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

Bending Spoons is the acquisition machine of the tech world. They have acquired the likes of Evernote, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Streamyard and more. However, they never open their gates to the secrets behind Evernote's product machine. Today that changes with Federico Simionato joining 20Product. Fede has been a Product Lead at Bending Spoons for 8 years where he has led product teams at Evernote, WeTransfer and more. AGENDA: 03:02 From Dentist Games to $11BN Bending Spoons 04:54 Advice for Aspiring Product Managers 05:38 Building a Coveted Brand at Bending Spoons 07:43 Evaluating and Testing New Product Ideas 13:35 How Evernote has Mastered User Retention 25:24 The Impact of AI on Product Design and Prototyping 31:19 How Bending Spoons Does Product Launches and Lessons Learned 33:27 How Every Product Team Should Do Monthly Updates to Users 36:38 Recording and Transparency in Updates 38:06 Lessons from Failed Product Launches 45:14 Structuring Teams and Acquisitions 47:12 Monetization Strategies and Push Notifications 57:21 Quick Fire Round: Insights and Reflections

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product and design leaders of our time. Today is a very special show. Bending spoons is on an absolute tear. Last month, they acquired Vimeo for $1 billion. Just this week, they acquired Eventbrite for $500 million. They are famed for buying the beloved Evernote previously. And today, we're joined by one of their product leads, Federico Simeonato. It was such a joy to have him in the studio, and I think this is one of the best product episodes that we have ever done. But before we dive into the show today, on this show, we care about velocity. Most teams lose it in code review, not in writing code. Now, CodeRabbit fixes that.

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• 2:08Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:34Harry Stebbings?

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:36Harry Stebbings?

  Faraday, I am so excited for this, dude. You've worked on some of my favorite products. So I'm thrilled to have you in the studio and thank you so much for joining me.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Thank you. I'm a huge fan of the show, actually. My favorite episode, I think, is the one with Nick from Revolut. I learned a lot from that episode.

• 2:50Harry Stebbings?

  Nick is phenomenal. My biggest takeaway from that episode actually was the fact that they run twenty-six experiments within the company and then allocate accordingly to who's winning and who's not winning. Thought it was incredible. Now, I want to start a little bit on you. Dentist Games for kids. How did that lead to Bending Spoons and, you know, a core role in one of the most coveted companies in Europe?

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so when I was at university, I knew that I wanted to start a startup. And so I just jumped at the first opportunity I got. I met a friend who was thinking about starting a startup. We were in Rome for a startup event. And he had this idea. He used to be the administrator for his parents' dentistry study. And he just saw that if you have to cure a child instead of an adult, you need twice the time. And so he was like, if we can reduce that, it's probably better, right? And so he thought, can we just gamify the experience a little bit? And the insight was good, but the way we implemented the result, I don't think it was great. And so I learned that you should care about what you're thinking of building.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And yeah, and so that failed. Or, I mean, it's still alive, but it didn't scale in a hypergrowth way. And then I just like, I wanted this hypergrowth feeling. And the way I discovered Bending Spoons was on the internet. And I just read the things that were written on their website. And they were so ambitious, so clear, so like, we know what we are, we are having. Giving great results, but we are not satisfied. Uh, we are at the scale of downloads of like Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that. Uh, and, and they are unknown, right? And I was like, who are these people who are getting these results while being unsatisfied by their scale they're at? And so I started studying, I just applied as you normally do.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  And yeah, I brought some liquor to, to Matteo, one of the co-founders for my first interview. And I like to think that that's what got me the job. Uh, yeah, and that was almost eight years ago now.

• 4:48Harry Stebbings?

  Fantastic. Love that. We're gonna dig into the processes with which bending spoons build different products across different lines. I do just wanna start though, you started a company there and that led into the product role. A lot of people today want to become PMs. What do you find is the best background before entering as a PM?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  I think the best background to enter as a PM is either being an entrepreneur, which teaches you to think about things that matter, or being a very good analyst of some kind, like somebody who's done very deep thoughtful analysis over how something works. Uh, at McKinsey, for instance, like Luca D'Addor. But, but even in an academic career, it can be, but just something who's very thoughtful and, and looks at the root causes of some behaviors or some things that happen. I think those are both things that matter a lot for a PM.

• 5:38Harry Stebbings?

  And so that's what matters a lot as a PM. We said there about kind of bending spoons creating this incredibly coveted brand. Everyone wants to work at bending spoons in Italy if you're in tech. What would you advise someone to get ahead to get a job at bending spoons?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I think people generally try to follow the steps that are supposed to land you a job. So like you have a great CV, you're very polite and professional. And, and that's certainly necessary, but I think that few people try to go the extra mile and try to do something surprising, you know, something creative. I, I really love when people come up with something new. I think there are great touches that you can invent. I mean, I just brought a bottle of liquor and, and it worked. I mean, it wasn't the only thing for sure, but I like to think that it helped make an impression, you know? And, and I like to think that it was a, a touch of something creative that, that not everybody thinks about, thinks about.

• 6:31Harry Stebbings?

  The importance of being surprising is very significant. I always actually say like you want to be the purple cow. Which is Seth Godin, you know, you drive past a cow, no one bothers looking, but then you drive past a purple cow. Wow, that's a big thing.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think maybe people out of a lack of confidence, they believe I need to look like I'm standard, you know, like I need to look like I'm, I don't have any rough edge. And I would, I would say, try to show your rough edges a bit and try, try to show off a few of your characteristics.

• 7:01Harry Stebbings?

  Has what it takes to be good at product changed over the last seven or eight years?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  I think that the underlying principle is the same. You have to find out what matters and you have to make it good. The way you do that evolves in time. I think with AI, you can build prototypes faster and so that allows you to test easily, which is something you couldn't do in the past. But the underlying principle of you need to focus on what matters is still very true today.

• 7:31Harry Stebbings?

  I had this wonderful schedule and I'm just kind of blowing it up. Sorry, as I said to you, I like real conversations. I do want to go through that, but kind of start at the beginning before that testing element, which starts with an idea. How do you determine which ideas to take and run with versus which to discard within Bending Spoons?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Two ways. We try to find the best ideas by, one, analyzing the top line. So how valuable is this idea? How much revenue is it going to bring? How many more customers is it going to bring? And we try to be very qualitative about it. Is it a step change compared to the previous way you do things? And these things are generally are alternative because you cannot analyze how much of a step change it is if you don't have a prototype. So for instance, on Evernote, I think building things that are useful is the most important thing, but you can never quantify useful. It's very hard to say this feature is more useful than the other. So generally, the way we try to do it is we see how many people might need it.

• 8:34Harry Stebbings?

  Surely you can quantify useful. Useful might be DAU over MAU as a metric.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  But you can't do it in before end. You can't do it before you release it. You can estimate how many people are going to use a specific thing that you're building and that is a good proxy for it, but you're not sure.

• 8:50Harry Stebbings?

  Could you not look at comparables in other products? Look at the metrics they have and then take a bet from there?

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, that's the way we try to do it. I'm just saying that sometimes it's more of an estimate game and a gut feeling like I think this is going to be more useful. I think that this feature looks a lot like this other feature that we've built and so it's going to be equally successful. But there's still an element of uncertainty. Some other times you have literally a business case built for a feature. For instance, on WeTransfer, we built a feature that allows you to recover expired transfers, which wasn't available before. We noticed that many people were hitting this page where basically would tell you the transfer has expired. You cannot download anymore because of course if we had to keep all transfers forever, it would just make costs skyrocket and so it's not feasible.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And so we thought, well, but if we only allow paying customers to download files after they are expired, then we increase the number of paying customers and we just benefit from it. And so we can afford to keep the files in storage for longer, right? And so we were able to model this very accurately in numbers. Like we had a spreadsheet with a couple of different scenarios and we saw what the impact of this feature could be based on how many people were hitting that page daily, the page of expiration, right? So when you build instead an exploratory AI feature on Evernote, you don't have a business case because you don't know how many people will use it. You can guess, but it's different.

• 10:20Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about modeling what it could be, outcome scenario planning. What have you most mismodeled in the downside or the upside?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Well, I think when you try to launch something new, you always want to look like you're being analytical. And so you try to make it look like, yeah, I've built a business case for this. And there is a scenario in which it works. But then when you launch this kind of projects that are like greenfield, they rarely work. And so it's kind of hard because, yeah, I saw a scenario where it could work, but it didn't. So for instance, we tried to launch during COVID, I had a small team and we were trying to launch. A fitness product for people that were training at home. And we were like, yeah, let's build a business case for it. And the business case was good, but then, of course, you just have to look at the reality of,

• 11:12Speaker 02

  do people actually want to use this product? They wanted, but it was very hard to convince them.

• 11:18Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you decide that was a good idea? Just out of interest, like fitness products, there's so many kind of freemium where you then hit a hard paywall. Such a saturated market. Why did you decide that was a good idea?

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, a few years ago, one of our biggest apps was called Thirty Day Fitness. It's still there, it still works, it's still a very good business, but at the time it was one of our biggest apps. And one of the things that we noticed is that Thirty Day Fitness is a good product because people want it. But it's not, it's not great at retaining people, meaning that after a while, people lose the motivation that they need to show up every day, you know? When you're training, it's, it's hard to every day remake the decision of I'll, I'll workout today. And so we wanted to solve this and we were like, can we find a way to get people to be motivated? And the best way to do it is if you have a personal trainer, right? But a personal trainer is expensive. And so we thought, can we make having a personal trainer inexpensive?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  And since during COVID, people were used to doing things on Zoom or on video calls. We were like, yeah, let's put a few people in a WhatsApp group and have a personal trainer that is paid by all of them. So they just need to pay one twentieth of a personal trainer. But the personal trainer is in charge of keeping each of them accountable. The idea is good, but it turns out that it's not enough. You, you, you need somebody who calls you out directly, like, Harry, you're not working out today. Why, why are you not here today?

• 12:42Harry Stebbings?

  Thirty Day Fitness, you mentioned there, still being like a, a business. How much sort of money does a business like that make years afterwards?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I'm not sure what it, what it makes today. I think it's still in the several millions a year.

• 12:55Harry Stebbings?

  Is that a paid marketing machine?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  There's also a lot of organic traffic going to it because people do look for this kind of product. There, there is a push that people want to be fit, you know? And, and so they, they, they do things organically. But, but yes, I, I think that most of the traffic for Thirty Day Fitness was paid, yes.

• 13:13Harry Stebbings?

  Got it totally. We're going to get to kind of paid and how we think about that. I do just want to go back to, we were talking about ideas, testing new ideas internally. When we think about like, okay, impact on top line, can you take me to a product decision where the impact on top line has not been significant, but it was still important for you to do? And how did you think about that?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  I think Evernote is the best example of this. Many of the things that we do on Evernote are not because we want to increase revenue, but it's because we want to make the product more useful. And in a very unquantifiable way, we just trust that by making the product more useful, people will keep choosing to stay on Evernote. Evernote is an archetype, is a kind of a product that has great inherent retention, because people pour their working hours into it and so they build their content, they get familiar with the product. But really what we do is we try to make Evernote more useful every day, even though we cannot for each individual feature that we build, analyze its financial performance. But it's still something that I would still choose to do every day,

• 14:20Speaker 02

  because it's just so important to people. Even though we can't demonstrate that the ability to collapse sections on a note, for instance, leads to higher retention, the bulk of it, the long tail of features that you build that make the product more useful, have to matter in your choice to keep using Evernote every day.

• 14:38Harry Stebbings?

  How many people still use Evernote?

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Millions.

• 14:41Harry Stebbings?

  Millions?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Millions.

• 14:43Harry Stebbings?

  Like, how many million?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  I'm not sure I can share, but millions of people, yes.

• 14:46Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And every day, hours a day. There are people running their business on Evernote. It's just that for us working in tech, this looks weird, because Evernote was popular once and it's not as relevant today in like tech pop culture. But if you run like a real estate agency, you might have everything on Evernote.

• 15:07Harry Stebbings?

  What metric do you use to guide product success in Evernote? Is it DAU to MAU? Is it hours spent in Evernote?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Retention, subscriber retention is the most important thing on Evernote. Making sure that everything we are doing is either not touching or improving the churn rate and especially the level at which you are retained as a customer. The way I think about retention is it's the percentage of your life that you choose to spend together with a product, right? So for instance, I am subscribed to Spotify and I've been for, I don't know, 10, 12 years, something like that, and I plan on being a subscriber for as many years or even more. And so it means that Spotify is very useful to me because I spend, I choose to spend decades of my life, so like half my life on Spotify. And there are people for which Evernote is as useful as Spotify is to me. And so they choose to be subscribed to that product for decades of their life.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  And we absolutely must do everything we can to not mess it up.

• 16:06Harry Stebbings?

  I love that in terms of like the commitment attached to periods of your life. What product decision has led to the greatest churn? And what did you learn from that?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 2023, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless. The reason being, we believed, and we still believe it, that Evernote provides a great deal of value to people that use it and that we could optimize pricing. At the time, we thought we could increase prices and people would still consider it a great deal. Not all of them, of course. There is a small amount of people who thought Evernote was either already too expensive or kind of at their threshold. It's like when you are subscribed to Netflix and you see that every year or two, they increase your subscription.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  And when you receive the email, you're like, is it still a good deal for me? It's either yes or no. And then you make a decision based on, am I getting enough out of this product and subscription that I'm accepting to stay subscribed to it? And similarly, on Evernote, we thought, let's increase prices in a way that still, it's a no brainer for the vast, vast majority of people, accepting that some people will, this will be over their threshold and we'll have to let them go. The most like unmotivated people, the least advanced ones, maybe the ones that were, maybe were already thinking about unsubscribing.

• 17:36Harry Stebbings?

  How much did you increase prices by?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  I think fifty percent or sixty percent, something like that.

• 17:41Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, that's quite a lot.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:43Harry Stebbings?

  That is different to a Netflix, like a dollar difference where you're like, ah, fuck it. But what's interesting is that proportionally to the churn numbers, you increase prices by fifty or sixty percent and people go, whoa. You're making a lot more money in that case.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yes, and on one hand, it's a like economic play, it's a financial play where you're making more money. The thing I like about it is that it all boils down to how useful the product is for you. And if it's more useful than what you're paying for it, it's a no brainer decision to stay retained, to stay subscribed.

• 18:11Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And also, as you said, it separates the flexi user who just switched to another tool very willingly versus something different.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:19Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have any lessons on pricing communication in terms of how to let users know a price is changing? The right words to use, is email the best way, is it push notification? Any lessons?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  I think what you want to do is you want to be confident about what you're doing so that you don't fear communication. If I'm confident that the price I'm asking you to pay is fair, then I can tell you ten times and you will still make the decision of staying retained. If you're trying to shy away and like, should we use bullshit language and not really tell people that we are increasing their prices? That's a bad move and it means that you're not confident that your product is delivering value to people. You just need to accept the fact that some people, this new price is going to be over their threshold for usefulness. And just be confident that what you're asking is best for most people.

• 19:12Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you make it easy enough for people to unsubscribe from your products?

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We invest a lot. I mean, at the end of the day, being here for the long run, it's not just about Evernote, right? It's about bending spoons, all of our products, we are acquiring bigger and bigger products. Instead of making a two percent more revenue on Evernote, it's much more important to build a reputation of a company that you can trust. And so instead of like some newspaper, I think famously asked you to call a phone number to unsubscribe. And that was the only way to unsubscribe and then you had to wait half an hour to unsubscribe. Instead. We we we review the unsubscription process regularly so that it's not too cumbersome, too frictionful.

• 19:56Harry Stebbings?

  That's fascinating. So we have the idea process and then we have the, oh, we've got something that could be a good idea. How do we go from idea to early testing and MVP? What does that look like?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it depends a lot product by product. So on Evernote, it's more about sitting down with customers, having conversations with them, showing them prototypes on Figma, for instance. Does this look like something that you think is useful for you, for your use case? And then over time, we've started knowing our customers better. We have a panel of Evernote experts that we know well and we know their use cases. And so we know that we can always count on them on providing feedback on advanced features. When it's a more casual feature, maybe we will want to talk to a more like average customer. So the way we identify the feature that works on Evernote is we just sit down with people and we show it to them. We show the prototype to them, we show the Figma to them.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  And based on their feedback, we just tweak it or maybe even discard it.

• 20:54Harry Stebbings?

  How do you know when to ingest advice and change versus discard it with customer feedback?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  It's especially important to realize when people are telling you, I don't need this. And and people never tell you, I don't need this. They generally tell you, yeah, it looks fine, it looks okay. And so you have to be, there's a great book, it's called The Mum Test, that you can read. And it tells you, if you ask your mother, did I do okay? She's always going to tell you, you did okay, right? She's never going to tell you, yeah, you did poorly or this is not good. You should ask questions in a way that forces people to tell you, yeah, I would actually not use this. So for instance, instead of asking you, how often do you work out? You will come up with an ideal version of you that that says like, yeah, I work out three times a week. But then I ask you, how many times have you worked out last week? You're like, hmm, only one, but actually it's because I had a meeting and I was away.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Okay, well, how many times did you work out the previous week? Still one because of this other thing, the previous week, still one. And so after a while, you notice that the things that people actually do are different from the things that they say. And so you should ask people, instead of do you like this feature or would you use it? You should ask them, what's a use case that you had in the last month for which this would have been useful? And if they can't come up with any, it's a it's a red flag, right?

• 22:12Harry Stebbings?

  Any other questions that are very helpful in identifying that? I love that. What's a use case in the last month? Any others?

• 22:18Speaker 02

  It depends a lot on who you ask. Like, if we select a user that we know is very active, then what we can ask is more like, how have you organized your system on Evernote? Your hierarchy of information on Evernote? Your notebooks, your notes? In a way that powers your business or powers your professional life, for instance? Instead, if you are selecting a user that is maybe a bit more casual or newer, then we should ask more specific questions about like recently, what did you do recently on Evernote? What reasons did you have for taking notes?

• 22:50Harry Stebbings?

  It's very difficult when you have a broad set of customers, ones which are incredibly advanced power users and ones which are much more casual. How do you advise people on building products for both without alienating either?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  It's not easy. It's not, there's no like silver bullet that you can pull that makes both happy. Sometimes you can find things that are useful to both groups. You should think about your product very specifically, like Evernote. Should we build Evernote for casual users? What would casual users do? They wouldn't pay because they are casual and so they wouldn't invest much on a product that just gives them like basic functionality. They have loads of competing products that they can choose from. Apple Notes, Google Keep and stuff like that. And so it doesn't look like it's a great arena to fight. You have great competition that's free and that's pre-installed on your device. How can you win that battle? Instead, advanced users,

• 23:50Speaker 02

  you cannot use Apple Notes if you're very advanced. You cannot use Google Keep if you're very advanced. So that's a battle that we can win. So it's very important to realize what arena you choose before you start.

• 24:02Harry Stebbings?

  It's very much the same for content, by the way. I mean, you're very kind in saying that you like the show. You know, we very much have this question often of do we go deep for fewer or broad for many? And it's very tempting to go broad for many because it's nice and ego flattering in some ways. But actually, we always choose to go deep for fewer and you get Much more product love from a fewer number of people.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I like to think that Evernote is never going to be as popular as Apple Notes. But at the end of one's life, I think an Evernote user will remember their experience on Evernote if we've made it delightful enough. And I don't think an Apple Notes user will care much about it. Not not because it's a bad product, it's just not as relevant.

• 24:45Harry Stebbings?

  Do you compare yourself to others and how do you advise product leaders to think about competition?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  I think you should focus on your customers, to be honest. Unless you're like getting started. So you don't have a customer base and you need to win people's hearts and and you need to win them over. If you already have an existing an existing customer base, I think your number one job is just to make sure that they love being on that on that product. Unless you have some crazy insight for by doing this, I could ten X my user base. It's very hard, it's very rare. I think you should focus a lot on your customers.

• 25:19Harry Stebbings?

  You said, hey, we we get Figma mockups and then we'll show them to customers. Is the way that you're doing design testing changing in a world of AI? And if so, how?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  When I was working on Evernote, I still am a lot, but but when I was focusing only on Evernote, we didn't have lovable cursor and these tools. And so we were building designs and we were showing them to people. And we were asking questions like, by looking at this, how would you use it? Now we can build prototypes and even if they are rough, we can put them in the hands of people and we can just like ask and use it and and we'll observe. It's kind of different. Like people tell you that they would do something and then in reality, when they have a prototype on their computer, they would do something different. So it's it's closer to to the truth.

• 26:10Harry Stebbings?

  I'm intrigued. Do you do Figma and Figma make? Do you replace that with a lovable build? Do you actually just go straight to cursor and anthropic and call code? What is that usage on Stacklift like?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  It depends a lot on the team and the project. Each team decides their own stack and we don't impose anything.

• 26:30Harry Stebbings?

  What do they look like that's different then? If you take one that's, say, Evernote, what is Evernote? And then take a WeTransfer, what is a WeTransfer?

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so on WeTransfer, we have used lovable quite a bit. We use Claude Code a lot to build prototypes. On Evernote, I think we use Figma a lot still, just because it's easier to use the components that we already have to make it look like it's actually the same, the same app. It's a bit more complex product, so it's harder to give the context to an L L M to build things that are, that look very close to the original one.

• 27:03Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we are going to skip the design phase in the future of product build outs and move straight to prototyping in these more vibe code tools?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  I think so, to be honest. I think that the role of a designer will be as important as it is today, maybe even more, but I think that the tools that we use will evolve. And so you, you won't work on pixels and then code, but you will likely merge the two things. I remember that when I got started with web development very early, like when I was in high school, I wouldn't have a design that I would try to implement. I just have like HTML code and CSS and I will try to tweak it to reach my results. It was a very manual process, but it, it was all contained inside the, the code editor, right? I think that in the future, it's going to look like that, where you are acting on the code and tweaking the code because it's so cheap and fast that you're just like tweaking the actual thing

• 27:56Speaker 02

  instead of creating an abstraction and then trying to apply it in the code.

• 28:01Harry Stebbings?

  How does the proportion of designers to engineers change over time with A I?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  It's evolving so rapidly that I don't know how it plays out in terms, in terms of team organization. If I had to like come up with an answer right now, I would say that it's going to make designers faster and you can try more things. So today, we have a backlog of a hundred ideas and we know that we can only try 10 of them in a few months, you know? I think that we'll reach a point. Point where we can actually try twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Both because people will be faster, but also because the manual work to actually implement those prototypes will be much shorter. So yeah, I I I think this means that the designer who won't work necessarily on Figma as they do today.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  In the future, will work on building these prototypes and and and coming up with these ideas and they will do it more and faster.

• 28:57Harry Stebbings?

  That's fascinating to hear actually how you use different tools across different teams. If we progress that along one stage, we have the idea, we have the prototyping and the putting in the hands of customers. We then have the, I'm actually gonna build it. How does the build process look for you internally?

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Usually is, let's try to close the gap between the prototype and something that is production ready. Because the prototype, if you did it well, it's inexpensive. And so it means that it lacks a lot of the things that that make it production ready. It it's basically a probe to some extent. We we call it a probe. It's a piece of software that is built to demonstrate that one metric is X or Y. And that's the its only job. And so when people interact with it, they give you the answer, but it's not ready to be plugged into the broader product. And so this way you can get your answer, but then in order to be able to plug it to the to the broader product, you need to do some work.

• 29:58Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think it's important to ship fast and be imperfect? Or to make sure that that gap between prototype, which is a probe, to fully beautiful product is seamless and complete?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  I don't adhere to one of the two schools of thought. I think speed matters when you're trying things and you're trying to find your way and you're you're probing the the area around you. But then it's all about polish when you actually need to build something that that millions of people use. You cannot have fast an experience.

• 30:29Harry Stebbings?

  Do you feel that product difference in terms of behaviour very much when you are working on a product like Evernote, millions every day versus a much smaller user base with maybe a less frequent usage?

• 30:42Speaker 02

  Well, for sure. You feel more responsibility. You feel, you also feel like you stand on the shoulder of shoulders of giants in some sense, you know? Like, sometimes I talked to Phil Libin, who was leading Evernote a few years ago, and I don't feel like shipping bad stuff on Evernote, just because it's always been such an important product and built in such a caring way that just by comparison, I don't want to be, I want Bending Spoons to have the name of those who are releasing sub-power experiences. I want us to have a good threshold for quality.

• 31:14Harry Stebbings?

  So when we have that quality and then we decide, launch time, okay? Got to release this. What have been your biggest lessons on how to do product launches or feature launches well?

• 31:25Speaker 02

  When you want to deliver a lot of things to people who need them, I think it's important to show that you are every week delivering useful improvements. So instead of doing a large and fancy launch, you try to do it in a way that feels like, yeah, every week I'm getting something new. You know, it really convinces people that you're in for the long run, that you are doing stuff that matters, and especially that even if this week, nothing gets built that's specifically useful to me, since I've been here for a while, I know that Evernote updates every week, and so I know that at some point, something will be built that is for me, that I need and I use.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  Instead, when you want to innovate and you want to try to like do a step change in the way people use the product, then it's important to be very considerate and very clear with communications. So for instance, let's talk about examples. When we built collapsible sections on Evernote, or the slash command menu, these are utility tools that make your product more economic, more polished, more useful. You don't need to be flashy about this. You don't need to like do a huge launch and to merge them together and to wait six months. You you need them to put them in the hands of customers as soon as possible so that they can start getting utility out of it.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Next week, we are announcing Evernote V eleven and it's going to be a significant change compared to whatever it is today. It's mostly a reflection of all the work that went through in the last three years. But it's also containing three advanced AI features that are not available on Evernote today. And when you do that, it's important instead to like kind of make a mess a little bit, not not necessarily that they should be unpolished, but like try to be noisy about it so that as many people as possible see that some drastically new functionality is landing on the product.

• 33:17Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree with you there. And I love that you say that, hey, it's better to do small weekly improvements communicated well than like, don't hear from us and then a big splash every six months. You do Evernote monthly updates. Can you just talk to me about that, the process of that? What you learn and how you'd advise other product people from doing that?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  This was born out of necessity, meaning that when we acquired Evernote, there were a few months in which we made the decision to work very deeply on the technological foundations of Evernote. Evernote was launched in two thousand and seven, I think, so it's almost twenty years old. And so it's not full of bad code necessarily, but it's full of old code. And it's very important that we innovate that and and we make it modern if we want to work on Evernote for the next ten or twenty years, right? We made the the conscious decision of working on tech foundations. But as we were doing that, we were also communicating the acquisition and we were raising prices as we we discussed earlier. These three things combined for a customer are

• 34:22Harry Stebbings?

  A lot.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  A lot to take in. And so I think that we should have instead started allocating some percentage of our time, improving the product in very visible ways that basically reassure people, look, we are here for the long run. Yes, we are making drastic changes. Some of them are uncomfortable right now. We truly believe it's the best outlook in the long run. We need to do them right now, but we are also investing a lot on your user experience. We didn't do it and so people were were. Either skeptical, some were pissed, some were were fine with it, they understood. But I started doing monthly updates exactly because we saw that it was important to communicate to people what was changing in the product. Putting a face behind the product, I think is important. It's not like bending spoons as a vague entity that is working on Evernote.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  It's Federico and his team who are working on Evernote.

• 35:11Harry Stebbings?

  What have you learned from doing those monthly updates? And how would you advise other product owners or CEOs on doing monthly updates to customers?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  I learned that user feedback matches reality and substance very directly. So when you issue a monthly update full of content that nobody needs, they'll just tell you, this is irrelevant, I don't need this, why are you working on this? They're very direct in a way that I find motivating, meaning that they're not trying to be kind, they're trying to be truthful. And so they just tell you if you're doing, if you're working on stuff that doesn't matter to them. You can do something very easy, you can, you can look at our YouTube videos and look at the comments under the videos. And see that when we started, we were learning and so we didn't get every update right all the time. And people would just tell us, I'm pissed, you raised prices and now you're bringing this stuff that I don't need, why?

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I don't understand. Lately, instead, we've become much better at understanding what people actually need, what they're asking us. And so comments are much more either neutral, I like, yeah, good, now I need this other thing. Or, yeah, this is finally, I've been waiting for this for years, it's exactly what I needed, thank you. So it's, the learning is, if you do the substance right and you communicate it decently, people will tell you. If you don't get the substance right, people will also tell you.

• 36:29Harry Stebbings?

  People literally, you know, sit down and take notes with these podcasts, which is great. And it's like a real compliment to me that we're doing good and valuable things. As granular as possible, how do you record them? How long should they be? Should they include everything or just like the big highlight? How transparent should you be? Like, should you really talk about things that are bad? How would you advise me on those?

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I sit down once a month. I think it's a decent frequency. I think it's enough that people feel like a lot is going on and and not like too frequent where you need to be in front of a camera every every day or every week. It should talk about what you're actually doing. One thing that that that we decided early on when when we started doing this is we talk about stuff that either we already shipped or that we are launching right now. We shouldn't talk about plans that we have for the future. Sometime we we break that rule, but it it's not like written in granite, but it's important that you don't just entice people with promises. You just tell people what they can do today with the product.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  So that you build a sense of practicality and trust. And you just tell them, look, slash comments are available on Evernote today. Just update your app and you'll be able to use it. Here's how it works. The other side is you also need to teach people how to use this stuff. It's a complex product. It's it's not a shallow product by any means. So you need to take a couple of minutes to show them if something is very new. Here is how it works. So come with me through through the experience. So yeah, I mean, tell people what you've done, tell them how it works, tell them decently frequently and be upfront about negative stuff as well.

• 38:02Harry Stebbings?

  We were talking about kind of the launch itself and lessons from them. What launch was the worst where you expected amazing and it didn't meet expectations? And what did you learn from that?

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Hmm. It wasn't on Evernote. It's a product that we launched at Benning Spoons that we were really hopeful for. It was called Play On. It was Apple Arcade, before Apple Arcade. It's almost exactly the same product, right? So a subscription, you can play high quality games as much as you want. You don't need to pay for each individually. You don't need to pay to win. You don't need to unlock in-app purchases. You just pay a subscription like Netflix, but for for mobile games, right? We believed that people would love this and it failed. We spent, I think, like five or seven million dollars on on licensing and and it eventually didn't work.

• 38:50Harry Stebbings?

  Was it immediately apparent that it wasn't working? And do you think when you have a product that isn't working, you can tell very quickly?

• 38:57Speaker 02

  It depends on how much you're lying to yourself. If you're very truthful and you have a plan for how do I validate that it's working with metrics? Then it's easy if you're like, let's put it out there and see what people do. It's a bit harder because then you you'll be hopeful, you invested a lot in it. And you'll try to find signals of usefulness and signals of retention. And so, yeah, you should be very ruthless with yourself before you start and and say, these are the metrics that we'll look at when we launch to determine if it's a good product. And like, I'm the first one who's guilty. I I often lay too much hope behind the product launch.

• 39:35Harry Stebbings?

  OK, so when we look at like play on this like Netflix but for games, what did we not see that we should have seen? What's our takeaway from that to prevent that happening again?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I think one, a big part of it that we learned is that when you watch a movie, you you watch it two hours and then you're done. And the next day you want to watch another movie. And so it makes sense for Netflix to exist because people want to consume different content. When you're playing a game, you get passionate about it. And generally, games have a much longer lifespan.

• 40:02Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  And so you can, you can definitely play for a game for a month, two months, six months, even a year. I've been, I I have a mobile version of Risk, the game, the board game on on my iPhone. I downloaded it when I was in high school. I paid for it and I still play it when, like yesterday, I was in an airplane and I and I played it. It's been 15 years.

• 40:23Harry Stebbings?

  And you paid once?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  I paid once, yes, it was a single time purchase.

• 40:26Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, the lifespan of that, of that experience is much longer in time. And so it doesn't make sense to pay a subscription for something that that gives you that much runway.

• 40:36Harry Stebbings?

  As someone who's invested in gaming before, there is this beautiful retention, flatlining. Actually, when you get to a three to five year line, which is insane to say, but when you look at your games like Candy Crush, they still have this insane flatline three to five years in, where it almost becomes like habitual usage every single day.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've never worked on a game. I I worked on an entertainment app that was very close to a game. It it was called Live Quiz. It was, do you remember HQ Trivia?

• 41:05Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, do I remember HQ Trivia? I'm not that young. Yeah, absolutely, dude. This was one of the hottest around.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  It was a few years ago.

• 41:10Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, smart mechanic, getting everyone together same time. Like, I think any behavioral change in product is exciting.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  I worked on a clone of HQ Trivia as my first project at Bending Spoons when I joined. It went hyper viral in Italy. We did 2 million registered users in Italy only. Italy is 60 million people in total, so 1 in 30 people used to play that game. Hyper viral, incredible virality, and it was so fun. It wasn't a good business. I think HQ Trivia wasn't a good business either, but super viral mechanic. But I'm a bit scared of games. It's very hard to make them work. It's even harder than a product, in my opinion, because it's about taste and it's about feelings and emotions and experience. Utility, as we were saying earlier, you can somehow proxy utility. You know, you can try to guess how useful a change is going to be in the future.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  With games, it's about the experience and the emotions that it gives you. It's completely qualitative. There's no... I mean, of course, you can look at metrics and analyze them, but beforehand, before you launch, it's very hard to say if you're working on a good game or a bad game.

• 42:18Harry Stebbings?

  What did you learn from doing the HQ Trivia clone?

• 42:21Speaker 02

  How intoxicating working on a successful product can be. It's just the experience of a lifetime to work on something that goes hyper viral. We literally launched as a beta test with friends and family. I remember literally telling people, "Don't tell others", because we can only support, I don't know, 50 users simultaneously, 100 users. 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 make it grow. It just, from that moment, when I told my family, my friends, "Don't tell others", it just went viral from there. We even set aside some money, I think a few tens of thousands of euros, to do marketing. We never touched them. It just took off.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Sometimes you can see when a product works. Immediately.

• 43:09Harry Stebbings?

  Does Bending Spoons do clones today?

• 43:11Speaker 02

  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 we we wouldn't, but no, it's been a while since the last time we did.

• 43:27Harry Stebbings?

  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.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:45Harry Stebbings?

  Can you take me to what you didn't expect to hit that did and the lessons?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  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 to record audio, maybe because there's nothing to do with the audio 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's literally perfect. And so we decided, okay, let's let's build it and launch it and see what people do with it.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  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's just one example of something that I didn't expect.

• 44:41Harry Stebbings?

  What did you learn from that?

• 44:43Speaker 02

  That you should be very careful with your opinions. You 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.

• 45:04Harry Stebbings?

  We've covered quite a few different products from, you know, your We transfers to Evernotes, to HQ trivia clones, to your Play ons. How is the team structured? I think people have this conception or idea that basically Bending Spoons acquires companies, fires the team and centralizes engineering and product.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  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 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 commut monetization 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.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  And so this means that the individual product team can be much, much leaner than it could be as a standalone company. And often 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.

• 46:23Harry Stebbings?

  What's the biggest change? So you acquire a company with 500 people and it now runs with 50?

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, the orders of magnitude are around and it's very case specific. It's very hard to, there's no like.

• 46:35Harry Stebbings?

  What was Evernote and what is it now?

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than a hundred.

• 46:42Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. Where are those hundred people? That still feels like quite a lot. If you actually think about the horizontal platform, it's legal, accounting, recruiting, data pipeline.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, at the product level, so just on the, on the specific product.

• 46:55Harry Stebbings?

  Does that not feel quite a lot in product in Evernote?

• 46:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not on product measure. I'm just talking about the business unit. It contains technology, product, design, data science, monetization, growth, even management. You know, like all those people are, yeah, a few times.

• 47:11Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get you. Can I ask you, you mentioned monetization there and you've mastered across different products, paywalls and moving from freemium to premium. What have been your biggest lessons in scaling from freemium to premium end product?

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Again, that it's very case specific. You don't have a playbook that you then apply to each product. Let's take Evernote as an example. On Evernote, we inherited a monetization structure that was based on basically unlocking advanced features. As a user, you would pay to unlock business card scanning, for instance, or PDF annotation. This creates a mismatch between the experience of a free user and advanced user, right? Because you literally have access to a different feature set. The way we approached it instead was, let's try to make it so that every user sees the power, the full power of Evernote. And so we literally made many features that were previously paid free.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Offline is a big one, like offline availability of notes and notebooks used to be a premium feature, and now it's free. Instead, we monetize based on content, so based on how much you have on the product. And so if you want to create a lot, then you pay more. If you don't create much, then you can use it for free. So this, this basically aligns the incentives of, I'm an advanced user, I use it hours a day, I create tons of notes, I pay more and I'm perfectly fine with it. I'm a very casual user, I don't use it much, I have a few notes and just trying it out. You can try the full product without any constraint, and you just like reflect the number of notes that you actually have.

• 48:50Harry Stebbings?

  How do you feel about the quite aggressive paywalls? I quite often download consumer apps, and instead of the, I'm using it very simply, but like, you know, age your faces and like, instead of like the do three and then you pay more, it's like pay more straight away. It's a very aggressive paywall strategy. How do you feel about how aggressive a paywall strategy should be and any lessons on that?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  The best way to monetize a product is always based on what works on that product. So you just try different setups and you see what works. It has been the case often where we've made the paywall more visible than in the past, just because acquiring products that have already grown and that already have a large user base, then you have more to unlock by monetizing. People who are already there. Instead, if you're growing a product, then you might want to be a bit less aggressive and just like get people to try more of the product for free. Because maybe it will improve your K factor. It would increase the amount of people that they refer, basically, if they have a good, a deeper experience with the product without interruption. It's very case specific.

• 49:58Harry Stebbings?

  Another element that I also just find fascinating from a behavioral psychology perspective is push notifications.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 50:04Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have any lessons on what works, what doesn't work and how you'd advise product owners?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're not big on push notifications. We have used them in some products differently. So on Evernote, I think we don't use them at all. I mean, we use them for reminders, for people who set a reminder for a note or for calendar events. But we don't like use them as a marketing strategy, just because we think it would decrease the user experience. People would be pissed about it and they would turn them off. And so that would reduce the usefulness of the product. So we don't do it. On the other hand, when working on live quiz, the HQ trivia clone, push notifications were literally the trigger to use the product. Because of course, it's happening a couple of times a day, always at the same time.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  But if you don't receive the notification, there are fewer chances that you actually remember to play. And so in that case, it was, it was a core part of the experience.

• 50:59Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to the structure, when you acquire a new business, a Vimeo, an AOL, what happens then? I know it sounds stupid, but like, does Luca say, hey, everyone, we're acquiring this. Who wants to work on it? Is that how it works?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  We take into account people's preferences. Like, if somebody comes to me and tells me, I like to work on Vimeo, I'm like, that's great. It's great to know that some people are passionate about one or the other product. I mean, at the end of the day, I think people are perform better when they are working on something they are passionate about. To the extent that it is possible, we always try to make it so people are working on stuff that they care about and they're passionate about. So we definitely encourage people to tell us, but it's not like we find volunteers to work on a product. It's more about. Function leads, so our CTO, Mateo, our co-founder, myself, other people, we have in mind the structure of the product teams and we try to see where we can find people

• 51:59Speaker 02

  that are best suited to work on new acquisitions.

• 52:02Harry Stebbings?

  And you're like a Jedi ninja that kind of jumps from new product to new product.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, lately I've done that quite a bit. It's a bit uncomfortable because you have to start fresh very often, but it's you learn a lot. You learn both about the specific characteristics of that product, but also about you start seeing some patterns about how companies are run and these things.

• 52:25Harry Stebbings?

  Do you get nervous?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:27Harry Stebbings?

  It's a big transition moving from respectfully the 30 Day Fitness to Evernote. That's a big transition.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:34Harry Stebbings?

  And then from Evernote to fucking Vimeo and AOL.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember I was on a plane. We were about to take off. I was in Malpens, I think. I was leaving to California to meet the Evernote team. And I was like, what am I going to tell these people? Like, they are true professionals and instead I'm just a guy with some startup experience. And what am I going to tell them? And so I lacked a bit of confidence. What I realized is that they're people. It's I was intimidated by the fact that many of them had like 20 years of experience being a VP at Yahoo or stuff like that. And they're smart professionals, but it's not like if they are and they have experience, then it means that you cannot talk to them. You can just have a very rational conversation with people and you just like try to do your best.

• 53:22Harry Stebbings?

  Which quality code base was the best when inheriting it?

• 53:28Speaker 02

  I don't dive as deep into the code as my colleagues, so I'm not sure. I heard that the WeTransfer codebase was very good.

• 53:36Harry Stebbings?

  Which was the worst or most difficult to inherit? It doesn't have to be codebase, but just like when you went into it as a product lead, you're like, oh.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Well, Evernote, I'm not sure it was bad. I actually don't think it was necessarily bad, but it was complex. Like, just compare WeTransfer to Evernote. WeTransfer, in terms of complexity, could be one feature of Evernote, and Evernote has like literally hundreds of features. So, I mean, maybe not the simplest one, but it's easier as product surface to conceive and to think about. Evernote has this long tail of small features, and it's 20 years old. When WeTransfer, if you fail an upload, people are going to be frustrated, but it's not going to be the end of the world. If you lose a note on Evernote, you will receive phone calls. And rightfully, understandably, it's what should happen.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  And so, it's just critical that you do it well. Not only it's more complex, but it's also more critical, and you should like triple-check everything you're doing. So, yeah, it was difficult.

• 54:39Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have horizontal paid marketing machines at Bandingspoons? And what I mean by that is, does the marketing sit as a function on top of the product teams? And they are a paid marketing engine for WeTransfer, for Evernote, for Vimeo, for AOL, dah dah dah? Or do you have individual paid marketing machines for each entity?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  It's generally individual. You can think of the function versus team as a matrix, right? Each person belongs both to a function and the team. So, I'm a product manager inside the Evernote team, for instance. So, I'm inside the product function, inside the Evernote team. And so, there are people who are inside the growth and marketing function. They work on Remi, for instance. Almost all people who do this are deployed inside business units.

• 55:22Harry Stebbings?

  In terms of their actual location, how do you think about effectiveness of remote in-product teams?

• 55:28Speaker 02

  I don't have a strong opinion on it. Meaning that, one, I see that some of our best contributors work remotely, or almost only remotely. And it's almost as if having the ability to craft an environment where you are almost cocooned inside your own habits and environment, you can just deliver your best work without distractions. Probably, for me, I'm most effective when I'm at the Office, but I do love having the flexibility to be able to, I don't know, meet my parents for a long weekend and just work from their place. I don't think that there's a clear winner between remote and in person. I think hybrid is a very good mix of both. When you need to attract this level of talent,

• 56:13Speaker 02

  it's an extra requirement to have to ask them, you should also be physically in Milan. If it's not necessary, you just drop it. It's a false requirement, you know?

• 56:25Harry Stebbings?

  You work with American teams that you often inherit and European teams that you sit with day to day. How do they differ in terms of work ethic, psychology, mentality?

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Honestly, I don't see that that big of a difference.

• 56:40Harry Stebbings?

  You don't?

• 56:40Speaker 02

  No, it's not like I spot a trend in how, I don't know, the WeTransfer team versus the Evernote team, just to name two that I worked very closely with. WeTransfer was based mostly in Amsterdam, some people in London, to Evernote in the US, mostly in the valley. I don't see a direct difference in culture.

• 57:00Harry Stebbings?

  Was the StreamYard acquisition successful?

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, I'm thinking about ways it could be defined as not successful, but none come to mind. It was a success financially speaking, we were able to increase revenue a lot. It was a success in terms of how much we were able to improve the product. Yeah, I would say it's definitely a success.

• 57:21Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Which company has Bandingspoons not acquired that you would most like to acquire because it would be great to work on?

• 57:34Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't want to sound arrogant, but I think I would love to work on Google. It would be.

• 57:41Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 57:42Speaker 02

  It's just one of the best products in history.

• 57:44Harry Stebbings?

  Google search?

• 57:45Speaker 02

  Google search, but in general, the Google ecosystem, like they just have so much surface, so much intellectually stimulating stuff that you could work on. One of my favorite products is Google Maps, just because of how useful it is every day, you know? And just even working on Google Maps would be great, just as my, like, literally my personal taste, it would be great. But YouTube, Android, Google Search, all the AI stuff that they're doing, it's just like theme park world for a PM, I think.

• 58:15Harry Stebbings?

  What is the most non-obvious app on your home screen that you love?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Let's check.

• 58:21Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Polytopia.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  It's a mobile game. And I actually discovered it because apparently Elon Musk is a big Polytopia player. It's a turn-based strategy. It looks like Civilization, the game, but it's mobile, it's a bit simpler. When you have 15 minutes, you just play a match there, it's nice. Another one is Napper. Napper is a... So I had a baby in April, and Napper is the app in which I log every time we feed her, every time she takes a nap. So yeah, and it's good at predictions, too. It literally is able to tell you when she's going to fall asleep with an accuracy of minutes.

• 59:03Harry Stebbings?

  That feels like a bending spoons company.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it might be, yeah.

• 59:08Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, tough retention. You do retention now, it's like, fuck it, they're four years old, they don't nap anymore.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  Depends on how many babies you have, but yeah.

• 59:15Harry Stebbings?

  Ah, that's true, but you're gonna get some churn in between, dude.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:19Harry Stebbings?

  What is the most non-obvious skill that a PM needs to be successful?

• 59:24Speaker 02

  I think great PMs are entrepreneurs, at heart at least. Like, people who can come up with valuable ideas, find a way to implement those ideas well, focus on what matters, meaning that the idea needs to be relevant for a goal. Being successful financially is one, but also like doing stuff that gets viral and gets a lot of coverage. I mean, depends on the goal, but you need to be very focused on what matters. The best entrepreneurs are great, creative people that come up with ideas, designers that are thinking what the UX should look like, project managers that get the team to ship fast, and they ship fast with the team. So I think being entrepreneurial is a hell of a skill for a PM.

• 1:00:06Harry Stebbings?

  Rapplet or Lovable, you can only choose one.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think our teams use Lovable more than Rapplet. I personally use Rapplet more than Lovable, though.

• 1:00:16Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  I prefer the UX, it's just that.

• 1:00:20Harry Stebbings?

  Claude Code or Cursor?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  So I tweeted about the AOL acquisition and the tweet went viral and I noticed randomly a few large accounts followed me. It's not like I saw all of the followers and I went through the list and I didn't have time to do it. And so I said, let's see if I can rank my followers by how large their accounts are. But there's no tool that does that. And so I was like, yeah, let's see if I can build a little tool to do that.

• 1:00:51Harry Stebbings?

  I'd pay a lot of money for this if you have that. No, seriously, do you have that?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  I have it. It doesn't work super well, but it works. I built it with Cursor initially and then it didn't work. And then I built it with Claude Code and it didn't one-shot it, but I saw that it was improving the things that were broken faster. And so I went with Claude Code in the end.

• 1:01:10Harry Stebbings?

  Wow, love that. Which wins ultimately?

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  I think at the end of the day, what you want to do is to have the preview on the right and the chat on the left or vice versa. But I think the code will become irrelevant. But I'm biased, I'm a PM, so I care about the prompt and the result. But I think that ultimately what you want to do is to deliver a great UX by giving the right commands. So I think that the Claude Code is the way to go, but I think that Cursor is a better UX today when manually looking at code and knowing the code still matters a lot.

• 1:01:46Harry Stebbings?

  Seven and a half years at Banning Spoons. You can call up FEDA the night before your first day, okay? And say, ah, I've done this before and you should know this. What would you tell yourself on that night before?

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Be bolder. I think sometimes I waited for somebody to give me permission to do stuff as if I was in school. And instead, when you start doing stuff autonomously and it looks like it's something smart and it can work, people will just cheer for you. It's not like anybody is going to stop you, at least not at Banning Spoons. If you have an idea for something that works, we're just going to be enthusiastic about you trying it. So I tend to be high agency, but I didn't have the confidence to just start doing stuff. And I'm glad that they pushed me to do it, but I would just tell myself, be bolder, start more things.

• 1:02:34Harry Stebbings?

  If I wasn't afraid, I would do dot, dot, dot.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  I love Neuralink. I think Neuralink is the product, like the thing that can change the world the most in 50 years, including AI, in my opinion. So I know people love AI. I love AI. I use it every day. But I think that ultimately, the way you perceive reality and the way it changes through Neuralink is going to be a bigger difference compared to having hyper-smart, hyper-smart computers. So yeah, so Neuralink, if I wasn't afraid to fail, I would start a Neuralink competitor or find a way to work on Neuralink, or even better, start a Neuralink product inside Bandit Spoons.

• 1:03:17Harry Stebbings?

  Fedd, this has been so much fun, Stu. Thank you so much for joining me, and I so appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  I loved it. Thank you very much.

• 1:03:26Harry Stebbings?

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