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Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#131

Post by captain_coffee »

publicdebates wrote: post #111
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades , and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.

How do you get clients on that rate? Genuinely curious

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#132

Post by jcynix »

torben-friis wrote: post #130
jcynix wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of millions in revenue and three acquisitions in 2024 — what’s behind Bending Spoons’ success? | Sifted https://sifted.eu/articles/bending-spoons-italy-startup-ipo So private equity is behind it.

Yeah, but AFAIK that means people buying companies, leaving them with a skeleton crew and milking the remaining users as long as possible. How does that fit with expensive hiring sprees? If anything I’d expect them to be continuously shedding absorbed employees.

I guess that companies which get bought might be a bit "overstaffed" from the startup phase or because planned further development. If one removes this staff, you need less people to minimally maintain a running app. But itcs just a guess, you'll loose knowhow too, when drastically reducing your staff.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#133

Post by CiccioNizzo »

MrDarcy wrote: post #69
jjice wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is what I think Bending Spoons does, mostly based on the Evernote situation. Product has paying users and it's in a "complete" state. Cut costs to optimize profit for a bit and hope not everyone leaves. In the case of Evernote, it's probably really hard to get 10 year users off of it at this point, so they can double subscriptions and they're locked in. My assumption is that there's a serious amount of peop…

Terrible for those laid off but perhaps not for Evernote customers if it means there isn’t unwelcome feature creep.

Been a paiyng Evernote customer since its launch. I unsubscribed at the beginning of 2025 after 7/8 years of shitty releases, not fixing old bugs, and new useless features.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#135

Post by dwedge »

rickydroll wrote: post #90
toomuchtodo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is correct. You're buying a cashflow. Bending Spoons has optimized their model for very specific types of cashflow enterprises to aggregate into their portfolio.

I use Harvest to track hours and expenses and to invoice my customers. Bending Spoons apparently bought them a while ago and just eliminated the shell company around Harvest. Based on my experience with Evernote, I don't trust Bending Spoons, and I'm wondering if I should look for a different time-tracking and invoicing system.

I've been in the same boat as you and replaced it last year but still pay for harvest (grandfathered pricing) until I can be sure I don't need it. I'm almost up to renewal and haven't used it at all since trying app.solidtime.io

I'll be honest it's not as good as harvest. The mac app is a bit buggy, it's not as easy to add manual time, and you need to pay for pdf export. But having said that I've found the free version to cover 90% of my use of the paid version of harvest

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#136

Post by altairprime »

bilekas wrote: post #20
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

4 months: Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302

This comment from e98cuenc seems extremely prescient. > Everybody loves to hate BendingSpoon, but there is a lesson here. They consistently rewrite the code of their acquisitions with a tiny team, fire everybody and are able to maintain and improve the product. They basically skip everything but engineers, and they are kept at a minimum. Feedback from users is the products they take over 1) become more expensive, 2)…

Honestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#139

Post by CiccioNizzo »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #123
Nextgrid wrote: post #106

I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…

The fact that it's the norm for the builders of mature software to stick around can lead to some gross engineering inefficiencies. For instance, a lot of Evernote's backend infrastructure was manually managed [0]: With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architectur…

> With Evernote, Bending Spoons identified that the backend needed a complete rewrite. They moved from a monolithic architecture running on manually provisioned virtual machines to a microservices architecture with managed databases, significantly improving performance and scalability.

And accidentally turned it into a shitty product in the process :-)

Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday

#140

Post by Nextgrid »

captain_coffee wrote: post #131
publicdebates wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly why I charge $999/hour for my software consulting. To the doubters, laugh all you want, but I've been doing this for literal decades , and will absolutely slaughter LLM generated code in terms of code reliability and maintainability amortized over 5 years.

How do you get clients on that rate? Genuinely curious

Hourly rates are inherently risky for clients - you're asking them to part with money with no guaranteed outcome, so there's a natural ceiling where the financial risk becomes untenable regardless of your expertise and reputation.

Clients don't buy hours though, they buy solutions. They have problems costing them money or preventing revenue and they'll pay a percentage of that value to solve it. When you price based on solution value rather than time, your effective hourly rate merely becomes a function of your efficiency and expertise delivering said solution.

They key to achieving such a rate comes down to your sales and business skills: understanding what to sell, how to structure it to maximize your earnings and make it palatable for the client.

For example I generally avoid hourly billing except as a filter for time-wasters. Instead, consultancy becomes a loss leader for the real business: deeply understanding client problems and delivering high-value solutions. Clients happily pay premium rates when they see the price as a fraction of the solution's worth to them.

I only resort to quoting (quite high) hourly rates where it's clear the client just wants consultancy/advice (basically a glorified IT/business support) as a way to make it worth my time and gently encouraging them to bounce (I openly suggest more cost-effective options and refer them there).

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