More like following the Computer Associates model, a tale as old as time. Find a mature platform with a captive user population with a fat, lazy management team, buy them out, slash headcount, and open the taps. Someone in the thread mentioned Atlassian, that is a perfect target for this kind of strategy.
It's LucidSpark for non-masochists. It's Parabol for power-users. It's possibly the greatest 'roll your own' tool for workshopping and blue-sky planning to hit mass-appeal without feature and subscription bloat.
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
My best experience was a large meeting I had recently, in a well equipped conference room with actual whiteboards and stacks of post-it notes and the Power Miro User in the room insisted we all bring laptops and work on the boards online. Jesus Christ.
i'm forever chasing the dragon of cocktail napkin + physical stickies + Balsamiq, and have never even used Miro, and even i let out a "ohhhh no" in a welp, should i just go back to bed tone seeing this
i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter
Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.
Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.
BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.
Do they even have the moat to pull the same sort of playbook with Miro? We used to use it for remote retros and whiteboarding, we ended up not renewing because we were already paying for Lucid and there was little added value.
I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.
Maybe not to the same extent. In a company I worked with recently they used it a lot but didn't store data in it, meaning there was very little lock-in: mostly inertia/convenience.
If BS slightly raise the price and ruthlessly cut costs (think - leave just a skeleton crew to keep it running), the calculation may make sense even if there's slow churn in the users and no special lock in.
(disclaimer: pure outsider speculation on my part)
miro is my go-to for putting together diagrams for slide decks, but after having tried using it to actually work on things a few times, i've just come to the conclusion that actually virtual whiteboards are a bad UX for most things, inevitably you spend more time organizing the board than actually getting work done
BS is slowly but steadily growing their userbase. Knowhing how did it go for their other purchases, of which I was using many (Komoot, Eventbrite, Meetup), not a single one has avoided constant nags of prompting for upgrades and dark patterns, so this will most likely end up in a similar way.
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
Komoot is particularly bad, I paid for a lifetime license but now they are gating new features behind a subscription. I think it's time to find something else.
and others like Aol. and Eventbrite, but where it really hit me was Evernote. i tried to cancel and then Bending Spoons (BS for short) tried to charge me several times at a subscription 5 times the cost. i think something about pre-auth tokens across the sea on a PayPal account almost old enough to run for the House of Representatives might have had something to do with it, but IIRC BS has already had cash money rulings against it for shady-to-illegal billing practices
Like Airtable - they probably started seeing revenue growth/acceleration plummeting due to vibecoding being able to replace the product and are pulling plug early instead of letting it grind out to 0.
2x ARR is low... But if they are making $600ARR and barely breaking even, enterprise and growth rates are slowing, or customer churn is high then it isn’t as healthy a business as it looks on paper. Especially if they don't have a new play in a highly competitive space where companies are looking to cut costs.
I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.
They bought Airtable last month for a similarly distressed valuation.
The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.
I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.
If you’re using it, you should plan to migrate off ASAP. I’ve been a long time user of Harvest, and after Bending Spoons acquired it, they increased our pricing by 800%.
Wow, this is quite shocking. I used to work in Amsterdam and Miro used to be one of more well-known companies there. A few of my friends worked there at some point.
I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.
Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...
Wow, this might seal the deal for "SaaS-pocalypse". I imagine the upside is high for Spoons considering the wealth of data and a well-oiled product enshittification playbook.
It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.
Well there goes that tool down the dumpster. Meetup has been nothing but finding ways to raise prices and revenue and not about building the site to be better, as it went downhill since like 2015/16
I'm curious that every time BS buys up some we hear about all the criticism of them and never the funding/management model thay has powered saas for the past 15-20years.
Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 35.7 ms ] threadWasn’t a whiteboard replacement.
Wasn’t design software.
Wasn’t a PM tool.
Even when the Miro power users would bust it out in meetings, it was always so painful to watch.
I don’t know what the point of Miro really was. There was a time Figma was doing something similar (FigJam), so maybe there was a trend for a sec.
No idea why or how it’s worth over a billion dollars.
Anyone reading this going “Noooo not Miro!!!” ?
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
Valuation dropped from $18b to $1b
Surprised to see they are profitable though.
i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter
Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.
Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.
BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.
Hope that's not a deal here.
[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.
If BS slightly raise the price and ruthlessly cut costs (think - leave just a skeleton crew to keep it running), the calculation may make sense even if there's slow churn in the users and no special lock in.
(disclaimer: pure outsider speculation on my part)
Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).
No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
its reward? successful IPO. here is an Economist article from a couple months ago: https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/01/can-bending-sp...
Great whiteboarding tool though.
The SaaSpocalypse has hit the post-Covid highfliers, and Bending Spoons is the grim reaper.
I don't suppose there is any big synergy hopes here. They're just identifying companies with relatively sticky enterprise accounts and will milk those.
I used it quite heavily at one company. I found it a bit bloated, but it was ok, and I didn't have to jump between one tool and another, it allowed me to draw some diagrams, do retrospective, share ideas with others.
Clearly the pandemic skyrocketed their valuation to a level they couldn't maintain...
It's a solid business model though - get another team to take the risk and develop the app and user base, then when times are tough, buy them out, wring them dry and suck out all the value. In the meantime, don't do any extra feature development on the apps, just run them on maintenance mode with a lean dev team and zero support.
Its not like they are making high payout in the purchases. They are snatching assets off weak hands (management, investors) who has no interest or idea on how to make their operations work.