can make in life to really minimize the impact. I've been using TiddlyWiki for more than 20 years and it always Just Works. I picked it precisely because I value endurance in the software I choose. I know that's not a fad right now, but folks just don't have to subject themselves to this standard of treatment.
That aside, my objection is the use of shady tactics to achieve that goal (constant nags and popups, massive price increases for reduced service, rejection of previously "lifetime" memberships, etc.), at the expense of the customer. Swaddling that in a blanket of "it's sustainable" makes me feel only a tiny bit better about it. To make an extreme comparison: fraud is also sustainable; I guess I'm saying sustainability is not an inherent good. If (hypothetically) every Evernote customer would be better off if they were using Joplin, keeping Evernote around would be a bug, not a feature. I don't think this is actually true, might it might be close.
Grombobulous 3 hours ago [-]
I think that every time an option leaves a market it’s a detriment to competition. It doesn’t really matter if that option was bad or that I won’t personally choose it.
I’m certainly very much against lifetime subscriptions losing promised features and things like that.
Grombobulous 21 hours ago [-]
I will add to my original reply, if I drink their company kool aid on their company website they pretty specifically list out a number of improvements they’ve made to their product portfolio.
They have claims like making Evernote sync faster, fixing stuck transfers on WeTransfer, offering a free organizer EventBrite account for the first time since 2005. These seem like pretty tangible claims.
Perhaps they are trying to combat this exact negative image that they’re just there to suck out value.
Maybe they’re lying about their accomplishments, I really don’t know. I don’t use any of their products.
Similar story here. They took my ~$100/yr Harvest time-tracking Solo plan, increased the price by 2.5x for a more restricted plan than I had... or I could get back the plan I had for $20,000/year.
So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.
burningChrome 1 days ago [-]
Was also on Harvest when news broke they had bought them here on HN. A lot of the same comments. I thought, "Well, maybe this is hyperbole, let's wait it out." About a month after they were acquired, same thing. Price of my plan went up almost by double.
So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
molf 1 days ago [-]
Double? Rookie numbers.
We went from $1k to $21k per year.
A few emails later and we have a hefty discount, but we will still move away.
eh, i backed up in a few places a bit ago. the actual concern is BS charged me when they shouldn't have (5x the former price, annual), won't refund, and turned off the account anyway. and PayPal seems to have an open marriage with PCI-DSS/SOC2 right now
PacificSpecific 1 days ago [-]
I've moved to Joplin and am pretty happy with it. Was easy to self host on my WebDAV.
I believe it imports Evernote data too.
Scoundreller 1 days ago [-]
I had a vendor acquired by one of these types of outfits.
I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
mavelikara 23 hours ago [-]
> this is where software goes to die
The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
pigeons 17 hours ago [-]
That avoided the Apache Foundation.
dehrmann 1 days ago [-]
Consolidating stagnant or dying SaaS offerings makes sense, but it'd be nice if there were a version of this that's a better steward of the companies.
bdamm 1 days ago [-]
If that was good business then presumably the brand could have done it at some point during their long slow decline?
cs702 1 days ago [-]
Arguably, they're a better choice for customers than a shutdown.
I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
taurath 1 days ago [-]
There’s no choice here, and often the companies are profitable, but if there is any stickiness to the product the customer gets the privilege of having a company they built trust with turn around and betray them with massively increased fees.
w4der 1 days ago [-]
I'd argue it's worse for consumers, by keeping them alive it staves off competition, and leeches cash by increasing subscription prices or locking once free feature behind paywalls.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
> cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
JumpCrisscross 22 hours ago [-]
> Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time"
Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.
apparent 18 hours ago [-]
I agree that a company in growth mode needs more employees than one in maintenance mode. But wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> wouldn't the owners already have cut unnecessary employees before selling out to PE or similar?
Usually not. It's emotionally difficult. And knowing what you need and don't need to cut (versus transition or aggregate with your conglomerate's administrative layer) is its own expertise. If you had that, you wouldn't need Bending Spoons or whomever.
quickthrowman 1 days ago [-]
That’s what “cut costs” means for SaaS, firing people.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it is part of cutting costs, but there are other ways to cut costs ("synergies" from merging back office functions) that don't necessarily affect the product.
24 hours ago [-]
ulfw 1 days ago [-]
That's a short term business model if I have ever seen one.
"customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
cs702 1 days ago [-]
Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments.
Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.
Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.
dehrmann 1 days ago [-]
> a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments
Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.
cs702 1 days ago [-]
Yes, agree.
Exoristos 1 days ago [-]
Add to this that they make it really, really hard to unsubscribe. I think there's been some legal crackdowns, but for a time, they could make it literally impossible.
The_Blade 1 days ago [-]
correct, they have made it impossible, charged my 2002-era PayPal account when i said, "i want to leave, don't"
rpdillon 1 days ago [-]
This article is like an advertisement. Here's how they spin it:
> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.
Bratmon 1 days ago [-]
You're thinking too narrowly. Buying a cow is a short term investment because cows don't live very long.
And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.
SkiFire13 14 hours ago [-]
I'm now imagining two little SaaS getting together and making another small little SaaS.
ulfw 16 hours ago [-]
They reproduce.
I haven't seen Evernote pro- nor reproduce anything
pigeons 17 hours ago [-]
So like Computer Associates?
1 days ago [-]
stock_toaster 21 hours ago [-]
So like Broadcom?
dvh 1 days ago [-]
So like Delphi?
john-h-k 1 days ago [-]
> The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?
pyrale 1 days ago [-]
because there's no joy in managing a declining company, especially when you made it grow in the past, and probably get enough money from the deal that you don't need to care anymore.
com2kid 1 days ago [-]
Very off topic - Just 2 days of for fun I tried to login to AOL.com with my username and PW from 1995. (Same username as on HN in fact)
It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.
Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
achandra03 1 days ago [-]
Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?
jodacola 1 days ago [-]
Bingo.
My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."
They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.
dbbk 1 days ago [-]
Not really. They dramatically overhaul the products. Bloated staff are cut, old tech-debt-saddled systems are thrown out and rewritten. In some cases they basically just keep the brand and the database and rebuild the product around that, in a smaller and leaner manner.
I actually think the model is interesting.
beering 1 days ago [-]
That is the PE playbook - buy ok company, revamp things to make it more efficient and profitable. The main difference seems to be whether the owners sell the revamped company or not.
Woshiwuja 8 hours ago [-]
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alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
BendingSpoon isn't PE because they are not attempting a restructure to then exit out of the asset within a defined time period.
When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.
M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.
The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.
BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.
The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.
buckle8017 1 days ago [-]
The classic PE strategy is to buy declining buy well known brands, borrow vast sums of money in the brands name, pay the PE firm huge consulting fees, and then bankrupt the acquired business.
Which isn't exactly what they seem to be doing but also isn't that far off.
smrtinsert 1 days ago [-]
Scotts point was that these brands have already declined, and that the only thing left is a very strongly loyal subscription base. That perked my ears up for sure.
robocat 24 hours ago [-]
The classic PE monetization strategy is to take an intangible asset and mine it: The one we all see is buying a quality brandname and mining it into oblivion. Plus various accountancy tricks to move the gold into the PE coffers.
In your example "very strongly loyal subscription base" is the asset.
Isn't it just a different form of private capital designed for the later stage of a tech company? I'm not saying its good, but I am not remotely surprised by tech's transition from growth/disruption/hiring to cost-cutting/M&A.
sbarre 1 days ago [-]
Isn't a PE firm going public just an admission of failure, and an attempt to make their private investors whole on the public market's back?
alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
BendingSpoons isn't a PE fund. It's just loose terminology that has become rife on HN like the misuse of "VCs".
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
Right, if we get really literal about it, Private Equity can really just mean “any private entity’s money.”
JumpCrisscross 24 hours ago [-]
> Is it not just a private equity fund
It’s executing a private equity (and conglomerate) strategy out of permanent capital. That makes it more similar to Berkshire Hathaway than a private equity fund. (It is also less levered than most private-equity funds, though more levered than most companies.)
PatronBernard 1 days ago [-]
It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.
chrisvenum 1 days ago [-]
Pre-bending spoons Komoot was a beautiful app and community.
You could operate it one handed with your brightness turned all the way down and easily get the info you needed.
Now when I pull it up mid ride to route home I have to click through multiple upgrade to premium pop ups with tiny exit crosses.
All good things etc etc
raverbashing 1 days ago [-]
And here's the thing, what should have the original company done if they were not having profits/growing (but shrinking)?
You don't sell a company if you don't believe its future can be better with you in command (most of the time)
notahacker 1 days ago [-]
Founders decide they want to do other things with their lives all the time, and in the case of komoot reportedly exited at a €300m valuation for a company that had raised very little VC money, which is going to tempt most people no matter how much they hate popups...
tancop 7 hours ago [-]
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yeeetz 1 days ago [-]
is firing staff after acquisition inherently bad if it's the same staff/management that led to the app being devalued and losing users in the first place though
1 days ago [-]
jlarocco 1 days ago [-]
I wish they'd buy Spotify...
Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.
Grombobulous 1 days ago [-]
This will never happen.
Labels literally negotiated their own royalty rates down in exchange for shares in Spotify. It’s the perfect way to push artists out of receiving earnings.
I think record labels would be first in line to buy Spotify if it was ever for sale.
bdamm 1 days ago [-]
Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?
jlarocco 4 hours ago [-]
It was a tongue in cheek complaint about their terrible apps and the user hostile way they force unwanted "features" on people.
I'd pay 2x my subscription price to be able to use a third party client again.
warkdarrior 1 days ago [-]
You need at least 3 devs to keep adding popups to the app with offers, upgrades, and other "related content".
strathmeyer 1 days ago [-]
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jack1689 5 days ago [-]
I was reading a bit about their story, it feels like they managed to succeed by turning overly funded (and by then devalued) software products and restructuring them for long term profitability as they are not bounded to the classic 10 year time horizon of private funds. Wondering if we will see more plays like this as alternatives to traditional private equity and as fallback option for VC backed companies that bursted.
tecleandor 1 days ago [-]
From the acquisitions I've followed, what they do is firing 80% of the staff the next week after the acquisition, raise prices, and put the app in maintenance mode. I don't know if they've done something more sensible elsewhere, but they mostly do wealth extraction.
mike_hearn 1 days ago [-]
They do claim to be shipping new features to their acquired apps. Look at their website. It's got lists of such things.
The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.
So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.
So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.
sbarre 1 days ago [-]
While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.
alanwreath 1 days ago [-]
That’s Valve (somewhat) and Blizzard (but to the nth degree) in a nutshell.
That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
bionade24 1 days ago [-]
Valve recently changed the Steam workshop UI/website meanwhile Steam still runs on X11 and depends on 32bit libs on Linux.
ethagnawl 1 days ago [-]
Whatever they are, they let Evernote devolve into a buggy pile of crap -- especially on Android. I migrated to Joplin, stopped paying for my obscenely expensive plan ($$$ per year) and haven't looked back.
GGO 1 days ago [-]
That's exactly their business plan. So seems like they are executing on it very well.
Quiza12 20 hours ago [-]
Same - what's funny is that if they'd lifted prices 20-30% I might have stayed, but they went with the big bang of 85%.
jabiko 1 days ago [-]
I'm a bit salty due to what they've done to the Komoot team. Komoot was (and still is) a great app for planing your outdoor activities.
Contrary opinion I guess but they've modernized the two services I use that they've acquired: Evernote and Harvest. I was already a paying multi-seat customer of both so maybe the worst price increases didn't happen to me (yet); I suspect Bending Spoons has a real animosity to free/near-free tiers. But I certainly might get bitten soon.
I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform.
Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome.
Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner, no computer or phone needed. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?
khurs 1 days ago [-]
This is the Prospectus they used for the IPO which goes into all the details about them
There is a market niche for projects cementary. Many companies or funds tend to buy projects at peak valuations (or artificial valuations based on blown up projections).
Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions.
Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.
dmacedo 22 hours ago [-]
Well I want to launch Straightening Forks: the B-Corp that hires experienced developers, designers, and other digital folks and instead of buying dying digital estate to extract the remaining bone hurting juice from its user-base, it would instead: re-implement (fork, LOL) open alternatives seeking viable business models or just FOSS a working path, with minimal product features serving those core users and their needs, centralising the core cross-product services and cost optimising the backend plus realising what's the actual features users "need" vs. "want", and try to create sustainable products which instead of just extracting value try to provide value in this world.
Surely this isn't difficult???...
cryo32 1 days ago [-]
Bending Spoons are the miserable tossers who bought Meetup and somehow made it worse by monetising every move you make. And it was pretty bad to start with.
luisgvv 1 days ago [-]
> What is Bending Sppons?
The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices.
Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.
block_dagger 1 days ago [-]
Whenever I see Vimeo in a headline, it reminds me of my lack of foresight. In college, the creator of Vimeo was in my friend group. I went to his on-campus apartment to pick him up for a party once. He showed me this "video sharing website" that he was working on. Its title was an anagram of "movie." This was in 1999. Digitized video was barely a thing. I looked at it, didn't understand how it would be useful, and assumed it was another one of his eccentric creative outlets that would go nowhere. A few years later, he was a multimillionaire and I was not.
ValentineC 7 hours ago [-]
> Its title was an anagram of "movie."
TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
block_dagger 1 hours ago [-]
It's both!
AdmiralAsshat 1 days ago [-]
Remarkably on-brand, named after the signature trick of a well-known charlatan.
apparent 1 days ago [-]
Are there any companies/products that got better after acquisition by these guys? I feel like the only times I've heard about them is when people are griping about how they're making stuff worse.
20 hours ago [-]
crumpled 22 hours ago [-]
I wonder if "loyal user base" just means people who feel locked in, or somehow don't know any better. I can't imagine another reason for the "loyalty".
Feels pretty exploitive.
mghackerlady 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how different AOL is since last time I checked. A few years ago at least, it was basically just Yahoo with different branding
bix6 1 days ago [-]
I don’t really get this model. Seems like a waste of money / time / energy.
Bratmon 1 days ago [-]
They keep popular but unprofitable products that would otherwise be turned down alive.
There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)
lain98 1 days ago [-]
Down 13% in the last 5 days.
xacky 1 days ago [-]
AOL Time Warner was the peak of the original dot com bubble.
The execs at Bending Spoon buy these SaaS services on the cheap, cut costs, jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible for as long as possible.
Rinse and repeat. The goal is to generate the highest possible rate of return on invested capital in a law-abiding manner.
There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.
I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).
Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."
Debatable
You can also be a bastard and jack up prices while cutting e.g. customer service. (Though absent new major revisions, service costs should go down.) But I'd argue we need, in tech, more of this strategy of calm wind-down than the everything-must-be-growth mindset.
> After the acquisition, Bending Spoons is anything but a passive owner, making changes to the products’ user experience and features, as well as to the underlying tech; monetization strategy, including pricing; and team organization, including headcount.
> While this focus on efficiency and revenue overlaps with private equity strategies, Bending Spoons claims a key difference: It “aims to hold forever, and has never sold an acquired business.” It is building a live portfolio, not presiding over a tech graveyard.
That last line has me wondering who wrote this.
The portfolio grows -- "live", and faster than each of the businesses within it shrink. As they all do, by Bending Spoons' strategic design.
As for my opinion on the company, I don’t really see anything particularly negative about it. I think the fact that they’ve never sold an acquired business is a rather admirable trait.
In a way, they’re doing something that may not have been possible without this style of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.
For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.
Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810
The $20,000 price plan wasn’t a real price, that was just a not so gentle nudge to move to a different offering. Maybe it feels bad but that plan effectively doesn’t exist anymore. Things change.
It’s got fewer features for the dollar, but if the previous company was not sustainable in the first place, it is what it is.
A company raising prices or cutting service quality is only a problem if they’re in a monopoly situation with no other market alternatives. None of the companies Bending Spoons has acquired are in that position. Many of them are far from being the market leaders.
The point is that Bending Spoons isn’t buying companies and saddling them with unsustainable debt like they’re Toys R Us. They’re buying companies that need drastic operating change and implementing that change so that they can exist in perpetuity.
This is true, but there are choices you can make in life to really minimize the impact. I've been using TiddlyWiki for more than 20 years and it always Just Works. I picked it precisely because I value endurance in the software I choose. I know that's not a fad right now, but folks just don't have to subject themselves to this standard of treatment.
That aside, my objection is the use of shady tactics to achieve that goal (constant nags and popups, massive price increases for reduced service, rejection of previously "lifetime" memberships, etc.), at the expense of the customer. Swaddling that in a blanket of "it's sustainable" makes me feel only a tiny bit better about it. To make an extreme comparison: fraud is also sustainable; I guess I'm saying sustainability is not an inherent good. If (hypothetically) every Evernote customer would be better off if they were using Joplin, keeping Evernote around would be a bug, not a feature. I don't think this is actually true, might it might be close.
I’m certainly very much against lifetime subscriptions losing promised features and things like that.
They have claims like making Evernote sync faster, fixing stuck transfers on WeTransfer, offering a free organizer EventBrite account for the first time since 2005. These seem like pretty tangible claims.
Perhaps they are trying to combat this exact negative image that they’re just there to suck out value.
Maybe they’re lying about their accomplishments, I really don’t know. I don’t use any of their products.
Evernote on iOS currently has a 4.4 star rating.
For comparison, the Obsidian iOS app has a 4.5 star rating.
here is a solid article from this week's Economist (that mentions another real jewel of a company):
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
So I downloaded my data, and had Claude vibecode a fully-featured clone in a single evening. Even if I was paying Anthropic API rates, it cost me less than a single year of my Solo plan.
So if anybody is reading this? They absolutely will gouge you. All the stories you've read are all true. Take some advice and get out while you can.
We went from $1k to $21k per year.
A few emails later and we have a hefty discount, but we will still move away.
I believe it imports Evernote data too.
I looked through their assets and it clicked: “this is where software goes to die”
The ones that IBM passed up on, yes.
I mean, they're at least keeping the service alive for as long as possible.
Don't forget "slash the workforce, ensuring that the product will get worse over time".
Not commenting on Bending Spoons. But in general, a company built to grow is overprovisioned for one being put into maintenance mode. If you're growing, sure, let the designers change the UI every release. If you're trying not to lose customers, don't do that. Which means you don't need a crack team of in-house designers.
Usually not. It's emotionally difficult. And knowing what you need and don't need to cut (versus transition or aggregate with your conglomerate's administrative layer) is its own expertise. If you had that, you wouldn't need Bending Spoons or whomever.
"customers who stick around." is anthesis to mid- to long-term customer loyalty when you do "jack up prices, and milk remaining users for as much cash as possible"
Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition.
Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.
Most things with royalties (oil fields, songs) work like this.
> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”
Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.
And yet dairy farms can last for centuries.
I haven't seen Evernote pro- nor reproduce anything
If they are such stable long term SaaS businesses who aren’t losing customers, why are they selling to bending spoons?
It worked! That is one hell of a series of good DB migrations.
Sadly I was immediately forced to change my password. Still, 31 years is a good run for a password.
My wife brought them to my attention recently because she heard about them from Scott Galloway, who was speaking highly of Bending Spoons on one of his podcasts. As she was explaining this to me, I said "It's just PE."
They must be doing some good PR/marketing, because, for some reason, "PE" isn't the first thing entering a lot of minds about Bending Spoons right now.
I actually think the model is interesting.
When BendingSpoon or IAC acquired an asset, it's meant to be held by them in order to augment their existing portfolio.
M&A isn't the hallmark of PE - restructuring an asset in order to exit out of it at a profit is.
The classic PE monetization strategy is to acquire an underperforming asset, restructure said asset, and then exit the asset at around 20% IRR.
BendingSpoons on the other hand is a holding company that is acquiring and consolidating stagnant but large SaaS platforms into a single mega-platform.
The economics are different as are the operational and organizational structures.
Which isn't exactly what they seem to be doing but also isn't that far off.
In your example "very strongly loyal subscription base" is the asset.
Fabulous article (I think evergreen through regular edits/updates): https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/the-mechanisms-of-enshittif...
Long on business keywords; a more soulless perspective than the above article: https://ahapartners.co/thinking/goodwill-isnt-a-rounding-err...
It’s executing a private equity (and conglomerate) strategy out of permanent capital. That makes it more similar to Berkshire Hathaway than a private equity fund. (It is also less levered than most private-equity funds, though more levered than most companies.)
You don't sell a company if you don't believe its future can be better with you in command (most of the time)
Keep one SRE to keep the servers running, one guy to do security updates to the app, and the team that acquires rights to music.
Labels literally negotiated their own royalty rates down in exchange for shares in Spotify. It’s the perfect way to push artists out of receiving earnings.
I think record labels would be first in line to buy Spotify if it was ever for sale.
I'd pay 2x my subscription price to be able to use a third party client again.
The steelman case for this is something like, mature apps that found product market fit are often over-staffed and doing a lot of duplicated work. You could get five of them together and consolidate their infrastructure/code to reduce costs, and have generalist devs who can work on any of those codebases. Then you need fewer people.
So this isn't an irrational thing to do. It's commonly done by firms like Google or Meta where they buy a small company and then rewrite it onto their own infrastructure to reduce costs. Sometimes the engineers are reallocated to other projects, or things drift and there are eventually layoffs. Google bought DoubleClick and then laid off 50% of the staff! Twitter didn't consolidate products but was clearly overstaffed, nobody imagines that Twitter was unique.
So the bull case for this is that it's finding efficiencies. The apps may not be the shiniest hottest things anymore, but they can still live on and be maintained if they're run more efficiently as a business. And yes this may involve layoffs or price rises, as often software startups hopelessly misprice their product and prefer to burn VC money than lose users or colleagues. Managers who aren't emotionally attached to the product or company can correct this, putting it on a long term stable path. That may suck for the user but probably sucks less than the company being under, or being acquihired and the product totally shut down.
That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.
After acquiring Komoot, they fired everybody. Watching their goodbye video is a bit heartbreaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLJkK4Wn1HI
Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446310
Weird Italian loveletter about the IPO:
Bending Spoons just went public: Italy won the World Cup
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48773549
Some history from only the past year in discussions:
Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161
Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
I use Evernote for paperless household management (shared travel itineraries, scans of paperwork, saved recipes, etc.) as well as my personal notes. It was under Bending Spoons that they finally landed multi-player realtime collaboration, which ended a decade of annoying sync conflicts and bugs, at least for me. Every month there are new little features like @mention to include a linked note, that bring more parity with platforms like Notion – the kind of core improvements the original owners had completely lost focus on. And they record a monthly video evangelizing the new features. Would something newer be better? Who knows but I'm happy not to switch, I have thousands of notes in there which I access from laptop, desktop, phone, and web. Bouncing from one platform to another is not my favorite way to spend time. I'm quite happy with how they've managed a mature platform.
Harvest also started adding new features for the first time in many years. Their customer support did turn into a baffling AI bot for a while but eventually a human replied and apologized. Harvest is also a mature platform that just needs to not self-destruct in order to serve my needs; but small new features have been welcome.
Both these platforms have something in common too: Good old fashioned REST API's. I like to scan directly to Evernote from my Brother MFC printer/scanner, no computer or phone needed. We log time into Harvest from a variety of other platforms and apps. I'm happy to have these workflows maintained. I might submit that this kind of specialized, deep-pocketed owner is the best-case scenario for long-term preservation of mature REST-based SaaS small businesses. Otherwise they get bought by Google, or dwindle when the founders move on?
https://bendingspoons.com/documents/financials/2026/Bending%...
Re-valuating these projects on the books would be an embarrassing to the board. Losing face, shareholders questions.
Selling these assets (possibly via asset swap) to specialized cementary fund where they can be disolved and disappear in the haze is a different, more honorable matter.
Surely this isn't difficult???...
The company that made me unsubscribe from Evernote after 8 years because it got slow, buggy and skyrocketed their prices.
Good riddance, now I am using Obsidian + an LLM and works way better.
TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
Feels pretty exploitive.
There are Victorian-horror-esque costs to that, but it's still better that those projects be alive but enshittified than completely dead (If you disagree, you can just cancel your subscription, after all)