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

Join my free Substack for deeper dives and extra insights: https://www.hiten.show/ Sign up to my newsletter to build better products faster: https://producthabits.com/ Join my daily list of must-reads to become a sharper operator: https://www.operatorlinks.com/ This is the story of Bending Spoons – the Italian startup that's never built a product from scratch. They buy apps on life support, fire half the team by noon, and do what the original founders couldn't: make them profitable. Referenced • Bending Spoons: https://bendingspoons.com/ • Company Overview: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/wha... • Eventbrite Acquisition (2025): https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/ben... • Evernote Acquisition (2022): https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/16/ben... • Inside Bending Spoons with Marcello Ascani:    • Dentro Bending Spoons 🏢 Con Luca Ferrari e...   • Luca Ferrari:   / luca-ferrari-12418318   • Luca Ferrari on 20VC with Harry Stebbings:    • Luca Ferrari: Scaling to 500M Downloads, $...   • Luca Ferrari on ICONS:    • From $10K to $500M Deals: Bending Spoons' ...   • Luca Ferrari on Invest Like The Best:    • The Playbook on Buying and Running Compani...   • Luca Ferrari with Marcello Ascani:    • Luca Ferrari 👨‍💻 CEO di Bending Spoons   • Remini: https://remini.ai/ • Portfolio: https://bendingspoons.com/products • Vimeo Acquisition (2025): https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/vim... • WeTransfer Acquisition (2024): https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/31/ben... • $11B Valuation: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bendin... Chapters (00:00) Making Evernote profitable again (01:02) The startup repair factory (01:25) Why they buy dying apps, not dead ones (02:15) “It’s like private equity had a baby with Google” (02:55) Why they've never lost a bid (03:23) Strike teams and the operating table (04:17) 50 secret tools that decide what to fix (05:14) Why it’s harder to get into than Harvard (06:08) 1% turnover without paying bonuses or equity grants (06:57) Why they refused venture capital for 10 years (08:02) 5,000 companies on their “buy list” Socials • LinkedIn:   / hnshah   • Twitter/X: https://x.com/hnshah