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What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

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Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#81

Post by beering »

dbbk wrote: post #54
jodacola wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#82

Post by pigeons »

danabrams wrote: post #63
cs702 wrote: post #12

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 inves…

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.

Yeah, gotta call out the "There's nothing wrong with that".

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#83

Post by john-h-k »

cs702 wrote: post #12

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 inves…

> 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?

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#84

Post by molf »

burningChrome wrote: post #51
SyneRyder wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#85

Post by cess11 »

danabrams wrote: post #63
cs702 wrote: post #12

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 inves…

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.

Is this practice good for the workers in the organisation?

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#86

Post by pyrale »

john-h-k wrote: post #83
cs702 wrote: post #12

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 inves…

> 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?

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.

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#87

Post by forsatellite »

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?

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#88

Post by [deleted] »

jodacola wrote: post #11
achandra03 wrote: post #4

Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?

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.

[deleted]

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#89

Post by [deleted] »

apparent wrote: post #79
quickthrowman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what “cut costs” means for SaaS, firing people.

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.

[deleted]

Re: What is Bending Spoons? The little-known AOL and Vimeo owner that's now public

#90

Post by JumpCrisscross »

achandra03 wrote: post #4

Is it not just a private equity fund masquerading as a tech firm?

> 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.)

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