The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:42:18 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:42:18] S1: What did you learn from doing the HQ Trivia clone? [00:42:21] S2: How intoxicating working on a successful product can be. It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyperviral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I I remember literally telling people, don't tell others because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, a 100 users. I I don't remember I don't remember the number, but I literally remember asking people not to tell others. And we never, never, never did anything else to to make it grow. It it just... From that moment, when I when I told my family, my friends, don't tell others, it just went viral from there. We we even set aside some money, I think, a few tens of thousands of euros to do marketing. We never touched them. It's... It just it just took off. So sometimes you can see when a product works immediately. [00:43:09] S1: Does Bending Spoons do clones today? [00:43:11] S2: No. We we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that that we we wouldn't, but, no, it's been a while since the last time we did.
00:43:11 · Federico Simionato, Harry Stebbings
[00:43:11] S2: No. We we don't launch new products. I mean, we probably would if we were decently convinced that we have a good shot at making something very good, very useful, successful, impactful. I'm not saying that that we we wouldn't, but, no, it's been a while since the last time we did. [00:43:27] S1: Play On was one big project didn't hit in the way that you thought it would. What did you not expect to hit that suddenly did hit? And what did you learn from that? We were chatting earlier about never studying your successes, which is why we don't actually attribute lessons to them often. Yeah. Can you take me to what you didn't expect to hit that did in the lessons?
00:43:27 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:43:27] S1: Play On was one big project didn't hit in the way that you thought it would. What did you not expect to hit that suddenly did hit? And what did you learn from that? We were chatting earlier about never studying your successes, which is why we don't actually attribute lessons to them often. Yeah. Can you take me to what you didn't expect to hit that did in the lessons? [00:43:49] S2: Sometimes there are things that are... They look a bit boring, and instead they they just work. So for instance, I think audio transcription on Evernote is one such example. We were almost about not to launch it because people weren't recording audio on Evernote. And so, I mean, chicken and egg problem. Right? They're not recording audio maybe because they don't want record audio, maybe because there's nothing to do with the audio once once you record it. We still decided to launch it because it was just, like, qualitatively so good. It's basically state of the art. It's perfect. You just talk and it transcribes it. It... It's it's literally perfect. And so we decided, okay. Let's let's build it and launch it and see what people do with it. We just observed people tweeting images of the transcription just because it was so accurate, and they were like, I'm blown away by how good it is. So that... That's one example of something that I didn't expect. What did you [00:44:42] S1: learn from that?
00:44:42 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:44:42] S1: learn from that? [00:44:43] S2: That you should be very careful with your opinions. You should always try to resort to some piece of evidence instead of saying, I think it won't work or I think it will work. Do you have evidence that it's working or not? And so if you don't, you should try and build evidence, and then you should follow that instead of saying, I think it won't work or it will work. [00:45:04] S1: We've covered quite a few different products from, you know, your WeTransfers to Evernotes HQ Trivia clones to your Play Ons. How is the team structured? I think people have this conceptional idea that basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team, and centralizes engineering of
00:45:04 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:45:04] S1: We've covered quite a few different products from, you know, your WeTransfers to Evernotes HQ Trivia clones to your Play Ons. How is the team structured? I think people have this conceptional idea that basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team, and centralizes engineering of [00:45:24] S2: the product. You can think of Bending Spoons as a horizontal platform to which we plug individual products. The platform is basically everything that you don't need to have at the product level. For instance, let's let's make an example, talent and recruiting or accounting, finance, legal. But not only that, also deep technological teams that power, like, library data pipelines, monetization libraries, stuff that can be adopted by each product. This way, you don't need an Evernote recruiting team. You don't need a commoditization technology team. You just need to have these pieces at the platform level. And then to this platform that... Where we invest a lot, you can plug new products all the time. And so this means that the individual product team can be much, much leaner than it could be as a stand alone company. And often, we we see the difference that it makes. Like, we can acquire companies that are very large and run them with very few people in comparison. What's the biggest change? So you acquire a company with 500 people and it now runs with 50? Yeah. The orders of magnitude are around... It's very case specific. It's very hard to to... There's no like... What was Evernote [00:46:36] S1: and what is it now?
00:46:36 · Harry Stebbings, Federico Simionato
[00:46:36] S1: and what is it now? [00:46:38] S2: Evernote was a few 100 people, and now it's less than [00:46:42] S1: a 100. Got you. Where are those 100 people? That still feels like quite a lot if you actually think about the horizontal platform, this legal, accounting, recruiting, data pipeline. [00:46:50] S2: I I mean, at the at the product level. So just on the on the specific product. [00:46:55] S1: Does that not feel quite a lot in product in Evernote? [00:46:58] S2: I mean, it's not on product measure. I'm just talking about the business unit. It it contains technology, product, design, data science, monetization, growth, even management, you know, like, all all those people are, yeah, a few tens. [00:47:11] S1: Totally get you. Can I ask you, you mentioned monetization there, and you've mastered across different products, payables, and moving from freemium to premium? What have been your biggest lessons in scaling from freemium to premium in product?