Bending Spoons · B2C · app acquirer and operator
Buy mature apps, let go of almost all staff, and run them on one central team
Evernote kept ~2 of hundreds of staff and still rates 4.4 stars; company valued at $11B
Workedportfolioexit-mapricing
What they did
Bending Spoons buys apps/subscription businesses (e.g. Evernote, AOL) and within the first month lets go of ~97% of the acquired employees, lifting the product onto its existing ~600-person team rather than shutting it down. Then optimizes pricing and marketing, where it is expert. Hosts add: products with years of locked-in user data (Evernote) tolerate higher prices, and a large user base (AOL's older email users) can be cross-marketed other apps.
What happened
Raised at an $11B valuation; Evernote kept a 4.4-star rating; Crowley calls the operational efficiency unmatched.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Why AI Probably Won’t Kill Your App (But Ignoring It Will) — Eric Crowley, GP Bullhound“They're not shutting down the business, they're not just taking it as cash flow. They are just lifting the business off whatever infrastructure and team was done and they're putting it on to their existing team.”
“The definition of optimize is probably change over time, but they're experts at pricing, they're experts at marketing.”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Strava: Buy a beginner-friendly app and sell it to your users as a bundleDeal closed; adviser calls it '1+1=6'; no post-deal numbers shared
- Runna: Give each runner AI coaching feedback on every run, built by an ex-coachGrew fast and was bought by Strava; no growth numbers given
- Build a web checkout to win back 15-20% margin from app store feesEvery one of the banker's clients is building or evaluating one; big wins at $100M+ revenue
- Tractive: Ping owners when their dog hasn't been walked in a dayGuest, a user, calls it phenomenal; no business numbers