Strategy
Bending Spoons expects job candidates to do 4-5 unpaid hours of "at-home" work before talking to them, mostly work unrelated to the core expertise and more geared toward problem-solving. They do pay very well for Italy and leverage that.
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science at 14:30 路 Featured in Growth Gems #130
Sylvain's take: They also have a 3-6 month internship program for graduate hires where people choose their role after working a while for the company.
They supposedly have less than 1% "unwanted churn".
Strategy
5 years ago app founders would not get a lot of inbound messages for acquisition. Now, some get frequent messages from companies like Bending Spoons or other private equity firms. It was also easier to revamp onboarding and paywall to significantly improve revenue.
"And now those same people, the same founders, they get messages like every day from Bending Spoons, like people and private equity, and all these. like the, the market has shifted significantly. Demand for apps is huge now."
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science at 20:34 路 Featured in Growth Gems #130
Sylvain's take: 
Strategy
Since they're very confident in their own team, the first move of Bending Spoons when they acquire a company is to fire 75% of people in that team and bring more talent in-house in Italy (where costs are cheaper).
"So when they did some of these big acquisitions, Note that we transfer and a bunch of the other ones, one of the first things they do is fire everybody. That's a big way to lower costs, because these are based in San Francisco and Amsterdam, other places. So you fire everybody and then bring it in-house, and it's still, you still pay really well, but it's cheaper in Italy and Milan than most of the other places."
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science at 13:23 路 Featured in Growth Gems #130
Strategy
Building apps from scratch might not be the fastest path to high revenue. Bending Spoons first bought an app for $15k, rewrote it, changed the design, and improved revenue metrics. This laid the ground for their growth strategy.
"They then took the profits from this app and made the next purchase, which was larger, and they managed to turn it around for a bigger profit. So this laid the grounds for the Bending Spoons' business model, which focuses on buying assets, overhauling them, and they describe it themselves as a mix between being a technology company and a privy-equity firm."
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science at 7:49 路 Featured in Growth Gems #130
Sylvain's take: Bending Spoons' annual revenue across apps has been estimated at $500M and they're eying an IPO.
Below is the evolution of downloads and revenue for their portfolio (source: Sensor Tower). It鈥檚 a little hard to read, sorry. You can see that Splice and Remini have grown a lot recently.
They did raise $340M in September 2022, which they used for acquisitions. StillFront and Embracer have had similar models, where they'd raise the value of their stocks via acquisitions and it apparently didn't go well but subscription apps is a different market.
