Getting komooted

The acquisition of Komoot by Bending Spoons made many people disappointed. Around 80% of Komoot’s employees lost their job, the 6 founders were each paid 20-30 million USD and a community-based app is doomed to death. Personally I’ve always been quite connected with Komoot. I planned many routes with Komoot, followed their story as a startup almost from the beginning and work in the software development of route calculation, turn-by-turn navigation, mapping technology and so on. Many times, Komoot served me as inspiration as local startup in the Berlin area and as a thriving community tech company.

Getting komooted

When We Get Komooted is an article about the impact for the users and community, the Komoot brand and the employees that I highly recommend reading.

With the sale, a brand and big community got destroyed from one day to another. This is nothing new. Bending Spoons is especially known for acquiring Evernote and WeTransfer. At least from Evernote I know their extreme change in operations after the acquisition. Prices increased, higher user churn, unsatisfied customers. This will now also happen to Komoot. I, for myself, now avoid Komoot.

Parties and their power

Everyone is talking about how bad the sale is and that it’s a big betrayal. But Each partie has their own interests:

1. Bending Spoons
2. Komoot’s founders
3. Komoot’s employees
4. Komoot’s community and users

Bending Spoons

The decisions that were made at Bending Spoons are plausible. If you buy a company that makes losses, and you want to turn it over into a profit generating company, you need to cut costs. They did this by laying off 80% of the employees, increasing prices and by pay-walling features that were previously available for free¹.

I sometimes cannot believe how easy it is for a company to increase revenue. I try to think about Netflix or Spotify. Each time they increase their subscription pricing users are furious about it (me included). However, they will make more revenue even though some users cancel their plan. A good or bad - based on the side you’re standing on - example for this is the sport streaming service DAZN who at one point² increased their subscription prices by 100% from ~20€ to 40€. As long as they keep 50% of their customer subscriptions they increased their revenue³.

The company strategy is straight forward[4]. Buy unprofitable companies, strip them off their costs and make them profitable. To be able to strip the costs drastically, there need to be some leverage. In this case, this is the community that is dropped.

Komoot’s founders

I can understand that at one point in time you want to sell and cash out. I’d expected it to be more than 20-30 million USD, but this is only without looking at any detailed reports.

Komoot’s employees

I once thought about applying to Komoot as an app developer. In hindsight, I’m glad I haven’t done so.

None of the employees held any equity shares. Especially for a startup this is awful. In the HN thread many think that you should never give more than your contracted 100% when being employed. I think if you don’t give more than 100% you won’t stand out and make any impact. However, I understand where this opinion is coming from - especially during times when a company is destroyed from one day to another like this.

Community and users

The article on bikepacking.com talks a lot about the community. I never used Komoot for more than planning routes, but obviously it benefitted from users contributing, sharing photos, routes and providing their knowledge.

And now, this community is dead. This is not the first time something like this happened, and it will not be the last time. A recent example is Reddit “killing” subreddits and their moderators or Twitter/X discontinuing their API and by that killing widely used third-party apps. It happens way to fast and it shows that you as a user don’t have any big impact on the company’s direction.

I believe that long-term the sell will harm the company more than benefiting from it.

Who is losing here?

Far and foremost the Komoot community lost. People who spent hours and hours adding value to the platform. But aren’t these users also those that benefitted the most from the platform? They shared knowledge and absorb knowledge while using the platform, interacting with others from the community and planning routes. At least from a monetary perspective Komoot was not that expensive as far as I can tell. I once bought a world map package for 10€⁴.

Many people also lost their job through this acquisition. They hopefully will be hired again soon. They will never again invest time in something that they don’t get compensated for and that doesn’t belong to them.

The founders got paid for their patience and their work they’ve done in the last 15 years. They created a great community and they also killed it with this decision.

Acquisitions like this will sadly happen again and again, it might be Goodreads, Strava or any other independent (looking) user-driven platform. The user is simply put always the product.