Evernote Owner Bending Spoons Buys Meetup.com

It’s almost exactly 12 months since Bending Spoons got their hands on the keys to Evernote and yesterday, we found out they’re just about to take over another pretty big app, Meetup.com.

In a blog post on the Meetup website the co-founder and CEO of Bending Spoons, Luca Ferrari explained that they hope to have control of the company later in January.

What is Meetup

Meetup.com is a global community website that lets folk setup “Meetups” and events around interests and location.

For example, there’s a Nature photography group with 1.5 million people around the world who meet in real life and online to chat about their interests.

Like Evernote, Meetup has been going a while. The website was founded by Scott Heiferman and four co-founders back in 2002 and grew steadily from there. In 2017 Meetup reportedly had around 35 million users.

They make money by offering a service called “Meetup Pro” which gives you some extra tools to help you market, build and grow your community group. Subscriptions currently start at $30 a month.

The history of the company has been a little bit of a ride.

After steady growth they acquired an email marketing & collaboration company called Dyspatch in 2013 and then in 2017 Meetup was acquired itself by WeWork for around $156 million. Founder and CEO Scott Heiferman stood down and the former CEO of Investopedia, David Siegal stepped in.

The new owners didn’t keep hold of Meetup for long and in March 2020 it was acquired by AlleyCorp a venture fund and tech incubator.

One thing to point out, March 2020 was pretty much the start of COVID lockdowns, and I would imagine this hit Meetup pretty hard even though they arranged plenty of online meetups during lockdowns.

Why would Bending Spoons buy them?

I would imagine they see some sort of future for the service and a way to make some money.

Bending Spoons do seem to have a habit of buying companies that are struggling a little, restructuring them like they did with Evernote and Filmic, but the apps they buy tend to carry on and get better. Evernote is certainly in a better place than it was 12 months ago.

It is interesting that Bending Spoons apps do seem to be targeted at niche(ish) audiences who would play well in a community. Remini, Splice and Filmic appeal to photographers and videographers and Evernote certainly has a large community around it.

Maybe something will connect them together, or maybe they’ll all just stay as stand-alone products under one roof, we shall wait and see.

What does this mean for Evernote?

Probably nothing. Maybe we could create some Evernote meetups like there were a decade ago. I hear from a number of folk who used to run little local Evernote groups and made lifelong friends from them.

One thing for sure I don’t think we’ve seen the last of bending Spoons acquisitions. They have some investment money lurking around, including celebrity money and they don’t seem afraid to spend it.

Have you used Meetup? Any good?

All the best

Jon