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Not too worried about not getting features, but what about simply keeping up with updates of Android, iOS, Garmin firmware…
And most of all: will the maps be updated promptly? If not, that’s simply the end of Komoot… their strong point for me was being able to see the type of path/road/… I would be facing. If that’s not up to date, then it’s useless.
That’s mostly (if not all) pulled from OpenStreetMap. There may be a bit of curation here and there, but pulling from OSM should be a pretty straightforward, automated process, so I don’t think there’s much to worry about there.
Hopefully Garmin Trail will pick up the data pieces, even if it’s just trails themselves. I’ve been a loyal Komoot customer for years but with BendingSpoon it’s only a matter of time before it’s “optimized” into being an overpriced crap.
Regardless of whatever shiny PR spin Bending Spoons has for their future plans, I’m out. As a longtime Komoot customer, watching them fire the very pioneers who built the platform without even bothering to understand their talent, vision, or hard-earned expertise was beyond insulting. It screams corporate arrogance and tone-deaf leadership. I won’t be renewing my subscription, and the app’s headed straight to the deletion bin. Loyalty goes both ways and clearly Bending Spoons missed that memo. I anticipate they’ll gut everything that made Komoot special and re-imagine it into a watered-down, soulless version packed with features no one asked for. Good luck with that. I’m no longer going to support a company that treats its people like this.
Yeah, but they owners made the ultimate decision to sell. No one “forced” them to sell to Bending Spoons. Perhaps some of your “anger” should be reserved for them, but few people (you included) would turndown a huge payout.
I took a look at the other products owned by Bending Spoons and one of them is Evernote, which has an almost annoyingly large number of regular updates for it, so they don’t seem to have cut that back.
Evernote was such a great app until Bending Spoons got hold of it. The updates that introduced more and more bugs and added useless functionality came at the expense of the core functions and any sense of reliability.
Yes, I still use Evernote but the annoying thing is too many updates rather than not enough…
Evernote after bending spoons didn’t comply with GDPR – it wouldn’t give me a way to access and export old content without paying for a £80 subscription (fortunately was able to do it as a trial, get the stuff out, then cancel the trial and move to a better note app where everything is backed up locally and in a non-proprietary format). Hence, the lesson from Evernote is get your data out pronto and look to somewhere else.
No, I don‘t agree. I am using Evernote since 2011. To be honst, it wasn‘t really going on for years. Long anounced features like calendar integrations, LaTeX-Fourmulas, markup etc … All this came AFTER Bending Spoons took the steering wheel. Evernote improved VERY MUCH after that.
Despite that, I am unhappy with their aquisation of Komoot. I really love Komoot and I am using it so much. I has given me so many walks and rides .. BIG THANK YOU! I hope that Bending Spoon will not fail. It‘s indeed a shame to fire all those wonderful people that have had done much for us.
Now tell people about the price increases……
I hope they band together and create a new mapping app, like komoot but better, user driven, not investor.
Terrific video, thanks for sharing. Inspiring in a reverse sort of way.
It’s amazing that Komoot needed such an army of people , where as https://cycle.travel is run by just Richard Fairhurst!
cycle.travel is an interesting alternative. Heavily focused on UK though, and as far as I can tell biased towards picturesque but sometimes significantly longer routes.
Thanks, I didn’t know this wizard. It builds routes very fast and most importantly it even determines correctly for a road bike. Too bad the steet view is not as direct as in ridewithgps.
Another shout out for cycle.travel – amazing app. I just wish it was more integrated with rides I did do, as well as rides I plan to do.
He’s moving it that way with his hex idea, but currently requires the app running while you ride, whereas I’ll always send to a head unit.
One of their first users, lifetime member and paying.
The paying will stop, the recommending as well.
Vote with your feet
Remember how they killed Evernote with their price increases?
Komoot is my go to app for bike touring and planning. Let’s hope that greed and incompetence don’t feck it up. But it doesn’t look good🤑🤑🤬
I forgot to mention. It’s only my opinion but why did the original owners have to sell it and cash in. Knowing what bending spoons would do to it. They effectively threw all there loyal staff under the bus for greed and money. Shame on them
No more Komoot for me. Would like to support remaining staff, but so sick of private equity killing things
Capitalism reigns the free world. I hope the employees did have shares themselves in the company, so that there is a form of compensation for suddenly being fired after years of loyalty
All private equity firm employees should be thrown in jail. Would be a net positive for the whole world no question
Hello. It’s a disgrace that Bending Spoons fires the entire Komoot staff group. I use Komoot to find the appropriate cycling roetes and hiking trails for my activities. I will now no longer use Komoot and will definitely not use any Bending Spoons products. To fire all resources from a company after acquisition is stupid. You firing all of the companies IP and expect users to pay more for little upgrade changes. That’s is CEOs with no integrity and heart. Cycling and hiking adventures are close to the athletes hearts. Dealing with a company that doesn’t show the same is an absolute disgrace. Shame on you Bending Spoons.
I truly trust you will continue being a team to create a new application that will outshine Komoot. Families stand together ❤️. Keep up the PR for your new adventures 💪🏻 👏🏻 ✨️. Waiting in anticipation for your new adventures and PR updates.
That’s sad news, speaking as a Komoot user, not an investor. But good info – thanks: nudged me to cancel automatic subscription renewal so I can make a deliberate choice about whether to continue or move next year.
Ufff maybe fewer institutions will now create routes in komoot. Where anything I wanted to download a route I had to buy additional regions. Hopefully the 300million will be distributed to employees and they won’t have to work till the end of their lives. From this photo I think they will because everyone is happy.
None of that money will go to the employees
Hopefully some of these employees had some equity. I also hope that they take their experience with Komoot and use it to ignite the fire in other sport tech startups. From the ashes Phoenix may rise…..
Oh well.. that’s a good reason to stop using it.
Komoot is lost.
Bending Spoon has only simple greed as its goal.
Sadly people doesnt have the insight to understand, and just blindly continues to pay more for less.
Choosing to sell Komoot is a moral choise, that previous owner have to live with.
But they where clearly morally weak and too much embedded in the narrow US money focused culture.
Goodbye Komoot.
A new door will open.
A German company bought by an Italian hardly seems US money focused
My small revenge: turned off activity upload in garmin connect. This way they receive a tiny bit of less data.
How are they able to “fire” these employees? Germany has some of the strictest employment laws in the world.
As a general rule of thumb, in most EU countries, if an office is being closed and/or relocated to another country, there’s very few employee protections.
In a situation like that, it’s usually possible to find “betriebliche Gründe” to let people go. Still some form of protection like at least 4 weeks of notice and everyone who has been working 12+ month is entitled to unemployment benefits.
It’s sad, but Komoot people shouldn’t be overhyped now. When reading the changelog of the iPhone app, they won’t released something interesting in the last 2 years. Always “fixing bugs”.
we’ll see if they actually want to work on getting more users or just holding on to their existing users. i’m a paid strava user and don’t really see any reason to switch to komoot. i think strava would have to start really failing and komoot would have to start hitting home runs before i would bother to switch. i don’t think i even know anyone using komoot. it’s all strava and ride with gps near me.
Well, the (old) owners lined their pockets and disappeared from the scene pretty quickly, leaving their often long-standing employees to their fate – 85% of them were simply fired from the new owner.
Responsible owners arrange company takeovers in such a way that their employees are also protected. This doesn’t seem to have been taken into consideration here at all. Money, money, money…
I have a very hard time believing that the gravy train runs for $300mil + interest without them keeping investing in the product.
Even with a solid price hike and user base that keeps growing slowly, that’s like 5 years of revenue?
How long does it have to keep running though? Supposedly Komoot was profitable even before the firings. Now they remove a very large fraction of cost (chances are most of the 15% not fired are from the lower tiers of the compensation spectrum): suddenly you have what could be considered hyperprofitability and even if that starts fading from day one, it’s likely to recoup that investment (plus interest), and whatever keeps coming in beyond that point of profit
Komoot was marginally profitable but more importantly their revenue was €35.5mil in 2023. With 20% growth they would have hit around €42.5 in 2024.
Paying 7x revenue is very steep, even if you think you can transform the business into a 80% profit margin SaaS company unless you think you are somehow able to sustain growth without investing in the product. If you add 5 years of 5% interest to €300mil you’re getting to €383mil.
I’m disappointed to see Ray being right again about people losing their jobs. I was kinda hoping this acquisition would be different. I had their subscription for route planning as I don’t really like Strava’s interface, cancelled now. I guess I will have to learn to like Strava… at least I won’t have to change tabs to see heat maps and Komoots interface at the same time ;-)
Switching a business from “build the machine” mode to “use the machine for earning money” mode. You need a lot less people to operate a hotel than to build it, and that’s even more true (far more true!) for computer services. It’s an ugly business and they know it.
so, read this article, watched the video on YouTube and 10 minutes later my komoot account was deleted.
Sometimes the gut decisions are the best ones in life, Bending Spoons will never get a euro cent from me.
Well, cashing in. I guess they realized that on order to really get rich from the company (vs just paying themselves a somewhat generous income while the company is not far beyond breaking even), they would have needed to cut costs. In other words: do most of those firings themselves.
And if they are, like most people, somewhere between the polar opposites of selflessly leaving money on the table in order to keep others in employment on one extreme and enjoying the firings on the other extreme, then it’s an attractive compromise to leave the company to others who have grown numb to feeling bad about performing an acqui-layoff (or more likely: are the kind of unpleasant person who never did)
And now Bending Spoon is searching for UX people all around Germany. Probabaly hiring for cheaper than what employees previously got at Komoot…
Losing your job is never nice. But the people at Komoot choose money. That’s their prerogative, and no one should be badmouthing Blending Spoon for their decision. In fact, the app will only get better, as it has already been pijnted out that the updates from the last two years were nothing but some cleanup and bug fixing. Hardly any functional advantages.
The previous article about Bending Spoons on this site was unrightfully negative, without any proper journalism done. But I guess that’s what you get when anyone can run a website where everything is about making money. Just look at all the annoying ads over here. And the in-depth reviews that aren’t really in-depth.
It’s always amazing to me, Jacklin/AB/a gazillion other names over the years, how hilariously easy you are to spot, despite thinking you’re creative, publishing a new name each time you post your pseudo-troll comments. The problem is, you’re actually really bad at trolling, mainly because you’re always wrong. Like, hilariously always wrong. I don’t think any other commenter manages to be as wrong, 100% of the time as you, and trust me, people have tried.
“The previous article about Bending Spoons on this site was unrightfully negative, without any proper journalism done. ”
It’s literally a list of past acquisitions, and the number of employees laid off, and how quickly they were laid off. It’s factual. If that feels negative to you, then that’s probably because it’s a reality.
No doubt, the founders at Komoot take blame for selling to Bending Spoons. But that’s also pretending to ignore the reality that Bending Spoons is known for gutting companies to make as much money as possible before throwing the carcus away. Thus, I find it ironic that you’re somehow upset about this site (here) making money. Weird.
But again, that’s your schitck, half-baked wannabe troll comments, with equally half-baked fake usernames every time. Enjoy! :)
Ouch DCR, better send Jacklin some ointment for the burn :) 🔥
Watching the video as a longtime user saddens me. I wish evveryone fired all the best. For me I will stop using Komoot and remove the app. Bending Spoons can stick their purchase in a place where the daylight doesn’t come.
Watching the video as a longtime user saddens me. I wish evveryone fired all the best. For me I will stop using Komoot and remove the app. Bending Spoons can stick their purchase in a place where the daylight doesn’t come.
As they say, nothing lasts forever — but you Italians should stick to fashion, wine, and food instead of ruining something as good as Komoot.
Och, what a comment full of prejudice if not racism. Of course italians are as capable to run a sw company as any others. Evernote has made significant improvement since they were run y Bending Spoons. What some people don‘t like is that they have to pay for service.
I will wait and see how Komoot improves .. or not. I am happliy using Komoot as a premium user and so far not planing to change.
I paid for Evernote. I objected to the tripling of the cost.
Komoot like Evernote will fade to irrelevance.
Tech requires investment to stay relevant and PE, which just extract value, doesn’t align with that. These companies all die or become irrelevant. You will see price hikes, bugs, and plenty of dark patterns getting introduced. Sad to see.