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Federico Simionato

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2025-12-05
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2025-12-05
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  1. “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 you need to win them over. If you already have an existing customer base, I think your number one job is just to make sure that they love being on that product. Unless you have some crazy insight for by doing this, I could 10x my user base. It's very hard. It's very rare. I think you should focus a lot on your customers.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, 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 Nodes user will care much about it. Not because it's a bad product, just not as relevant.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's not easy. 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 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, you cannot use Apple Nodes 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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “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 Ernst, your hierarchy of information on Everard, 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 recently, what did you do recently on Evernote? What reasons did you have for taking notes”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “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 red flag, right?”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It's especially important to realize when people are telling you, I don't need this. 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 says like, yeah, I work out three times a week. But then I ask you, how many times have you worked out last week? And you're like, only one, but actually it's because I had a meeting and it was away. 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 noticed that the things that people actually do are different.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Yeah, it depends a lot 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 your use case? And then over time, we've started knowing our customers better. We have a panel of Evernaut 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 average customer. So the way we identify the feature that works on Evernot 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. And based on their feedback, we just tweak it or maybe even discard it.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “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 2% 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 review the unsubscription process regularly so that it's not to cumbersome, too frictionful.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yes. 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 10 times and you will still make the decision of staying retained. If you're trying to like shy away and like, should we use language and not really tell people that we are increasing their prices? That's a bad move. 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 the threshold for usefulness and just be confident that what you're asking is best for most people.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yes, and on one hand, it's like an economic plate, 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, to stay subscribed.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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 the threshold and will have to let them go. The most unmotivated people, the least advanced ones maybe the ones that maybe were already thinking about unsubscribing.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “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. And when you receive the email, you're like, is this 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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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 retained as a customer. The way I think about retention is it's”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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 just looks weird because Evernote was popular once and it's not as relevant today in tech pop culture. But if you run a real estate agency, you might have everything on Evernote.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think Evernot 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 poor their working hours into it and so that 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 because it's just so important to people. Even though we can't demonstrate that the ability to collapse sections on a node, for instance, leads to higher retention.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Also, a lot of organic traffic going to it because people do look for this kind of product. There is a push. People want to be fit. And so they do things organically. But yes, I think that most of the traffic for 30 day fitness was paid.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 need somebody who calls you out directly, like, Harry, you're not working out today. Why are you not here today?”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, a few years ago, one of our biggest apps was called 30-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 30-day fitness is a good product because people want it, but it's not great at retaining people, meaning that after a while people lose the motivation that they need to show up every day. When you're training, it's hard to everyday remake the decision of a 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? 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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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 different scenarios and we saw what the impact of this feature could be based on how many people were hitting that page daily, that the page of expiration, right? 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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “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 Wii transfer, we build 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 we 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 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”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “But you can't do it in beforehand. You can 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 are not sure.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think people generally try to follow the steps that are supposed to lend you a job. So like you have great CV, you're very polite and professional. 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 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 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 I like to think that it was a touch of something creative that not everybody thinks about.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “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 at McKinsey, for instance, like Luca didor. But even in an academic career, it can be just something who's very thoughtful 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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “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 great results, but we are not satisfied. We are at the scale of downloads of Twitter or Spotify or stuff like that, 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. just applied as you normally do 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 and yeah and that was almost eight years ago now”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “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. 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. 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 wanted this hypergrowth feeling. And the way I discover Bending Spoons was on the...”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “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.”

    2025-12-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source