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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

#121

Post by everybodyknows »

rpdillon wrote: post #60
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…

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 dif…

> 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.

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

#122

Post by block_dagger »

ValentineC wrote: post #115
block_dagger wrote: post #33

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…

> Its title was an anagram of "movie." TIL! I always thought it was some creative play on "video".

It's both!

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

#123

Post by john-h-k »

pyrale wrote: post #86
john-h-k wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So then we prefer the scenario where the employees are just forced to manage a declining company? Or we prefer it folding?

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

#124

Post by spenjovewkwhalo »

robocat wrote: post #91
smrtinsert wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. Fabulous article (I think evergreen through regular edits/updates): https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/the-mechanisms-of-en…

Thanks for that, loved the worseonpurpose article

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

#125

Post by rpdillon »

Grombobulous wrote: post #119
rpdillon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to real users tells a different story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847994

Sure, one user’s anecdote. You can find negative reviews for any product. Evernote on iOS currently has a 4.4 star rating. For comparison, the Obsidian iOS app has a 4.5 star rating.

Yep, I ended up looking into this quite a bit more, and now agree with you. Evernote ratings were historically lower before the Bending Spoons acquisition. There are shady things you can do with ratings like ask whether they like they app before redirecting them to the rate it, it does seem like I was over-indexing on some anecdotes (I also worked with some ex-Evernoters, so I was coming in a bit biased). Thanks for pointing out the trend!

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

#126

Post by puszczyk »

rpdillon wrote: post #67
Grombobulous wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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 don't know about their other software, but i'm a (paying) user of komoot. Komoot development has stagnated until bending spoons took over ~1y ago, see the recent https://www.komoot.com/product-updates

maybe it's case by case basis; i'm not an evernote user since the botched rewrite probably 10y ago at this point

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