[jjice]

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.

[WJW]

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.

[johnnyanmac]

For a hosting space like Vimeo, I'd be surprised if this gave them 5 years. And remember, they acquired Vimeo for over a billion dollars.

This isn't like some B2C 5-10 dollar a month service. Video hosting is notoriously expensive and paying clients will quickly see other alternatives if they see smoke. These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill. They are "active", so to speak.

[csallen]

> These are already people with specialized needs that the main market leader (Youtube) cannot fulfill.

Isn't this just a bigger reason why these people won't leave? Assuming the acquirer isn't dumb enough to remove the core benefit that comes from their highest paying customers, they will keep providing those, and those customers won't churn. And I think this is a safe assumption, considering it's the primary goal and focus of the people at the acquirer.

[johnnyanmac]

My TLDR response here would be this: Vimeo isn't Evernote and people are paying a lot more to expect more. The nature of this means that smaller bits of "product rot" will push them away faster than what a consumer would tolerate. These are already people who needed to deliberately avoid Youtube, so they aren't afraid to migrate again if needed.

There's also a lot more competition with Vimeo than there is with YouTube. So options exist to find.

----

But I'll break down my thoughts further. I'm familiar with the scene (a lot of artists use Vimeo for their portfolios, as well as working with clients on NDA content), but not intimate. So I'd love someone for me to call me out here. But:

There's 2 lenses here. Your lens implies Vimeo is the best service in this niche space, that reducing down the staff count to a skeleton crew will keep it as the most competitive option, and that as long as this isn't disrupted that it'll be business as usual. And we'll be charitable and assume this doesn't enshittify. Those are all valid points. I'm much less charitable, but I can still work in this lens for the sake of argument.

The lens I'm looking in is more at the type of person using Vimeo, not the type of business Vimeo runs. Compare this to Evernote. It's a lot closer to Twitter or Facebook, where remaining users will use it simply because "it's familiar" more than for any competitive edge. It has everything you need, and even if costs rise, we're still talking about one lunch outing per month. It's a "sticky" product benefiting from previous goodwill and marketing.

The people on Vimeo aren't "sticky". They are closer to the type of person who leaves Windows for Linux because Microsoft keeps pissing then off. In fact it's more like they are Linux users who jump around from distro to distro because they already forsook the market leader. They are "actively" on the move and aware of the tools they use. Given that Vimeo is a highly premium service when you use Enterprise, you need to be active. You don't want to be on a sinking ship and have your work crash with it.

So I see two roads here. Some users will stay "stuck" because maybe nothing else does compared to Vimeo. Or because some larger pipeline relies on Vimeo and it's beyond their control. Then some users will be either leaving to another service, or actively keeping an eye out for competitors in the near future. That's what I see as "different" here.

Now, taking my charitable lens off: I do think there will be a lot of small issues pushing people off, and then a few huge ones. Small things like site performance degrading as they scale back server, and worse support as they slash labor. Then the larger things will truly push people, like a price hike, change in monetization models, or failing to honor any deals made pre-bending spoons. Or even a huge data leak. Those things, big and little, break the foundation of a trusted business.

[breakingcups]

Since Vimeo owns the customer billing relationship in a lot of their whitelabel B2B business, migration would be a pain, especially when compounded by a massive amount of data needing to be re-ingested. I think those customers will tolerate a reasonable amount of rot before starting to move and that the timescales would be long.

[csallen]

Totally reasonable take, thanks for going in depth.

[aetherson]

I mean, if your argument is, "Bending Spoons made a bad investment," then sure, okay. That's not implausible! Companies make bad investments.

But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

[johnnyanmac]

>But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

So many chains to keep up with. There wasn't really a lesson here. Just "Vimeo is not Evernote"?

My wider lesson unrelated to this chain is that US at will employnent sucks and we need to overhaul it. You don't create a trusting career by treating employees like toys to discard.

[aetherson]

The US has enriched a vastly larger number of software engineers through at will employment that Europe has through making it very hard to fire people who aren't adding value.

[johnnyanmac]

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 another counry's industry.

3. Even if I took this as truth, this didnt happen overnight. I worry about how Gen Z will be "enriched" in this model, and saying "but millenials/Gen X had great careers" is condescending to Gen Z at best. The rules changed over their careers, and we're still using the old rules to talk about how good we have it. Or had it. Gen Z doesn't know what those rules are anymore, so there's nothing to fall in love with.

[aetherson]

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]

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]

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]

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

[aetherson]

Yes, the owners were paid by the sale. The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company).

Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off a month ago. But the money that is being soaked up by employee who are, again, stipulated to be not doing anything productive goes somewhere else. This may be a tragedy for an individual person, but it's good for society overall.

[toomuchtodo]

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]

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.

[dwedge]

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]

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.

[toomuchtodo]

Yes.

[skrtskrt]

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]

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.

[MrDarcy]

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

[CiccioNizzo]

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]

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]

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.

[criddell]

I wouldn't classify a small number of people with equity scoring big and millions of users losing out as everyone doing great.

[philipallstar]

The users will have done worse had the company simply closed, though. I think that's generally the alternative.

[DonHopkins]

Just unmitigated bug and software rot creep.

[johnnyanmac]

It's worse. When a company like this is "mature", they don't try to appeal to new users. They instead squeeze what they can out of the existing user base, because that user base is probably already dying off. This isn't about attaining a steady state business, its about seeing how much of the toothpaste you can still squeeze out the bottle before it crusts up.

This practice is derogatorily called "vulture capitalism" for a reason. I hope the remaining engineers are either lining up for retirement or networking around for their next gig.