This is typical of Bending Spoons. They make an acquisition, lay off as many people as possible, then start jacking up prices and putting features behind ever larger paywalls. They've got to start feeling the pain of user churn and attrition at some point, but not yet, I guess.
Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
461–470 of 522 posts
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. I don't know how that's relevant to my argument at all. This is just "you criticize society, yet you participate in it" dismissal. 2. This is like saying "Asia has better rice because it employs more rice makers than the US". Besides being dubious in truth, that also isn't a good measurement for "enrichment" nor "quality". It's just saying that there's more money being put into the industry in this country than an…
The point for me is that "a trusting career" costs far more than it's worth. I would much rather make 3x as much in America with less job security.
That's fine, but different people have different risk tolerances and preferences. There's many people who would never want to emigrate to the USA, and many Americans who emigrate abroad. There's no one country that fits all personalities.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#463From "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…
Startups focus on building assets, not revenue or profit.
Companies like Bending Spoons focus on buying these assets and turn them into $$$$$$$$, not sustainability or growth.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read it as: “This is the price for me to do work I don’t want to do, but will do, if you make it impossible for me to say no.” It’s not about justifying the rate, that’s the wrong way to think of it.
And if no one takes your price, you fail as a business. I think that's the concern. There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr" without getting some bulging eyes. Because I don't have the credibility to back that up. How to get credibilty? Well, you gotta be in industry. The thing the two consultants here are besmirching. You can't win.
I think you're just looking at these negotiations from the wrong perspective.
> There's not a lot of vectors I feel I can jump in to say "I'll do this for 1000/hr" without getting some bulging eyes.
1000/hr might be a lot for you, for many businesses it's not even a meaningful expense, the bigger hassle for them is doing the paperwork to get the money sent out.
I'm well out of tech at this point, running a small lifestyle business in a different industry. At least once a month, I get people in my new industry offering me significant amounts of money to build them software. I don't have a fancy public tech resume; really, the only thing these people know is that I'm some relatively pleasant, rich, former tech guy.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#465I 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 -…
> “Tech was an outlier in this case because ZIRP allowed companies to retain full engineering teams to keep "engineering" the product even once product-market-fit has been achieved…”
Do you include visual design/UI design in the engineering category? In the situation you describe does a completed product continue evolving visually, or does the design stay fixed, and gets bug fixes and such?
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#466I 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" the way a building is finished.
On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions.
Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws.
Some examples of where it should be "done" by some point include smart TVs and smart lightbulbs. I'm also old enough to remember the era of games where patches were rare and small, unlike the current experience of having to wait for Steam to install updates almost every day, and only then will allow me to see if the game I want to play and which worked yesterday now has a mandatory update that I also have to wait for (which is less often but still often enough to be annoying).
Even with MacOS, while I absolutely do appreciate all the behind the scenes stuff regarding security and so on, the last time I appreciated what they did with the UI in an update, the version branding scheme was still to name releases after cats.
Even as an iOS developer, although I can see what they're trying to do with SwiftUI, I find it worse than UIKit in basically every regard because the "magic" keeps not working and the "problem" it tried to solve was never (for me) a problem; with concurrency, they went from GCD to Combine which IMO was a step back, before going to async/await.
"Too many features" is also a problem for the developers, as it leads to them duplicating work. For example, the background sounds feature on my phone and the one on my HomePod each has its own list of sounds, they're not just two interfaces to the same underlying app even though the HomePod's OS is a fork of tvOS which is a fork of iOS.
(The other way around, the home I grew up in is now about twice the size it was when my parents bought it around 1970, judging from the Google areal view).
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point for me is that "a trusting career" costs far more than it's worth. I would much rather make 3x as much in America with less job security.
That's fine, but different people have different risk tolerances and preferences. There's many people who would never want to emigrate to the USA, and many Americans who emigrate abroad. There's no one country that fits all personalities.
Agreed, I’m responding to someone who is criticizing the American way of doing it, so I’m explaining the tradeoffs as I see them.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#468I 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 -…
This is the same business model that Computer Associates used successfully in the 1990s, so it's not new to IT or technology.
The primary difference now is that the transition from bespoke IT on premises environments has been subsumed by the cloud hyperscalars and an entire hierarchy of products that use that infrastructure in a higher level of composability than in the past.
Products like SAP will continue to require engineering to maintain compatibility with the changes in its customers' requirements.
Products like MS-Word don't need that same level of feature work.
If a product is essentially feature complete then making the engineering a "maintenance only" support is about minimizing those support costs.
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds good. I’d suggest niching down and talking to some customers to see who genuinely cares about those things - as they might turn out (tragically I know) to be things only techies care about. Fair warning.. when we hear talk to customers we are tempted to reply “I talked to customer in my mind and they love my thing!” But unfortunately customers in our minds don’t have money :) There’re either customers out ther…
Yup, good points! Thank you. I'm building a pretty generic tool for now and hoping a couple of niche use cases surface here soon.
I quite like this. I am your customer possibly. will bookmark
Re: Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday
#470I 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 -…
Vista Equity operates along a similar model for SAAS
cut wasteful spending, find a way to increase revenue - milk the SAAS for a few years - then either sell it off or shut it down - or it can keep running as a lean cash generating machine
Vista Equity rotates operators within its holding companies