I have some friends there. Morale in the company was very very low. There were multiple rounds of lay-offs and management went AI crazy. They were desperate to live up to their extreme valuation from 2022. "We have to be the future of work" etc. Now the exit was 10x lower than their max valuation.
It's LucidSpark for non-masochists. It's Parabol for power-users. It's possibly the greatest 'roll your own' tool for workshopping and blue-sky planning to hit mass-appeal without feature and subscription bloat.
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
It was a great whiteboarding tool for teams. Planning, research, meetings, standups etc. IMO they tried to cater to too many use cases at once, missed the AI train, and focused too hard on enterprise, which hurt the product a lot.
For remote companies, it is quite useful and really a white board replacement. We use(d) it for customer research, retros, design exploration, architecture diagrams, data modelling and a ton more. Figma (Jam) is way too designer focused.
I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).
There are a whole lot of people out there who use Miro for all of their documentation, planning, troubleshooting, etc, in multiple roles. It's a primary tool for many people, like a word processor/sheets/slides on steroids. And the moat they have makes it nearly impossible to take your data elsewhere. It is very entrenched.
Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.
miro is my go-to for putting together diagrams for slide decks, but after having tried using it to actually work on things a few times, i've just come to the conclusion that actually virtual whiteboards are a bad UX for most things, inevitably you spend more time organizing the board than actually getting work done
Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.
Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.
BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.
BS is slowly but steadily growing their userbase. Knowhing how did it go for their other purchases, of which I was using many (Komoot, Eventbrite, Meetup), not a single one has avoided constant nags of prompting for upgrades and dark patterns, so this will most likely end up in a similar way.
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
Why would it be a typo? Miro was doing $600M ARR, some of their customers were paying them $100k+ a year. That is totally normal. It would be weird if they did not have such customers.
Great whiteboarding tool though.
Wasn’t a whiteboard replacement.
Wasn’t design software.
Wasn’t a PM tool.
Even when the Miro power users would bust it out in meetings, it was always so painful to watch.
I don’t know what the point of Miro really was. There was a time Figma was doing something similar (FigJam), so maybe there was a trend for a sec.
No idea why or how it’s worth over a billion dollars.
Anyone reading this going “Noooo not Miro!!!” ?
Incredible reponsiveness, UI/UX, and embeddable rich media functionality. Was like Hypercard mixed with whiteboarding and an incredibly traversable canvas.
I don't care for or use any of the AI features.
I hope the price doesn't go up dramatically.
> Wasn’t a PM tool.
I know a lot of people who used it for one or both of these. Also for architecture/system design (ie. not UI - although I guess some used it for user journey or wireframing).
My old company used it across the board for basically, everything. Engineering flow diagrams, UI prototyping, team retrospectives.
I personally often used it for creating diagrams that I would later insert into slide decks.
It was basically a swiss-army knife type tool which could be applied in so many situations.
Deeply saddened that it's going to Bendingspoons, where companies go to die.
Never underestimate what other people find useful that you do not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miro_(video_software)
Miro acquired my startup back in '21[0], so this is bittersweet as our users will be (eventually) affected by this. Founders and employees at Miro definitely deserve to cash out for their hard work and it's unclear (ie. not publicly known) if they will since this is a 10x down round.
Also weird that they had to sell - they were one of the most established (visual) collaboration platforms out there. I'd be keen on learning about the inside story if it ever gets public.
BS is known for aggressive management of companies they acquire, optimizing for cash flow and revenue, firing most/all of the original team, etc. Their acquisitions before Miro include Airtable, Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Meetup, Evernote ... for at least a few of those, my direct experience with the product afterwards or in chats with their users, the platforms does get enshittified.
Hope that's not a deal here.
[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
As many share, I used Miro and found it quite nice.
Seems like you answered your own question. Obviously there are customers and a revenue stream (I don’t even know what micro is).