The buyer who wants your product forever, and your free tier gone by Tuesday
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief,
TL;DRBending Spoons' acquisition strategy focuses on revitalizing stalled products with strong user bases by optimizing pricing and features, offering a model for product leaders to enhance retention and profitability.
Bending Spoons just went public on the Nasdaq and popped 40% on day one. If you run a mature product, this is the company that might buy it someday. So let me catch you up on how they operate, because their playbook is now the model investors are cheering for.
They buy love, not corpses
The easy story is that Bending Spoons picks up dead brands and drains them. That story is wrong, and it matters for how you read them. They bought Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, Vimeo, and AOL because those products still have real users doing real things. As of March 2026, the portfolio served over 500 million monthly active users and 9 million paying customers.
Joe Hyrkin, who sold Issuu to them in 2024, put it plainly: "'Old internet brands' is the wrong frame." They buy products with live customer behavior, then run them through one central machine of product, data, and pricing.
So the target is not a company that failed. It is a company that stalled, still loved, still paying, run by owners who hit a wall.
The math they run on your P&L
Here is where it gets sharp. Bending Spoons turned a $112 million net loss in early 2025 into $27.4 million in net income a year later, on $601 million in Q1 revenue. Subscriptions were 84% of the business. They got there through cost cuts, new features, and higher prices.
The headcount part is blunt. They added 1,830 people through the AOL, Eventbrite, and Vimeo deals, then said they expect "only a few hundred to remain" once the work is done. The Vimeo deal closed and the entire video team was cut.
Revenue per core employee jumped from $1.12 million in 2023 to $2.57 million in 2025. That number, more than any brand name, is the thesis investors bought.
What they change first, and who complains
After a deal, they touch the price, the free tier, and the staff. WeTransfer got stricter free limits, and cofounder Nalden said he was building a rival service. Evernote lost free features and raised prices, and long-term subscribers were loud about it.
Through all of it, cofounder Matteo Danieli keeps returning to one claim: customer retention has been "remarkably stable." That is the whole bet. They believe a loved product can absorb a price hike and a thinner free plan without users walking. Their pricing runs on heavy data and constant experiments, not gut feel.
Danieli even points to Evernote's AI-heavy v11 as his proudest fix, with cofounder Phil Libin praising it. The pattern: cut hard, ship features, raise price, watch the churn number, adjust.
Why now, and why they keep buying
SaaS valuations dropped this year on fear that AI will eat older software. Bending Spoons treats that fear as a discount rack. Danieli called it "a great opportunity and moment to deploy capital." Eventbrite went for around $500 million, far below its $1.76 billion IPO valuation from 2018.
The pipeline is huge. In 2025 they sourced over 2,500 targets, studied about 200, and closed six. CEO Luca Ferrari said they have flagged more than 1,000 businesses worth nearly $400 billion in revenue as future targets. If you run a stalled product with paying users, you may already be on a list.
The deep cut
Bending Spoons is not betting on your brand. They are betting your users will not leave when the price goes up and the free tier shrinks. That is a retention bet, and it is measurable. So the most useful thing you can do before any buyer comes calling is know your own answer to their question. Pull your cohort retention and your price sensitivity now. Find out which users would tolerate a price hike and which would bolt. If you know that number better than a buyer does, you keep the leverage in the room, whether you sell or not. The free tier you treat as sacred is the first line item they will test.
Three questions for your team
- If a buyer raised our prices 20% and cut the free tier tomorrow, how many paying users would actually leave? Do we have the cohort data to answer that, or are we guessing?
- Which of our features drive word of mouth versus which just add cost? Could we defend that split in a room full of people running the numbers on us?
- What is our real revenue per employee, and would that number make us look like a target worth stalking or a business already running lean?
