Eight Years to $1M, Then 14x: How Doist Bootstrapped to $14M

Nathan Latka spent a good chunk of an hour trying to get Amir Salihefendić to name the year Doist crossed a million dollars in revenue, and never really got one. “I think we probably passed that probably like in … 2015 maybe,” the founder finally offered, “but like the thing is … I didn’t even notice that because I was not really focused on the number.” It was not evasion. It was policy. “We never actually celebrated any of the milestones,” he said. “Even right now like when you pass like 1 million or 10 million in the ARR like it’s kind of like not really something that we celebrate a lot.”

The GetLatka record for Doist is less coy than its founder. It carries revenue of $1 million recorded May 2015, $7.92 million recorded May 2019, and $14 million recorded October 2020 — the same week this conversation was taped, in mid-October 2020. Behind those three rows sits a company that has taken no outside money, employs no salespeople, and charges about five dollars a month for a to-do list.

Eight years to the first million

Doist started in 2007 as a to-do list Salihefendić built for himself. His background is development; most developers, he pointed out, write a to-do app at some stage. “Not many continue doing that for like over 10 years.” He co-founded a social network alongside it from 2007 to 2010, and when that did not work out he went back to the side project.

It was charging almost immediately, for an unglamorous reason: he did not want to pay the server bill himself. “I was doing this on the side and I didn’t want to pay for the like server costs, so I just like, you know, let’s just make reminders a big feature.” He had a popular Danish blog at amix.dk, and that is where the first customers came from. By the end of the first year he had more than 200 of them and a couple of thousand dollars a month in profit, and he was still the only person at the company — “I did the support, the marketing, the design, the development, everything.”

• 2007 · Launch Built as a personal to-do list. First paying customers inside the first couple of months, 200-plus by year end, a couple of thousand dollars a month in profit.
• 2011 · First hire Four years in, and the end of the one-man company.
• 2012 or 2013 · 10,000 customers “We passed that before probably like 2012 or 13.”
• 2013 · Native mobile apps The thing he credits for bending the growth curve. “We were actually very late to the market.”
• May 2015 · $1M revenue The first revenue row on the GetLatka record, against a team of 50.
• May 2019 · $7.92M revenue 88 people on the record; he put the 2019 exit at “probably around 10” million, hedging that he was not sure.
• Oct 2020 · $14M run rate 90 people, about 50 of them engineers.

Ask him what changed and he does not name a growth tactic. He names the apps. “Something that really accelerated a lot our growth was basically the native mobile apps,” he said. “If you look at our growth curve it’s based like almost flat from like when it’s kind of a side project for me, and then when we begin to ramp up it’s kind of like the native mobile apps, like hiring the team, and that’s where also like the whole like most of the customer growth comes in as well.”

14xLatka’s reading of the record on tape: eight years of slog to the first million in revenue, then a fourteen-fold multiple on it

One price point, set in 2007 and never moved

Latka put it to him that between 2007 and 2019 Doist had exactly one price: five dollars a month. He agreed, and then explained why that mattered to everyone else in the category. “I said this initially like very low price point,” he said, “and basically all the other competitors” followed — because “we were like one of the first online to-do apps and we basically set the price point.” A decade of SaaS pricing in a whole product category anchored to a number a solo developer picked to cover his hosting.

• Todoist Premium — about $5 a month, $4 a month if paid yearly, sitting on top of what he calls “a very powerful free version.”
• Todoist for Business — roughly $49 a year, about a dollar a month more per seat. Not an enterprise product: “if you want to buy premium for your employees then you would use Todoist for Business.”
• Twist — the asynchronous team communication app, doing “maybe 600,000 … or maybe even more” a year. “Twist is also like a freaking like slugfest … most companies would have given up by now.”

The Business tier is the most uncomfortable number in the interview. He described it as “a huge hack” and “an afterthought,” something the team spent about three months building — and that afterthought has been generating 30 percent or more of Doist’s revenue for years. “We have not really improved it,” he said. He also warned that his own price quotes were approximate, since pricing had been updated roughly a year earlier.

The hiring that made them slower

The GetLatka record shows 10 people in May 2012 and 50 by May 2015. Salihefendić remembers that stretch as the worst period in the company’s history, and not because of the market.

“We’ve basically hired more people and we didn’t really become more productive. We actually became less productive, because we didn’t have the structure in place to actually make people productive.”

Amir Salihefendić, founder and CEO, Doist

Asked how he measured that, he did not reach for revenue per employee. “Just like shipping,” he said. “We didn’t ship anything.” He dates the paralysis from roughly 2015 to 2017 and blames two things: a codebase full of “legacy crap” from the years when this was a side project and “a lot of the choices that I made initially weren’t really the smartest ones,” and an organisational experiment he now warns people off. The company had, in his words, “a love affair with like no hierarchy.” His verdict: “Don’t try that, like it’s not working.”

The reset landed around 2018, and the numbers on either side of it are the argument for structure over headcount. Between May 2015 and October 2020 the GetLatka record has revenue going from $1 million to $14 million while the team goes from 50 people to 90. Of those 90, about 50 are engineers and none are in sales.

A $100 lifetime value he refuses to chase

The ceiling shows up the moment you divide. Salihefendić volunteered a lifetime value of “about like 100 or something like that — so it’s like very very low, but we have like a lot of volume.” Against a five-dollar monthly price, Latka did the only arithmetic available to him.

$100 lifetime value ÷ $5 a month = 20 monthsLatka’s calculation on tape, which he turned into roughly 70 percent annual revenue churn. Salihefendić had no company figure to check it against.

“I actually, I don’t know each month how many customers you churn,” he said. “I don’t know exactly.” Pressed on how he could call churn bad without a number, he gave the honest version: “I know that the churn is bad like compared to the benchmark, but honestly I don’t really care that much. There’s some people inside a company that care more about this than me.” He puts the free-to-paid conversion rate at “a few percentage” and blames the category rather than the funnel — “the market that we’re in is like brutal … it’s almost like consumer,” where both conversion and retention run badly by revenue churn standards built for business software.

“I kind of feel like I’m creating a tool, and if people find it useful they find it useful. If they don’t, they have other tools they can use … it makes me like sleep much better at night.”

Amir Salihefendić, founder and CEO, Doist

What he does care about is the thing that would move the number without him having to manage it. Latka’s intro put Doist’s products in the hands of more than 13 million people; the paying base, by Salihefendić’s reckoning, is comfortably north of 200,000. The gap between those two figures is a product problem he names precisely. “We still lack kind of like the multiplayer aspect,” he said. “We have kind of figured out like the single player mode … when we actually figure out like the multiplayer mode, then I think the magic will happen.” And the warning that follows it is the sharpest thing on the tape: “Creating a tool that is mostly for individuals is brutal … you have like very hard time to actually keep users because you don’t have like a natural way to bring them back. With collaboration it’s much much easier.”

The ownership question

No money in, and no exit at $200 million

“We didn’t raise any money and we still have not raised any money,” he said, and by his account the company has been profitable every year of its life. One wrinkle: the GetLatka record does carry a single funding line of $40,000 dated December 2010. Nothing on the tape supports it, and the founder’s denial is flat and unprompted, so the ledger row is the weaker of the two sources — but it is on the record and worth naming rather than quietly dropping.

The cash policy is simple. “The general strategy has been to kind of like reinvest everything back to the company,” he said. “I have of course like taking some money off the table over the years.” He still owns most of it. What changed in 2020 is that he started rolling out employee stock options, ending at roughly a quarter of the company for the team — a reversal he explained against the bootstrapper orthodoxy he used to hold, that equity is not worth much to employees. “Equity is like, if you want to get wealthy, you know, it’s true equity,” he said, and then made it plainer: “I don’t really think it’s like fair for myself only to make myself like wealthy. I also want to do the same thing for other people.” A lot of that team has been there more than five years, and the company has been fully remote with no office since day one.

Latka tried the standard test: two hundred million dollars, all cash, Monday morning. The answer came back before the sentence finished. “I have already like declined,” he said. “I don’t even like entertain those ideas.” Asked for the largest offer he had turned down, he said he could not name one, because he does not open the emails — there is a template he sends back. “Why would I want to sell like this? You know, it’s kind of like my life’s work.” The plan instead is “to pass like 100 million in revenues in the next five years, or like it’s right now probably more like four and a half years,” starting from a base he expects to clear 15 million this year and 20 million next.

He is 35, married with two children, sleeps about seven hours, recommends Let My People Go Surfing by the Patagonia founder, and runs the company handbook as a versioned repository in git. Asked what he wishes he had known at 20, the answer came from a man whose family fled Bosnia for Denmark and who has spent thirteen years building a borderless company out of a hobby.

“You can probably do anything that you actually like want to do. So, you know, I think like there’s so much freedom, and a lot of people think there’s like limits, and I don’t really believe in that.”

Sources Nathan Latka’s interview with Amir Salihefendić, founder and CEO of Doist, recorded mid-October 2020. GetLatka company record for Doist: revenue of $1M (May 2015), $7.92M (May 2019) and $14M (October 2020); team size of 10 (May 2012), 50 (May 2015), 88 (May 2019) and 90 with about 50 engineers (October 2020); one funding line of $40,000 dated December 2010. Pricing, customer counts, lifetime value, conversion rate and the Twist revenue figure are as stated by Salihefendić on tape.