This Italian startup makes $1.5B a year reviving zombie apps

SUMMARY

Hiten Shah narrates the rise of Bending Spoons, an Italian startup that acquires struggling apps like Evernote, revives them through strike teams and proprietary tools, achieving profitability and a $11 billion valuation without building from scratch.

STATEMENTS

Bending Spoons acquires dying apps with loyal users but stuck management, focusing on long-term ownership rather than quick flips.
After acquisition, strike teams diagnose issues like organizational sprawl and undermonetization, then customize treatments such as rewriting code or optimizing pricing.
The company builds over 50 proprietary tools, including Lumen for insights, Crystal for targets, and Pantheon for AI infrastructure, to accelerate revivals.
Bending Spoons maintains elite talent density with a 0.003% acceptance rate for hires, rigorous assessments, and a culture emphasizing impact over bonuses.
They bootstrapped for years, reinvesting profits and using debt before equity, retaining control while scaling to $1.5 billion in annual revenue.
Acquisitions target software with strong brands and clear profitability paths, improving products for paying users and raising prices to boost retention.
The model combines private equity's efficiency with tech's innovation, modeling lifetime value instead of short-term exits.
Bending Spoons has revived 20 apps in 10 years, never losing a bid by paying premiums for forever-hold assets.
Turnover is just 1% annually due to compensation tied to impact and optional stock options at discounts, fostering non-transactional teamwork.
They maintain a list of 5,000 potential acquisition targets amid a market of underperforming unicorns, investing billions in major deals like Vimeo and Eventbrite.

IDEAS

Acquiring proven products skips the risky product-market fit phase, allowing focus on optimization and scaling existing user bases.
Modeling acquisitions as lifetime holdings, not short-term flips, enables deeper investments in product and engineering for compounded long-term gains.
Strike teams act like emergency medical units, swiftly diagnosing and treating app ailments with custom solutions tailored to each case.
Proprietary tools like Manurva automate key decisions on features, cuts, and pricing, turning weeks of analysis into days.
A hyper-selective hiring process, tougher than top tech firms, ensures talent density by screening for motivation and problem-solving beyond resumes.
Avoiding bonuses and equity grants prevents transactional mindsets, promoting collaborative problem-solving centered on collective wins.
Bootstrapping with reinvested profits and debt before VC preserves founder control, building trust with banks through consistent profitability.
Paying premium salaries in Europe mimics Wall Street levels, attracting global talent without the churn of traditional incentives.
Focusing revivals on paying users' pain points, then raising core prices, consistently improves retention and profitability.
A "buy list" of 5,000 companies exploits market downturns, turning distressed assets into a portfolio of evergreen revenue streams.
Integrating acquired apps into a shared AI platform like Pantheon allows seamless scaling and knowledge transfer across the portfolio.
Cultural immersion via "controversial principles" and Milan-based onboarding accelerates learning, enabling juniors to manage $50 million businesses quickly.

INSIGHTS

Reviving established apps leverages inherent user loyalty and brand value, reducing failure risk compared to greenfield innovation in volatile markets.
Long-term ownership mindset fosters sustainable improvements over quick fixes, creating defensible moats through continuous compounding of tech and operations.
Elite talent density, achieved via extreme selectivity and impact-based rewards, forms the ultimate competitive edge in execution-heavy turnaround plays.
Proprietary internal tools transform acquisition chaos into predictable processes, enabling scale without proportional increases in human overhead.
Debt-financed growth before equity minimizes dilution, allowing founders to retain vision while funding aggressive expansion in a capital-scarce environment.
Prioritizing non-monetary culture over incentives builds resilient teams that prioritize shared success, drastically lowering turnover in high-pressure settings.

QUOTES

"We crashed and burned by being arrogant in thinking we knew what the market would want."
"We acquire to hold forever. We never sell."
"It's almost like private equity had a baby with Google."
"We buy businesses where almost all the value lies in existing customers or users."
"Those kind of incentives tend to hinder relationships. They tend to make things more transactional."

HABITS

Reinvest all early profits from small app fixes directly into the next acquisition to fuel organic growth without external capital.
Deploy strike teams immediately post-acquisition to diagnose and treat core issues like cost inefficiencies within days.
Screen hires using custom AI for potential and cultural fit, followed by rigorous assessments testing talent, motivation, and problem-solving.
Tie compensation raises exclusively to individual impact on business outcomes, avoiding performance bonuses to encourage teamwork.
Onboard new employees in Milan with immersion in "controversial principles" for three months before assigning to high-stakes projects.

FACTS

Bending Spoons achieved a $11 billion valuation in 2025 after reviving 20 apps, generating $1.5 billion in annual revenue.
The company has a 0.003% hiring acceptance rate from 800,000 applicants, selecting just 250 elite operators annually.
They maintain only 1% annual employee turnover with a team of 700, compared to the industry average of 10-20%.
Bending Spoons bootstrapped for nearly 10 years, raising no VC until hitting $100 million in revenue.
In 2025, they invested over $3 billion in acquisitions including Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite, topping their buy list of 5,000 targets.

REFERENCES

Bending Spoons website and portfolio (bendingspoons.com/products)
TechCrunch articles on Evernote (2022), WeTransfer (2024), Vimeo (2025), Eventbrite (2025) acquisitions
Luca Ferrari's podcast insights on early startup failure
Remini app revival example (remini.ai)
Tools: Lumen, Crystal, Pico, Manurva, Pantheon
Investors: The Weeknd, Ryan Reynolds, Andre Agassi
Broader inspirations: Private equity models, Google-like tech depth

HOW TO APPLY

Identify acquisition targets with strong user bases but stalled growth by scanning lists of underperforming SaaS companies and analyzing retention metrics.
Assemble a cross-functional strike team of engineers, designers, and operators to audit the acquired app for sprawl, costs, margins, and monetization gaps within the first week.
Integrate proprietary or custom tools to automate diagnostics, such as data cleaners for insights and AI platforms for feature prioritization and pricing tests.
Focus initial fixes on enhancing value for existing paying users, then incrementally raise prices on core features while monitoring retention spikes.
Scale talent by implementing extreme vetting processes, including AI screening and multi-stage assessments, to build a dense team capable of rapid execution across multiple projects.

ONE-SENTENCE TAKEAWAY

Bending Spoons proves acquiring and meticulously reviving proven apps with elite talent and tools yields scalable, profitable empires without starting from zero.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Target distressed assets with loyal users over unproven ideas to minimize product-market fit risks and accelerate path to profitability.
Invest in internal tools for decision automation to handle multiple turnarounds efficiently, treating them as core assets rather than overhead.
Prioritize talent density through ultra-selective hiring and culture-focused onboarding to ensure execution speed outpaces competitors.
Bootstrap with debt and reinvested profits early to retain control, only seeking equity once cash flows validate the model.
Model acquisitions for perpetual ownership, emphasizing deep product enhancements that compound value over decades.

MEMO

In the bustling tech landscape of Milan, Bending Spoons has emerged as an unlikely powerhouse, transforming the graveyard of digital has-beens into a thriving empire. Founded in 2013 by Luca Ferrari and his co-founders after a humbling startup flop, the company eschewed the glamour of building from scratch. Instead, they turned to the undervalued: apps on life support, teetering between irrelevance and redemption. Their first purchase, a glitchy keyboard app for $10,000, wasn't just a bargain—it was a blueprint. By fixing bugs, streamlining features, and monetizing smarter, they flipped it profitable, using the windfall to hunt the next zombie. This "repair factory" approach has now revived 20 such apps, propelling Bending Spoons to a staggering $11 billion valuation by 2025, all while generating $1.5 billion in yearly revenue without a single original product in sight.

The secret lies not in magic, but in a disciplined playbook that blends surgical precision with technological wizardry. Acquisitions aren't impulsive; they're guided by three ironclad signals: beloved software with fervent users, management paralyzed by indecision, and a lucid roadmap to profits. Take Evernote, the once-indispensable note-taking tool that had devolved into a buggy relic. In 2022, Bending Spoons swooped in with an offer 50% above rivals, then unleashed a strike team—fresh European graduates turned elite operators—who dismantled organizational bloat by noon. They rewrote code, purged 400 bugs at Meetup, and rejigged pricing at WeTransfer to curb free-rider abuse. Proprietary tools like Lumen for data distillation and Manurva for build-or-cut dilemmas turned diagnostics into action plans overnight. Retention soared as they laser-focused on what paying users craved, proving that revival isn't reinvention—it's ruthless refinement.

At the heart of this machine is human capital, denser and more loyal than Silicon Valley's finest. With 800,000 applicants vying for 250 spots in 2025—a selectivity harsher than Harvard's ivy gates—Bending Spoons crafts its moat through people. AI sifts resumes for raw potential, while grueling assessments probe motivation and ingenuity beyond Big Tech benchmarks. New hires immerse in Milan's headquarters, absorbing "controversial principles" that demand intensity without the distractions of bonuses or equity handouts. Raises hinge on impact alone, and employees can swap salary for discounted stock options, forging stakes without toxicity. The payoff? A mere 1% turnover in a 700-person army, where general managers helm $50 million businesses mere months after onboarding. This isn't just hiring; it's engineering a perpetual motion team.

Funding the frenzy demanded ingenuity as bold as the strategy itself. For nearly a decade, Bending Spoons shunned venture capital's siren call, bootstrapping with profits and low-interest loans banks eagerly extended to their ever-flowing cash. Only at $100 million in revenue did they dip into equity, drawing in celebrities like Ryan Reynolds and Andre Agassi alongside traditional investors—totaling $700 million for ops against $3 billion in debt for deals. This inverted startup script preserved control, fueling a 5,000-company "buy list" amid a sea of faltering unicorns. 2025 marked their apex: over $3 billion poured into titans like Vimeo, AOL, and Eventbrite, each slotted into the repair pipeline for eternal nurture. Analysts nod approvingly; in a market bloated with overvalued ghosts, Bending Spoons isn't just surviving—it's feasting.

As tech's feast-or-famine cycle intensifies, this Italian upstart offers a provocative template: why chase unicorns when zombies can be kings? By holding forever, wielding tools like Pantheon for AI ubiquity, and betting on unbreakable talent, they've built a model resilient to downturns. Yet questions linger—can this scale indefinitely without diluting the founder's touch? For now, Bending Spoons stands as a testament to patience and precision, reminding founders that sometimes, the best innovation is in resurrection.