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 was a great whiteboarding tool for teams. Planning, research, meetings, standups etc. IMO they tried to cater to too many use cases at once, missed the AI train, and focused too hard on enterprise, which hurt the product a lot.
I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).
There are a whole lot of people out there who use Miro for all of their documentation, planning, troubleshooting, etc, in multiple roles. It's a primary tool for many people, like a word processor/sheets/slides on steroids. And the moat they have makes it nearly impossible to take your data elsewhere. It is very entrenched.
Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.
For remote companies, it is quite useful and really a white board replacement. We use(d) it for customer research, retros, design exploration, architecture diagrams, data modelling and a ton more. Figma (Jam) is way too designer focused.
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.
That’s not Power User, that’s Lazy User: just like how Agile tries to offload the work of managing ticket statuses onto developers, their demand offloaded the work of recording post-it note outcomes onto attendees.
I often saw the same pattern in engineers who hated Agile and Jira, but then would spend weeks coding automation to avoid one-time drudgery that would have taken a tenth of the time to complete. So I am being careful not to judge “Lazy”, because that’s a normal tendency for any lifeform with energetic constraints, as itself inherently wrong — but it absolutely can be optimized to personal excess at group cost, as I would judge this refusal to use in-person paper tools to be.
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)
Why would it be a typo? Miro was doing $600M ARR, some of their customers were paying them $100k+ a year. That is totally normal. It would be weird if they did not have such customers.
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.
It's a best-in-class real time collaboration board. It's also a decent general purpose diagramming tool, but if you're using it for creating software architecture diagrams or product flows, there are better tools for that.
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%.
My Harvest renewal was going to be a 1,400% increase. I just cancelled the service yesterday after 20 years. While I was clicking through the "Yes, I am sure" buttons, it got down to a mere 300% increase. I wouldn't pay that purely on principle.
I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.
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.
Yes. Buying companies at their actual value and then optimising the and extracting value they can. Considering lot of these startups and how they have acted I don't even consider them anyway evil.
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.
tencentshill | 19 hours ago
tehlike | 19 hours ago
zipy124 | 19 hours ago
denverllc | 19 hours ago
zipy124 | 19 hours ago
yborg | 19 hours ago
everfrustrated | 16 hours ago
nunez | 10 hours ago
DidntUseIt | 19 hours ago
Wasn’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!!!” ?
ricardobeat | 19 hours ago
saberience | 19 hours ago
My old company used it across the board for basically, everything. Engineering flow diagrams, UI prototyping, team retrospectives.
I personally often used it for creating diagrams that I would later insert into slide decks.
It was basically a swiss-army knife type tool which could be applied in so many situations.
Deeply saddened that it's going to Bendingspoons, where companies go to die.
tomwphillips | 19 hours ago
I don't care for or use any of the AI features.
I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.
justincormack | 19 hours ago
dserodio | 11 hours ago
senko | 19 hours ago
> Wasn’t a PM tool.
I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).
0xbadcafebee | 19 hours ago
Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.
tnolet | 19 hours ago
piltdownman | 19 hours ago
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
Centigonal | 19 hours ago
joezydeco | 19 hours ago
sidewndr46 | 18 hours ago
altairprime | 15 hours ago
joezydeco | 15 hours ago
altairprime | 13 hours ago
The_Blade | 18 hours ago
i'm just waiting to wake up to news of Luca Ferrari buying Inter Milan like some old world Mark Walter
senko | 19 hours ago
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
lbreakjai | 14 hours ago
I'm curious to know if it was ever as embedded as, say, Jira is, in some companies.
senko | 14 hours ago
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)
nunez | 10 hours ago
camillomiller | 19 hours ago
tnolet | 19 hours ago
adamas | 19 hours ago
VladVladikoff | 19 hours ago
Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).
0gs | 19 hours ago
tnolet | 19 hours ago
0gs | 17 hours ago
elAhmo | 19 hours ago
deadbunny | 19 hours ago
throwa356262 | 18 hours ago
No hold on... Adobe is probably already secretly owned by BS given their business practices.
oathvz | 18 hours ago
dserodio | 11 hours ago
pjm331 | 19 hours ago
elAhmo | 19 hours ago
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
tonyedgecombe | 19 hours ago
jszymborski | 19 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
_joel | 19 hours ago
fuzzfactor | 18 hours ago
m000 | 18 hours ago
nness | 19 hours ago
KellyCriterion | 19 hours ago
The_Blade | 18 hours ago
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...
leugim | 19 hours ago
bfeynman | 19 hours ago
kslambert | 18 hours ago
jtwaleson | 19 hours ago
Great whiteboarding tool though.
senko | 19 hours ago
katspaugh | 19 hours ago
People should try Kinopio.
jtwaleson | 19 hours ago
SenHeng | 17 hours ago
altairprime | 15 hours ago
nunez | 10 hours ago
pavlov | 19 hours ago
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.
cameldrv | 19 hours ago
Smeevy | 17 hours ago
I'll sort of miss Harvest, but I'm acclimating myself to the idea of just writing my own timesheet software.
altairprime | 15 hours ago
0xbadcafebee | 14 hours ago
arnvald | 19 hours ago
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...
knes | 19 hours ago
danielrmay | 18 hours ago
vira28 | 16 hours ago
Ekaros | 16 hours ago
fakedang | 15 hours ago
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.
b3ing | 15 hours ago
627467 | 14 hours ago
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.
nunez | 10 hours ago