[HN Gopher] Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down
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Bench to be acquired after abruptly shutting down
Author : Nelkins
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-12-30 14:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| bagelss wrote:
| Let's wait and see. This is a case study in how not to shut down
| a company. I, like many business owners, will have already
| started looking at alternatives. With an estimated 35,000
| businesses you would have thought Bench would have some
| acquisition offers on the table before they chose to close.
| swores wrote:
| It's possible that they explored all acquisition possibilities
| they could find without the world knowing about their
| situation, and that the only company or companies who could
| reach acceptable terms to acquire them didn't have the network
| links to find out that Bench was acquirable until the news
| broke that they were shutting down.
|
| Obviously not an ideal situation, both parties (if an
| acquisition is indeed happening) would prefer to have been able
| to do it before Bench's announcement, but there's simply no way
| to let every single person & company in the world who might
| consider acquiring them know what's on the table without the
| information being public knowledge too.
| beibeiq wrote:
| NDR (Net Dollar Retention) in a business like this is the key
| metric for determining whether there's a business or customer
| base worth acquiring here. With Bench's rumored churn in
| recent years, their existing investors which includes top
| funds like Bain and reputable ones like Inovia (which is top
| Canada) would've had the opportunity to invest first. Clearly
| they didn't.
|
| With a rumored 2024 revenue of $54.9m in 2024, and peak
| valuation at $230m+ (4x Rev which isn't unreasonable to pay
| even for a tech-enabled services business), churn would've
| been really bad for this deal to end up here.
| swores wrote:
| I was commenting on how acquisitions happen, not asking to
| be spammed by an accounting company masquerading as a
| relevant comment.
|
| I'd suggest deleting it and not continuing this strategy,
| as I suspect I'm not the only HN reader who will react to
| your comment by making a mental note that 'Digits' is a
| company with annoying marketing.
| beibeiq wrote:
| Hey that's good feedback. I'll leave the first part since
| I was also commenting on how acquisitions happen. Note
| though that the OP is an affected bench customer looking
| for a transition but I'll respect your part of this
| thread. Have a great rest of 2024.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42523061 "bench accounting
| services shutting down". 3 days ago, 300 comments
| GiorgioG wrote:
| Oh yeah I'm sure the people you just fucked over really want to
| stick around.
| ezekg wrote:
| Especially when the service the last couple years has been
| bad...
| jsheard wrote:
| > Your service will continue seamlessly with the platform you've
| always trusted.
|
| Uh, I think that trust may be a bit compromised until they
| explain what the hell happened.
| scrapcode wrote:
| Now with your quote, I'm curious how many times they've changed
| this lander...
|
| > Welcome Back [...] More information on how to continue your
| services will be available soon.
| dotty- wrote:
| lol, well, the companies who have already started a migration
| away from Bench are probably not going to stop their migration.
| Ouch.
| ezekg wrote:
| Especially when the Bench competitors offering those migrations
| have a deadline of the 31st to do 2024 books/taxes.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Seems like a last second deal. Doesn't inspire confidence. For
| context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42523061
|
| And former CEO's post:
| https://x.com/ianwcrosby/status/1872724231999381790
| cj wrote:
| It's very possible it has been a deal long time in the making.
|
| When you're in an acquisition process, the acquirer will often
| prey on your weaknesses to get a better deal. If Employer.com
| had already been in talks prior to the shutdown, then they
| already knew the financial condition, they may have surprised
| Bench with a dramatic decrease in the purchase price at the
| 11th hour in an effort to get a better deal knowing Bench's
| only other alternative would be to shut down. Maybe Bench
| called their bluff, called off the deal and shut down. (The
| only rational reason to do that would be if they think they
| could successfully sue the acquirer or get the original deal
| back on the table)
|
| Pure speculation, but typically acquisitions take many months
| to come together. Even a firesale acquisition doesn't happen in
| a week.
| benatkin wrote:
| This might not even be worthy of being called a firesale
| acquisition. It might just be selling the customer contracts
| locked in with Capchase.
| pbreit wrote:
| Lousy behavior all the way around. And with SMB accounting on
| the last days of the year.
| ksec wrote:
| Now with a list of Board of Directors
|
| https://x.com/amasad/status/1873018020895047744
| mikebonnell wrote:
| Would you trust Employer when their "About" page looks like this?
| https://www.employer.com/about
|
| "Our Story There are many variations of passages of available,
| but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by
| injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even..."
| jsheard wrote:
| They've secured investments from Logoipsum, Logoipsum,
| Logoipsum and Logoipsum so they must be legit.
| cmac123 wrote:
| Ha!
| admissionsguy wrote:
| Sounds like they are not afraid to use AI already, which will
| give them an unbeatable edge when the LLMs improve.
|
| Source: YC investment thesis
| shesprtytechncl wrote:
| Yeahhhh I wonder if this is a new shell company spun up to
| either take on the old one as a way to restructure financially
| and get rid of some debt (I have no idea how this would work)
| or to give them enough time to wind down. Or something else?
| Who knows but definitely weird.
| aimazon wrote:
| Employer.com is a new "brand" from long-established
| Recruiter.com. My guess is that Recruiter.com planned to launch
| Employer.com in the near-term, and they saw the Bench.co
| shutdown as the perfect opportunity so they've sped up their
| plans and "launched" employer.com.
|
| edit: after reading Recruiter.com's investor filings (as
| they're a public company) the acquisition of Bench is going to
| kill them. The founder has gone hog wild on acquisitions
| despite having barely enough income to support them. It's a
| tale as old as time: a medium successful company goes public
| and starts issuing shares to fund acquisitions at a rate far
| outpacing the business growth and suddenly, one day, the music
| stops and everything comes crashing down.
| shesprtytechncl wrote:
| I am not doubting you, but where did you hear this abut
| recruiter.com?
| lbotos wrote:
| there is a link on the page that links to "bountyjobs.com"
| -- which says on that page "a recruiter.com company"
| xeromal wrote:
| The article of this post
| nameless_me wrote:
| The process you describe above is highly vulnerable as Ponzi
| scheme. The goal would be to raise total revenues, to paint a
| certain financial picture to meet targets for cashing out
| before the high debt load and interest payments sink the
| ship.
|
| As soon as there is insufficient cashflow for several
| consecutive periods, the whole thing comes crashing down.
| This is a strategy for cashing out, rather than building a
| long term sustainable book of companies for steady, organic
| growth which has the cash to payout dividends and reward
| loyal investors.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > The process you describe above is highly vulnerable as
| Ponzi scheme. The goal would be to raise total revenues, to
| paint a certain financial picture to meet targets for
| cashing out before the high debt load and interest payments
| sink the ship.
|
| You have just described almost every modern VC backed
| company....
| lbotos wrote:
| As well as:
|
| What's the mission behind Strivo?
|
| If you are going to use a passage of text, you need to be sure
| there isn't anything. There are many variations of passages of
| available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some
| form, by injected humour, or randomised words.
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| I searched the phrase "What's the mission behind Strivo?"
| because that felt like a rather specific question in the middle
| of a bunch of placeholder text. This template came up in the
| results, and it's a lol to see how little was changed from the
| template...including some of the photos
|
| https://strivo.framer.website/about
| ezekg wrote:
| According to the founder, he just bought the domain a month
| ago: https://x.com/JesseTinsley/status/1861243509006848065
|
| Probably not finished but acquired Bench anyways.
| jsheard wrote:
| Amazing how this company that barely existed 5 minutes ago is
| already trusted by Google, Chipotle, Robinhood, HubSpot, X,
| Chime and Anthropic per their landing page. I wonder if
| that's also news to those companies.
| 42lux wrote:
| Someone visited the website from their IP ranges how much
| more trust do you want?
| ksec wrote:
| In the world of crazy valuation ~$450k for that domain seems
| pretty good deal.
| duxup wrote:
| Is that a form of lorem ipsum or ... what even is that?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| looks like they "fixed" it by removing all content save for the
| title
| lowercased wrote:
| Screenshot would have been nice ;)
| divbzero wrote:
| An hour after the parent post, the about page
| https://www.employer.com/about now redirects to the home page
| https://www.employer.com/ -- must have been an error that the
| webmaster has corrected.
| johnbatch wrote:
| They also left https://www.employer.com/terms showing the
| license for the template they bought.
|
| "By accessing and placing an order with UXTheme, you confirm
| that you are in agreement with and bound by the terms and
| conditions contained in the Terms Of Use outlined below. "
| codegeek wrote:
| What a comedy of errors. So they screw over their paying
| customers without any notice and now suddenly they are acquired ?
| I love capitalism but the way Bench handled this is a disaster
| and left so many customers unsure of what to do. Especially at
| year end when accounting becomes even more critical. Shameful.
| brightball wrote:
| There's not really an economic philosophy that can protect
| people from bad decisions. In the middle of year end accounting
| though, this was a train wreck.
| wbl wrote:
| There is a right way to do this and a wrong way and they
| picked the wrong way. The right way is to say "we will do
| 2024 and work with you to transition for 2025".
| itake wrote:
| Where does the money come from to pay for that? As an
| employee, would you want to work for 6mo, for no
| promotions, bonuses, stock?
|
| Seems like they could have had huge layoffs, to try to
| maintain, but maybe they thought the sale would go through
| before the shutdown, meaning no one gets laid off.
|
| But the buyer waited until after the shutdown to grab it
| BehindBlueEyes wrote:
| There was barely enough money to pay for the last week of
| wages, would you expect employees to volunteer to achieve
| that?
|
| I'm not defending what they did, but doing the work even
| one more week was not an option afaik. At best they could
| have wrapped up earlier?
| floating-io wrote:
| A business should know approximately when it will run out
| of money. Ethically, they should have warned their
| customers that their financial situation was poor and
| thus they might close.
|
| They should have done that months ago... Maybe they would
| have been acquired without all the drama...
| Hilift wrote:
| The vulture capitalists just bought a whole bunch of data.
| rchaud wrote:
| In disrupting the staid, predictable world of accounting, one
| must move fast and break things.
| BehindBlueEyes wrote:
| I wish the trend of moving fast and breaking thing would go
| out of fashion already. I guess being kind and fixing things
| doesn't make any money so why would anyone want that /s
| Nelkins wrote:
| As someone who was affected by this, I opted to go ahead and try
| and get my money's worth (although I have another service doing
| this in parallel). Also they were supposed to file an S Corp
| election for me, so hopefully I'll be able to find out the latest
| status of that. This whole thing is such a mess.
| Nelkins wrote:
| A bit of research yields this guy as this owner of
| employer.com: https://x.com/JesseTinsley
| benatkin wrote:
| At the end of his bio:
|
| > Acquiring companies DM me
| toddwx wrote:
| did it immediately let you proceed to your existing data
| Nelkins wrote:
| Yes. I'm able to log into the platform. You need to navigate
| to https://app.bench.co. I actually don't remember if they
| provided that URL, or if I just typed it into my browser out
| of habit. It may work for everyone who was on the platform.
| buro9 wrote:
| It's never that smooth.
|
| In fact 2M requests arrived on December 23rd from Claude
| alone for a single site.
|
| Average 25qps is definitely an issue, these are all long
| tail dynamic pages.
| nervous_jessica wrote:
| have you found anyway to export this year's data? I've
| logged in but now I'm worried that somehow opts out of
| getting the export data
| jbeard4 wrote:
| Same. The situation is clear as mud.
| tleichli wrote:
| how long does it take for you to get the secure link that has
| your data from Bench when you opt out of Employer.com
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Bench accounting services shutting down_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42523061 - Dec 2024 (304
| comments)
| dang wrote:
| (We changed the URL from https://www.bench.co/ to an article that
| gives more background.)
| wdaher wrote:
| For Bench customers that want to look elsewhere, Pilot is doing
| free migrations from Bench to QBO, even if you don't want to use
| Pilot. (So you can even take advantage of it if you want to
| instead DIY or work with some local firm.)
|
| https://pilot.com/bench-qbo-migration
|
| (Disclaimer is that I'm one of Pilot's founders.)
| auston wrote:
| Your free BOI filing (even if you don't want to use Pilot) is
| why I use Pilot.
| jbeard4 wrote:
| Has anyone figured out how to download your data from Bench? In
| the original email they sent out that announced they were
| shutting down, they said data would be available to download from
| http://data.bench.co. But right now, this domain appears to be
| inactive. When I logged back in, they gave me the option to: give
| employer.com permission to access my data, or download my data. I
| selected the former option so that I could access the dashboard,
| but I'd still like to download my data in case it turns out I
| would like to migrate to a competing service.
| kidhastings wrote:
| Former Bench user here - I selected to opt-out and download my
| financial data over an hour ago. I still haven't received it and
| am getting concerned. Has anyone actually received their data
| from Bench yet?
| cmac123 wrote:
| The new Bench site asks us to click a button saying we "consent
| to continue using Bench as part of employer.com." Has anyone
| clicked that? I'm hesitant, since it does not state clearly what
| I am "consenting" to.
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