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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does anyone have experience with Kick.co? It seems more self-managed with AI. I don’t want to migrate to another company that’s just going to close again despite being well funded.
7 years with bench and just renewed the annual plan last month. Seems like it’s unlikely we’ll see any refund for the 11 months remaining. Very frustrating to have to mirage somewhere else and pay for 2024 catch up.
I’m interested in migrating over to Pilot. How is the migration process from bench? It seems we can do a data export in a few days. Can pilot do 2024 catch up?
We have a number of folks who have switched from Bench, and as you can imagine there's enough volume here that it's worth building some bespoke stuff for this.
And yes, we can do 2024 catch-up work.
(waseem@pilot.com if folks have any specific questions)
