111–120 of 126 posts
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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"
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.
I haven't seen Evernote pro- nor reproduce anything
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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"
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.
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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.
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.
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 as…
TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".
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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
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)
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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 recom…
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…
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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.
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?
I'd pay 2x my subscription price to be able to use a third party client again.
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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…
Talking to real users tells a different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847994
Evernote on iOS currently has a 4.4 star rating.
For comparison, the Obsidian iOS app has a 4.5 star rating.
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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 c…
> 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 tactic…
I’m certainly very much against lifetime subscriptions losing promised features and things like that.