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