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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

#61

Post by rpdillon »

Exoristos wrote: post #35
cs702 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as a perpetual bond with declining coupon payments. Customer "inertia" or "lock-in" might be better terms to describe what the company is looking for in an acquisition. Their ideal customer may well be someone who's forgotten they have a subscription on credit card auto-pay.

Add to this that they make it really, really hard to unsubscribe. I think there's been some legal crackdowns, but for a time, they could make it literally impossible.

This article is like an advertisement. Here's how they spin it:

> Speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder and chief product officer Matteo Danieli said some of the scrutiny was due to the fact that products such as Evernote were genuinely loved by their users. But he said that despite all the changes, customer retention has been “remarkably stable.”

Ah yes. In other news, the prison population size is also remarkably stable.

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

#62

Post by bionade24 »

alanwreath wrote: post #25
sbarre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that their specific approach sucks, I do wish more companies would declare products as "done" and stop messing with the UI and changing features every quarter, and just go into a long-term stability mode.

That’s Valve (somewhat) and Blizzard (but to the nth degree) in a nutshell. That said, tangentially, I do wish game companies would let games live on.

Valve recently changed the Steam workshop UI/website meanwhile Steam still runs on X11 and depends on 32bit libs on Linux.

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

#63

Post by danabrams »

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…

There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline.

There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.

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

#64

Post by IncreasePosts »

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…

Renowned author C. H. Atgpt

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

#65

Post by alexpotato »

danabrams wrote: post #63
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…

There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle and Bending Spoons's model is to maximize what they can get in the final stage of decline. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're a user of one of these services you might take it as a hint to find an alternative.

> There are four stages to any successful companies lifecycle

I usually say in interviews that my preferred time to join a company is at the end of stage 1 (start up) and the start of phase 2 (organizing).

Nothing makes me happier than to be told "Hey, we got this up and running and it's a mess. Now we need someone to turn this into a system that is easy to modify and maintain."

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

#66

Post by Grombobulous »

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…

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 of intervention, which is to keep companies/products that would have otherwise disappeared viable.

For a company like Evernote it wouldn’t be better for their customers if the company liquidated. There are worse things that can happen to your service provider of choice than price increases or worse customer support.

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

#67

Post by rpdillon »

Grombobulous wrote: post #66
rpdillon wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 recommend the product to their friends.

Charging $20,000 for a note-taking app subscription is not that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849810

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

#68

Post by Grombobulous »

alephnerd wrote: post #36
sbarre wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a PE firm going public just an admission of failure, and an attempt to make their private investors whole on the public market's back?

BendingSpoons isn't a PE fund. It's just loose terminology that has become rife on HN like the misuse of "VCs".

Right, if we get really literal about it, Private Equity can really just mean “any private entity’s money.”

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

#69

Post by Grombobulous »

jlarocco wrote: post #8
PatronBernard wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. They are also enshittifying Komoot and EventBrite. Also by default they acquire a company and fire all staff within the week. Fuck Bending Spoons.

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.

This will never happen.

Labels literally negotiated their own royalty rates down in exchange for shares in Spotify. It’s the perfect way to push artists out of receiving earnings.

I think record labels would be first in line to buy Spotify if it was ever for sale.

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