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- Hacker News
- People are reacting like Bending Spoons is going to make Airtable worse, whereas in fact being acquired by bending spoons is already the indicated of things being worse than ever. Which may be a little premature for Airtable but definitely not unexpected. As to what will bending spoons do with it - does anyone know (or care) what did they do with Evernote, or AOL?
Airtable felt stuck for a long before that, now is just the moment to remind ourselves not to be stuck with it.
by dmblit - i gotta say, there were some bumps post-acquistion, but evernote is still going strong. not too AI-sloppy, a few new features here and there, reliability still aok. they were worse pre-acquisition imx.by 0gs
- "Bending Spoons"... never heard about them until now... let' do some research!:
Wikipedia:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons)
>"Based in Milan, the company acquires products with existing product‑market fit[4][5] (such as AOL, Eventbrite, Evernote, komoot, Meetup, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer) and manages them for long-term ownership, often increasing revenue and lowering expenses (including by reducing headcount).[6][7] The company employs full-stack developers to rewrite acquired codebases using artificial intelligence, proprietary platform tools, and open-source software (often Python, FastAPI, and TypeScript).[8][9]"
Ah!
So they're kind of the equivalent of a
special kind of Private Equity firm
that specifically purchases/manages/improves: Commerical websites, Apps, SaaS'es and other Digital/Software products that already have many users/customers (aka "Product-Market Fit" in business parlance...)
Although, arguably, Microsoft, while never called a "Private Equity" firm, sort of did all of that first, with other tech companies, in earlier decades!
Well, wait a second now...
If memory serves me, then actually Computer Associates did all of that (for software mostly for the Mainframe / Minicomputer markets and related!) even earlier than Microsoft, probably about a decade or so earlier than Microsoft!
Anyway, interesting article!
- Airtable is worth "just" $1.3B? I see (or used to see) it almost everywhere; why such a low valuation?by moinism
- I’ve always felt like their money went into marketing, not actual capabilities. It still feels like a Fisher-Price tier platform imo.by sithadmin
- Bummer. Airtable's a killer product and I've been using and evangelizing it for nearly 10 years at this point. Built whole side projects around it (and its API), plus organized a ton of personal information. I've made some custom integrations too which have just kept working without maintenance for years. I've got fairly regular backups of all my data, but still. Hurts my heart a little.
Best case scenario it keeps working without totally jacking up the prices. But also starting to think about long-term alternatives. BaseRow seems reasonable, as does spinning all of my many bases into a single big Django monolith (something I've had in the back of my head for while anyway). But it's been nice not having to micro manage this service. Pretty good mobile app, too. Enjoyed it while it lasted, I guess!
by xavdid - Why not simply rebuild what you need with Claude? Airtable seems to me as a prototyping product. Once you know what you want, formulate it as product objectives and ask Claude how it could be implemented from scratch. Dont even give it any ideas about Django. Just ask it what technologies are sensible for what you need, read and verify its answers, lock in a stack, plan your features and implement them.
You will be surprised how many things you could not fix in Airtable or where awkward workarounds can be solved much more elegantly if you (or Claude) consider them straight in the design phase. Just make sure to start with your objectives and _maaaybe_ desired workflows to avoid biasing Claude too much and that you end up rebuilding Airtable.
by prennert - Bending Spoons strategy can be summarized in the following plan:
- Make offers so low that - if anyone were to accept the deal, they're desperate/greedy enough to take it - hike price and limit features - people who do not have the capacity to switch will bear the cost - bleed out remaining customers
If it works, it works. They're basically betting against the amount of business depth that exists in the world
by ramon156 - >Make offers so low...
Yes, all the company execs at Airtable and the VCs and their lawyers and finance guys and advisors are stupid and were incapable of fielding rival offers...
Businesses tend to sell for their market value at that point in time.
by v5v3 - I have a lot of personal stuff in Airtable. It's really nice software but the company has struggled. Omni, their AI agent was terrible, and yet the founders have doubled down on agents with Hyperagents (nee Superagents).
I'm sure Notion DBs ate their lunch, but Coda had the best document database integration I've seen, but they got bought by Superhuman.
This entire market space is going to be messy for a while.
- > Omni, their AI agent was terrible
What was terrible about it?
by petilon - You may want to start looking at alternatives. I work at Grist https://getgrist.com, AMA.by maffulli
- Coda got acquired by Grammarly who then installed Shishir Mehrotra (Coda CEO) as CEO of Grammarly. They then acquired Superhuman Mail and renamed the whole thing Superhuman. They also acquired Rows to bring a formal spreadsheet into the mix to add to their Coda tables and productivity suite. (Well played.)
I was very surprised to see Airtable sold for reportedly less than what they raised and had assumed AI tailwinds (easy database GUI) would benefit them well. Presumably, this was insufficient to overcome enterprise revenue headwinds and a chilly SaaS financing market.
I do wonder how this might have played differently had their product and API been better engineered as a database for developers through faster read/write and data scale... unnecessary in PLG-focused pre-AI world, but an interesting avenue for agentic growth nonetheless.
Tough break for the Airtable team. It was a great product and I have recommended it often to small business owners over the years.
by mceoin - Expect entshittification of Airtable after the acquisition.by mertbio
- This goes for almost all software.
'entshittification' in software is pretty much almost a standard.
Software and businesses that goes through these stages:
Venture Capital, Private Equity, Acquisitions, Ads / Sponsors, Raising Prices due to competition, etc.
Always get enshittified.
by colesantiago - Airtable has got too expensive for all the weird limitations you end up either writing tons of weird hacks around or paying another sass product to fix for you because airtable don't want to engineer a solution.
Can't say it'll be hugely missed whatever they do at this point.
by weego - Bending Spoons is where products go to die.
- I have lately seen steady improvements in Evernote.by TMWNN
- Ive been happy with all the improvements they are making to Komoot do far.by bwb
- You could also phrase it as "Bending Spoons is where dying products go".by CodesInChaos
- I'd rather Bending Spoons than Broadcom. I can still use Komoot but I can't even access my license codes from VMWare.
- Maybe going against the grain but I think their product philosophy is actually really interesting. They basically just buy the database. Then throw out the crappily built product, with years of tech debt and cruft, and rebuild it leanly, with a small team, low overheads, and ruthlessly optimise for efficiency, and amortise shared in-house resources across the product portfolio.
There's a strong logic to that.
by dbbk - >Bending Spoons said Airtable's current net cash position implies an equity value of about $2.25 billion.
Bending Spoons must have amazing negotiaters to strike such a bargain.
We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
by v5v3 - > We should send them to Iran to negotiate the peace deal.
I laughed so hard. But I mean seriously...
by ergocoder - I don't think this is quite accurate. The main question is how much revenue does Sortable bring in each year and after all expenses, how much cash flow does Airtable generate for its owners every year? I am positive it is nowhere near a billion dollars a year. If we roughly say it is annual recurring revenue of USD 0.5B a year, now the question is how much can bending spoon choke airtable neck forcing it to reduce expenses without meaningfully reducing revenue.by collabs
- $725M@11B Series F 2021 Dec
$270M@5.8B Series E 2021 Mar
$185M@2.6B Series D 2020 Sep
$100M@1.1B Series C 2018 Nov
$52M@152M Series B 2018 Mar
by dustingetz - After they acquired Meetup.com, subscription prices skyrocketed while nothing useful was added to the product.
29€ a month just to host a meetup page with RSVPs.
by katspaugh - And yet, with all the promise of vibecoding and AI, nobody has created a clone that undercuts it in price.
- Did users leave for other products/solutions?by darkwater
- Was anything else needed to be added to the product?
I was fine with meetup.com in its original form: it had the community of people wanting to go to events, it let you share your events to these people. People showed up to events.
And the price you pay is for you to access their users. If you think it's just an RSVP page, vibe code one in 5 minutes and try and see how many people will show up to your events.
It's a modern product development failure to think that you must be adding new features all the time. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
by serial_dev