This is going to be the most boring newsletter you read all week. Read it only if you want to make your business profitable. If you'd rather hear about the next shiny AI thing, this isn't for you. Because I'm about to tell you about a company that IPO'd at $25.7 billion, and they don't build anything that is AI.
Let's dig in.
The $25.7B Company That Builds Nothing
Bending Spoons just IPO'd at $25.7 billion and surged about 40% on day one. Here's the crazy part. They don't build products. They buy broken ones.
AOL. Evernote. Meetup. Vimeo. Eventbrite. Names you probably filed under "dead."
Bending Spoons bought them and did three things: cut cost, raised prices, fixed unit economics.
Now they're worth more than the SaaS companies burning cash chasing AI innovation. Sit with that. The most "innovative" SaaS companies are tanking because they can't monetize. The market isn't rewarding innovation anymore. It's rewarding operational discipline.
If that's not the case for "go-to-market is the business," I don't know what is.
Watch: A deep dive on how Bending Spoons buys dead companies and make them profitable so you can do it too
The Numbers That Got the Room's Attention
I ran this by our CEO roundtable, about 10 B2B SaaS and services CEOs, roughly $10M to $60M ARR. Half hadn't really heard of Bending Spoons. Then I put up the numbers.
IPO at $25.7B. Up 40% day one. Q1 net income of $27.4M profit. The prior comparison quarter: $259M in revenue and a $12M loss. So they went from losing $112M to making $27M in profit while more than doubling revenue.
One CEO, let's call him Georgie, said, "Wait, how is that possible? They're not building new products. They're not building AI."
That's exactly the point, Georgie.
Georgie runs a ~$35M ARR company. Great product, strong engineering, some of the most robust AI capabilities in his space. And he's burning about $400K a month building the next feature, the next integration, the next AI thing. Meanwhile Bending Spoons buys products that already exist, already have customers, already have revenue, and just makes them profitable. No new R&D. No hype. Just unit economics.
FYI - Nobody's buying AI innovation long-term. They're buying profitable businesses.
Want some answers? Here’s a Four-Step Playbook.
I dug into how they actually do it. Here's the model.
Step one: they buy venture zombies. Companies that raised a ton of money, built products people use daily, and never figured out how to make money. VCs gave up, founders moved on, product still there, users still active, nobody knows what's next. Evernote had 200M users at its peak and couldn't monetize. Bending Spoons bought it.
Step two: they cut cost, ruthlessly. Not "AI made us efficient" theater. They look at the org chart and ask one question: what actually drives profitable revenue? Everything else goes. Features nobody asked for, marketing that doesn't convert, empty office space. Gone. No apologies.
Step three: they raise prices. This is the move that got me. The founders couldn't monetize, the VCs couldn't crack it, and Bending Spoons walks in and raises prices 2x, sometimes 3x, with almost no product changes. Their logic: people are using it and getting value, so why is it $5 a month? Yes, some customers leave. But the ones who stay are the ones who actually value it. Revenue goes up, churn stabilizes, and unit economics improve big time.
Step four: they let it run. The hardest one. No new features, no pivots, no bolting AI onto everything. They let the product do what it already did, profitably. 84% of revenue is subscription. Recurring, predictable, profitable.
That's the playbook that made them worth $25 billion.
Momentum Growth vs Profitable Growth
Here's the framework I want you to keep in mind every time you think AI is the answer. Because AI is mostly not the real answer; it’s at best something you do when you get there.
Momentum growth: revenue is up, activity is up, everyone's busy shipping. You're spending $1.50 to $2 to earn a dollar, hoping you turn profitable someday. That works while a VC or PE firm is funding the gap. Then the money leaves, just like it left every zombie company Bending Spoons now owns.
Profitable growth: revenue is up and unit economics are up. You retain your most profitable customers, expand with the ICP that actually wants you, and your cost of acquisition falls because you finally know who to focus on. Not how many. Who. That's what compounds.
The market has made its preference obvious.
Unit economics beats innovation over the long run. Efficiency beats activity. Innovation gets you into the market. Unit economics keeps you there.
Four Things I'd Do If I Were You
Run unit economics on every segment. Not blended. By ICP, by deal size, by channel. Find where you actually make money and where you're subsidizing growth with cash you don't have.
Ask: would I cut this if it's not profitable in 90 days? Kill the pet projects and the 3 a.m. AI features one customer asked for. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he cut ~350 product lines down to 10. That's what made Apple profitable.
Consider raising prices. Nine out of ten of you are underpriced and you know it. At Terminus, our first deal was $250 a month. Three years later we closed the same profile for $100K. My own team eventually kept me out of pricing conversations because I loved the product so much I wanted to give it away. Have someone else do it if you have to. But do it.
Stop chasing the next AI feature. It won't save you. A profitable business will.
Go-to-Market Is the Business
Great companies die with great products because they never figured out how to monetize. Then someone like Bending Spoons waits for them to die and picks up the pieces for nothing.
Most SaaS companies won't IPO. Most won't get a 10x strategic exit. I was fortunate to have both, a 10x at Pardot and a $100M+ exit at Terminus, and that's not the reality for most businesses.
The reality is you'll run out of money if you don't fix this. So fix it now.
The market won't wait.
Our blunt advice to CEOs and GTM leaders:
Go-to-market is the business.
Go to runongtmos.com/move and take the free assessment. 15 minutes. It shows you what stage of business you're in and how to navigate the valleys of death into a profitable business. Over 3,000 businesses already run on GTM OS.
Now, let's get moving.
love,
sangram
p.s. 100,000+ GTM leaders read our content every day. If you want more frameworks like this, follow along at runongtmos.com and let's get moving.