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IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

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Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#31

Post by ghaff »

joe_fishfish wrote: post #14
magicalhippo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of, is there a good replacement for Meetup if you just want to organize some informal activities, like a user group or going biking?

Sadly most people (at least in my country) use Facebook for this.

Probably. Purely anecdotal and it may just reflect the company I keep, but Meetup seems to have dropped off my radar and that of people I know. I can easily believe that many groups paused during the pandemic and never kicked back off again; I've certainly seen that behavior with a lot of groups generally.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#32

Post by Someone »

DeathArrow wrote: post #18

How are they going to earn money if they fired the entire team?

Teams cost money, so that’s a cost-cutting measure. They’ll replace it with a better team, where ‘better’ is defined from a $$$ perspective.

There’s a wide range of options here:

- zero person team, and hope to recover cost from buying from existing subscribers and new buyers/subscribers over time before the app dies.

- replace them with marketeers, and hope to get enough more new buyers/subscribers before the app dies.

- smaller team, making it easier to break-even.

- cheaper developers, making it easier to break-even.

A new development team might just be a skeleton team to keep the app running across OS upgrades, or it might be a much larger team, or anything in-between.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#33

Post by monooso »

John23832 wrote: post #28
sambalbadjak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands we use Erbij, ( https://erbij.app ), which is now going international. full disclosure, I'm one of the founders

So YOU use it. Not saying it’s not a good app, but your selling your book.

> Not saying it’s not a good app, but your selling your book.

I'm not sure what your point is. Someone requested an alternative, an alternative was proffered and the personal interest disclosed.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#34

Post by ghaff »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #16
vineyardmike wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not private equity… they’re like a bottom tier tech conglomerate that’s been growing rapidly lately. They most famously bought Evernote. They buy apps/products that mature and don’t need a lot of work, fire all the workers and hire a skeleton crew to manage them in a cheaper labor market. They also harvest data from the apps and resell it.

I've always wanted to build a digital burial business like this, actually. It feels like a great way to tax late adopters' unwillingness to take on the risk of switching to a newer, better platform. As a late adopter myself of a great many things I feel like I understand the crotchety reluctance well enough to make a good go at it - maybe I'll unlearn my own risk aversion along the way.

It's not just the risk. Something like Evernote, for example, if someone has been using it religiously for years, there's a real cost associated with migrating to something new (and probably no better unless it's a completely different workflow).

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#35

Post by antimius3000 »

sambalbadjak wrote: post #23
magicalhippo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of, is there a good replacement for Meetup if you just want to organize some informal activities, like a user group or going biking?

In the Netherlands we use Erbij, ( https://erbij.app ), which is now going international. full disclosure, I'm one of the founders

That picture of the 3 dudes against a yellow background makes me never even want to try this, what does that even have to do with your product?

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#37

Post by Etheryte »

antimius3000 wrote: post #35
sambalbadjak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands we use Erbij, ( https://erbij.app ), which is now going international. full disclosure, I'm one of the founders

That picture of the 3 dudes against a yellow background makes me never even want to try this, what does that even have to do with your product?

Agreed. It feels like a cheap lottery ad or something else extremely obnoxious.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#38

Post by hobofan »

Sayrus wrote: post #5

They recently acquired Meetup as well [1]. This doesn't bode well for its future. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953242

Meetup has already been scaled down during the time it was owned by WeWork, and hasn't really changed during that time, so I doubt a lot will change.

It's almost more surprising that Bending Spoons thinks they can squeeze out any money out of Meetup.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

epolanski wrote: post #24
mathverse wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont their hire mostly in Italy?

Yes and they have notoriously quite high standards. Even though I think that the people that apply there have quite low moral/ethical ones.

> people that apply there have quite low moral/ethical ones

Out of curiosity, why? It doesn’t seem like these apps are either critical nor need those developers anymore.

Re: IAC sold 17 apps to Bending Spoons. $100M deal, all 330 employees fired

#40

Post by sambalbadjak »

antimius3000 wrote: post #35
sambalbadjak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands we use Erbij, ( https://erbij.app ), which is now going international. full disclosure, I'm one of the founders

That picture of the 3 dudes against a yellow background makes me never even want to try this, what does that even have to do with your product?

I guess you'll never know :)
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