20VC: Inside Bending Spoons Acquisition Machine: Evernote, Eventbrite, Vimeo | How Evernote Evaluates Acquisitions and New Product Ideas | How Evernote Mastered Product Launches, User Retention and Monetisation with Federico Simionato

How Bending Spoons runs Evernote on retention and small bets

Bending Spoons runs acquired products like Evernote on retention and close attention to customers. Most features cannot be quantified in advance, so prototypes, small weekly releases and a shared platform replace big forecasts and large teams. After failures such as Playyond, the company no longer launches new products.

Takeaways

• Retention is Evernote's central product metric. Simionato defines retention as the share of a customer's life they choose to spend with a product. Evernote has hundreds of features and a long tail of small ones, and they matter even when their effect cannot be measured.
• Ideas are ranked by top-line impact, often by estimate. Bending Spoons looks at revenue and new customers. Evernote features rarely quantify, so the team estimates how many people need them. WeTransfer's expired-transfer feature was modelled in a spreadsheet, while exploratory AI features have no business case.
• Price rises should be confident and transparent. Evernote's 2023 price rise of about 50 to 60 percent caused its biggest churn. Simionato defends it because the product is worth more than users pay. The company also reviews how easy unsubscribing is.
• Prototypes beat stated preferences when testing. Testing starts with customer conversations and Figma prototypes, plus an expert panel for advanced features. Prototypes show that people behave differently from what they say. The backlog holds about 100 ideas, and only about 10 get tested in a few months.
• Ship small improvements weekly, announce big ones loudly. Simionato prefers steady weekly gains to big splashes. Major changes such as Evernote v11, with three advanced AI features, get a loud announcement. Monthly updates cover only shipped features and explain how to use them.
• A shared platform keeps acquired teams lean. Bending Spoons runs recruiting, finance, legal and data pipelines horizontally across products. Evernote went from a few hundred people to fewer than a hundred. After the acquisition, the team should have shipped visible improvements while rebuilding old foundations.

Failed bets and what they taught

• Playyond, a mobile game subscription almost identical to Apple Arcade, failed after about 5 to 7m dollars of licensing spend.
• Simionato's first project, an HQ Trivia clone, reached 2m registered users in Italy through word of mouth. It was not a good business, and games are harder to predict than utility products.
• 30 Day Fitness retained people poorly but still earns several million a year, mostly from paid traffic. A COVID-era home workout product and a shared personal trainer idea also underdelivered.