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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

#151

Post by Nextgrid »

wavemode wrote: post #126
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 economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as mu…

> Software is never "finished"

Software may never be finished (in your opinion) but the budget of any customer is finite. If you keep reinvesting your revenue forever into "engineering" the product there's going to be a time where a competitor comes in with a finished product matching your customers' requirements and snatches him from you by both charging less and making a profit.

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

#153

Post by CodeWriter23 »

nness wrote: post #4
ayhanfuat wrote: post #3

From "Vimeo to be acquired by Bending Spoons in $1.38B all-cash deal" ( https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/vimeo-to-be-acquired-by-be... ): > Bending Spoons has a pattern of acquiring companies, then laying off staff and cutting features. For example, Bending Spoons acquired note-taking and task management app Evernote in 2022, after which the company laid off most of its U.S. and Chile staff and moved operations to E…

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

> customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn after a 1-3 years, so they wouldn't make enough of a return

You might think that. Then there's Earthlink and AOL still collecting $5 or $6/mo per mailbox as their cash cow.

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

#154

Post by stabbles »

Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #51
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

For example, they bought the German hiking and cycling app Komoot. It's a mature app in terms of functionality, with a stable user base. There's little chance of hypergrowth with this type of app. It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since…

> Since then, there has been no further development of the service.

That's not true, the website and app both got a major redesign after acquisition.

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

#155

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

bradleybuda wrote: post #61
nness wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this model. Such significant layoffs would indicate that there is no real appetite for expansion or growth. Their goal might be be to acquire, dramatically cut costs, and then run the product for as long as they can at a profit before breaking it down and selling it off (or hope for a buyout by a bigger player.) But that wouldn't make sense — customers of a depreciating SaaS product surely churn af…

HN: VC is a cancer, businesses don't need to grow forever at all costs, products can be finished, what we need is sustainable small companies Also HN: No, not like that

Alright, so is vimeo finished product then?

Why not come out and say this?

Also another thing but other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699#46709164 points out how Vimeo wants to replace SV engineers with Italian engineers to save money.

They are a first and foremost private equity company, Don't forget. There's no loyalty to any group.

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

#156

Post by Beretta_Vexee »

alistairSH wrote: post #95
Beretta_Vexee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, they bought the German hiking and cycling app Komoot. It's a mature app in terms of functionality, with a stable user base. There's little chance of hypergrowth with this type of app. It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. They laid off 90% of the teams. They migrated the app to their infrastructure to pool costs. Since…

It's also complicated to switch apps because transferring routes, collections, photos, etc. to another service is difficult. Not really, sync everything through Strava, and then drop whichever service you don't want. Basically any bike ride I've done in the past decade is on 3+ services because they all sync.

Oh I can do it but I am not really representative of the average user.

Plus I have a lot of points of interest, note, picture, that I could request via gdpr but not easy to reuse and couldn't be imported into Strava.

Strava isn't better than Komoot on this regard.

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

#157

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

ryoshoe wrote: post #115
cheschire wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost as if HN were a community of voices instead of just one…

The Goomba Fallacy strikes once again

This fallacy's pretty cool and first time I Heard of it!

Do you know other fallacies like this which are less known but as interesting (that you or others might know of) probably?

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

#158

Post by burningChrome »

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 use Harvest for my freelance invoicing and started seeing the huge notice at the top of the app and was wondering how this was going to impact my stuff going forward. I'm also very leery having gone through a horrible Evernote experience.

If anybody has any good alternatives, I'm all ears.

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

#159

Post by Nextgrid »

refulgentis wrote: post #117
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 -…

I think you're entirely correct. I put it to not-tech people as: "[insert_ridiculous_valuation] is because you can fire everyone tomorrow and keep operating" > "Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product despite it being essentially finished." This is wrong, though, it's unnecessarily tying in a pop-finance obsession with ZIRP. Un…

> companies took on debt to fund bloated engineering teams because no one noticed the engineering was done

ZIRP allowed a lot of "businesses" to exist that wouldn't in a conventional, competitive capitalistic environment. Businesses in quotes because there was never any reasonable potential for profitability, but it didn't matter because VC money was cheap. Building a sustainable business is hard, playing "startup founder" and having that lifestyle subsidized by VCs is easier.

In that case, (over)engineering was part of the performance art that was required to keep your only revenue source: the next funding round. There was never any incentive to "finish" the product because doing that would put your business model (or lack thereof) to the test and stop the music. On the other hand, as long as cheap money is around you could endlessly "engineer" and pivot and bullshit around, chasing the next funding round and using that to pay yourself/your friends decent salaries.

During the ZIRP era it was all about "engagement" and DAUs/MAUs, then it was blockchain, and now it's all about AI. For those that have run out of grifts, they fold or "incredible journey" and get sold for pennies on the dollar to entities like Bending Spoons that do notice there are bloated engineering teams that can be cut.

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

#160

Post by hahahahhaah »

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 -…

I don't think you need ZIRP or even VC to have successful software companies that reinvest in features. You need a low marginal cost of manufacturing, aka the floppy disk.
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