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Wunderlist is integral to our companies business processes and it was a fight to get everyone moved onto it, I can only hope Microsoft has a hands off approach to the app and continues to let them create a best in class application.
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How would it be run as a sustainable business then? Sorry, but I really fail to understand how we can expect quality for free. Free means that it's either run as a hobby (you shouldn't make it part of your workflow as it might disappear one day) or run on ads (lower quality by implication). Why not support your favourite apps by paying a little so the good folk can continue working on it!
Or option 3, be a goliath sized company (eg Microsoft) and run the app as a loss leader to consolidate/establish a position as a market leader in mobile.
How do big companies make the initial approach? Do you get a phone call out of the blue from someone at Microsoft saying "We are interesting in acquiring you - how does x million sound?" (I know I've grossly over simplified!).
They first reach out for some kind of "we're looking to do something in this space and wanted to discuss working with you". Our first conversation was along the lines of "We're not sure whether we're going to build this, partner with someone or buy something. Keen to find out more about what you guys are doing and see if we can work together".
Next meeting it went to "We're clearly not going to build this ourselves, and it doesn't make sense to partner but let's talk about what it would look like if we acquired you. How do you think your tech/team would work inside our company".
Took maybe 6 meetings in total to get to a price though we probably could have forced that sooner.
How do big companies make the initial approach? Do you get a phone call out of the blue from someone at Microsoft saying "We are interesting in acquiring you - how does x million sound?" (I know I've grossly over simplified!).
Recently went through this. They first reach out for some kind of "we're looking to do something in this space and wanted to discuss working with you". Our first conversation was along the lines of "We're not sure whether we're going to build this, partner with someone or buy something. Keen to find out more about what you guys are doing and see if we can work together". Next meeting it went to "We're clearly not goi…
Can anybody enlighten me on the technical difficulties of writing a todo list manager?
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Recently went through this. They first reach out for some kind of "we're looking to do something in this space and wanted to discuss working with you". Our first conversation was along the lines of "We're not sure whether we're going to build this, partner with someone or buy something. Keen to find out more about what you guys are doing and see if we can work together". Next meeting it went to "We're clearly not goi…
What kind of details do they ask before giving an offer? Anything that might be considered proprietary or were they eager from the go?
Almost everything they could have seen as a user of our app but a few things that were admin functions.
A bunch of it they could have used to build their own app but we figured that was pretty unlikely.
They asked for a few things we did disclose like: - team size / locations / education - revenue (we didn't need to disclose but we did)
They also asked for a few things we didn't disclose like: - cap table - how much we had raised - what our last valuation was.
We kept it on a need to know basis - the above is irrelevant to them pricing the company.
James Duncan Davidson had left SF to work in Berlin for Wunderlist a year or so ago, so is part of the team that was acquired.
For those not familiar with the name, he was quite famous for us working in Java land back in the day. He worked at SUN and created the first versions of Tomcat and Ant.
He was also an O'Reilly author, with books such as Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Cocoa in a Nutshell (and also wrote the Agile Web Development with Rails book for the the Pragmatic Programmers editions).
He's also quite famous as a photographer (his other job), covering many O'Reilly conferences, Apple events, TED and such. Some very iconic tech related pictures from such events are his.
[EDIT] Another thing I don't see mentioned. This is not just a TODO list app. It's more of like MS buying their own "Slack".
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What kind of details do they ask before giving an offer? Anything that might be considered proprietary or were they eager from the go?
We ran them through the front end of our product and how it works from top to tail, discussing why we made certain product decisions. Almost everything they could have seen as a user of our app but a few things that were admin functions. A bunch of it they could have used to build their own app but we figured that was pretty unlikely. They asked for a few things we did disclose like: - team size / locations / educati…
Everytime I run into the WSJ paywall I want to throw things. Yes it is easy to get around but no we shouldn't have to. Because advertising. Anyway does anyone know approximately how many users this app had? Seems like a pretty rich valuation for a to-do list app.
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Recently went through this. They first reach out for some kind of "we're looking to do something in this space and wanted to discuss working with you". Our first conversation was along the lines of "We're not sure whether we're going to build this, partner with someone or buy something. Keen to find out more about what you guys are doing and see if we can work together". Next meeting it went to "We're clearly not goi…
What kind of details do they ask before giving an offer? Anything that might be considered proprietary or were they eager from the go?
I think they needed it more than us to be honest, they were effectively opening up their corporate roadmap to us for what is now a publicly traded company. We were talking to competitors of theirs who we could have shared this insight with which would have done more harm than them taking any of our IP.