5 ms·

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 op

by jjice 9mo ago

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 people that go "eh" and just deal with the cost increase and stagnated features.

toomuchtodo 9mo ago
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.
- rickydroll 9mo ago
  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.
  - toomuchtodo 9mo ago
    Yes.
  - dwedge 9mo ago
    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
  - burningChrome 9mo ago
    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.
MrDarcy 9mo ago
Terrible for those laid off but perhaps not for Evernote customers if it means there isn’t unwelcome feature creep.
- DonHopkins 9mo ago
  Just unmitigated bug and software rot creep.
- CiccioNizzo 9mo ago
  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.
  - criddell 9mo ago
    I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2. But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5. I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that. I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop. It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.
    - philipallstar 9mo ago
      If everyone gets salaries and equity is paid for then everyone's done great. And then we can build another one, or an open source equivalent once all the money's been spent researching useful features, and then we're done.
WJW 9mo ago
It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same. The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.
- aetherson 9mo ago
  And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
  - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
    Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.
    - philipallstar 9mo ago
      Well, the workers already got paid for their time; the owner didn't for their time and (more importantly) risk. No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
      - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
        The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"? >No one wonders why loyalty is dead. I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age
skrtskrt 9mo ago
It would be nice if there were a common way for essentially feature-complete SaaS businesses to carry on and maintain some expected level of quality, security updates, and support without endless pressure to expand revenue or slash costs.
- Nextgrid 9mo ago
  A lot of the pressure to expand revenue comes from within thanks to the flaws of permanent employment - you hired permanent employees at a discount compared to the equivalent contractor/temporary workforce in exchange for a promise of perpetual employment. These people will thus do their best to ensure their perpetual employment (they will never say "hey I think we've finished building your product, now you can lay us off to make profit"). You can of course sidestep that and use contractors for the initial build out - plenty of agencies and freelancers will give you a quote with various terms. It'll cost way more in the short term because you're essentially paying upfront the years of salary they would otherwise earn building the same thing as permanent employees, but at least it's an upfront, honest transaction with no expectation of loyalty. You can then hire a permanent skeleton crew for the continuous upkeep. Want a turnkey Vimeo you can deploy on a cloud or truckloads of servers you can just rack up in a colo? If you have a spare 1.4B laying around, I'm sure that can be arranged.

by jjice 9mo ago

toomuchtodo 9mo ago

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.

rickydroll 9mo ago
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.
- toomuchtodo 9mo ago
  Yes.
- dwedge 9mo ago
  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
- burningChrome 9mo ago
  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.

MrDarcy 9mo ago

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

DonHopkins 9mo ago
Just unmitigated bug and software rot creep.
CiccioNizzo 9mo ago
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.
- criddell 9mo ago
  I don't user Evernote very often, but I have a bunch of stuff stored in there and use it basically in a read-only mode. For a long time I was able to get the $36 / year plan which I felt pretty good about. It was a great app and service which I didn't use very much, so that felt like a fair price and I felt good about supporting them at that level. Basically every time I opened Evernote, I was paying $2. But then the price tripled and for me, it's too much. I'll pay $2 per session, but not $5. I remember their CEO (Phil Libin I think) on their podcast explaining how they were building a 100 year company. I really wanted to believe that. I use Obsidian now and like it, but it feels like they are going down the same path. They keep adding features that don't really fit the original editor-for-a-folder-of-markdown-files. I wish they would stop. It's a bummer but the feature treadmill seems inescapable. Bending Spoons will probably be able to buy Obsidian for a very nice price in a few years and the Obsidian founders will do very well.
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    If everyone gets salaries and equity is paid for then everyone's done great. And then we can build another one, or an open source equivalent once all the money's been spent researching useful features, and then we're done.

WJW 9mo ago

It was like that with WeTransfer too. Fine company that had been profitable for years, but with little hope of getting ever 10x bigger again. I used to work there and had already left by the time of the acquisition, but all the old colleagues I've spoken to said the same. The main business was throwing off gobs of money and there were SO MANY failed projects to try and find new revenue streams. Everyone who was not being pushed by the PE owners could see that they would never account to even 1% of the revenues of the main product. It was only a matter of time before someone came in, said "the main business is fine as is" and fired the people who were involved in the moonshots then sat back and raked in the cash. Sure, it will probably not last forever. But if it brings in millions per year for 15-20 years until the company dies, then that is probably an outcome Bending Spoons is fine with.

aetherson 9mo ago
And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago
  Sadly, "return money to owners" ends more like the owner selling off the company and leaving all the workers under them in freefall. And people wonder why loyalty is dead.
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    Well, the workers already got paid for their time; the owner didn't for their time and (more importantly) risk. No one wonders why loyalty is dead.
    - johnnyanmac 9mo ago
      The owner got a big pay package from the sale on top of usually being one of the more highly compensated employees at such companies. What do you mean by "the owner didn't get paid"? >No one wonders why loyalty is dead. I see you missed the recent narrative of "Gen Z is lazy" and "most managers avoid hiring Gen Z" out there. I assure you many managers are baffled, bit blame the (relative) children instead of seeing how work culture has shifted since they were that age

skrtskrt 9mo ago

It would be nice if there were a common way for essentially feature-complete SaaS businesses to carry on and maintain some expected level of quality, security updates, and support without endless pressure to expand revenue or slash costs.

Nextgrid 9mo ago
A lot of the pressure to expand revenue comes from within thanks to the flaws of permanent employment - you hired permanent employees at a discount compared to the equivalent contractor/temporary workforce in exchange for a promise of perpetual employment. These people will thus do their best to ensure their perpetual employment (they will never say "hey I think we've finished building your product, now you can lay us off to make profit"). You can of course sidestep that and use contractors for the initial build out - plenty of agencies and freelancers will give you a quote with various terms. It'll cost way more in the short term because you're essentially paying upfront the years of salary they would otherwise earn building the same thing as permanent employees, but at least it's an upfront, honest transaction with no expectation of loyalty. You can then hire a permanent skeleton crew for the continuous upkeep. Want a turnkey Vimeo you can deploy on a cloud or truckloads of servers you can just rack up in a colo? If you have a spare 1.4B laying around, I'm sure that can be arranged.