How Doist Bootstrapped Past $10M ARR With No Salespeople

The figure most often attached to this interview, the $14 million in its YouTube title, is not in that table, because Salihefendić never said it. Latka offered it: “So you basically have grown over the past twelve months from a $10,000,000 run rate to a $14,000,000 run rate bootstrapped.” The founder answered “Yeah. Yeah.” and moved on. Latka later restated it as “you said you’ll break about 14,000,000 revenue this year”; what Salihefendić had said was 15, and as a forecast. Latka’s “eight years to get your first million bucks in revenue. And then over the past four years, you’ve basically 14 x that” was likewise his own arithmetic, built on a year the founder had just called a guess. An earlier version of this post put both in its headline and charted $1 million (June 2015), $7.92 million (June 2019) and $14 million (October 2020) from GetLatka’s record. None of the three is a figure Salihefendić gave, and the record no longer carries them.

The public record does not line up neatly with his recollections either. In July 2015 the SaaS Club podcast described Doist as “a company with over 40 employees and several million dollars in annual revenue”, which suggests the first million came before his “2015 maybe”. And on March 4, 2019, Salihefendić tweeted that Doist had “most likely doubled our MRR to $2 million in a few months – making Doist a $20+ million ARR company”. LatAm List, reporting the milestone two days later, tied the jump to price rises on both plans and a billing change. That annualised monthly rate is about twice the “probably around 10” he gave Latka for the whole of 2019. Neither source explains the gap, and this post does not pick between them.

A low price point the category copied

Latka put it to him that between 2007 and 2019 Doist had only one price point, five dollars a month. That was Latka’s framing, and it is looser than what Salihefendić had just described: a Premium plan, a Business tier on top of it, and a pricing update “maybe a year ago”. What the founder did claim is that Doist set the category’s price. “Because we were one of the first online to do apps, we basically set the price point, and everybody has the same price point.” If he is right, the SaaS pricing of a whole product category was anchored by a solo developer who started charging to cover his server bill. The price did sit still for a long time. In March 2019, reporting a 30% rise in Todoist’s Premium price and a doubled Business price, LatAm List quoted Doist’s product-growth lead saying the plans “had been historically low priced, and didn’t move in almost 10 years.”

• Todoist Premium: “I think it’s, like, $5 per month, and then, like, if you pay yearly, it’s 4,” sitting on top of what he calls “a very powerful free version.”
• Todoist for Business: “a dollar higher”, which he then put at “about $49 per year, or $5 or $6 per month” before correcting himself: “Sorry, actually not... We have updated our pricing maybe a year ago, so it’s something in that range.” The two figures do not agree ($49 a year is about $4 a month), and he offered neither as exact. It is not an enterprise product: “It’s basically like if you want to buy premium for your employees, then you will use this for business.”
• Twist: the asynchronous team communication app, which he put at “probably maybe $600,000 Run rate. Or maybe even more yearly. So it’s very small compared to Doist.” He has not given up on it. “Most companies would have given up by now. And it’s a really, really brutal market as well. There’s a lot of competition. But I really believe in the asynchronous way.”

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 generated “30% or more of our revenues for many years now”. “We have not really improved it,” he said.

The hiring that made them slower

Once he went full time, he hired five to ten people, then built the native mobile apps, then “hired a bunch of more”. By 2015, he said, “we ramped up to about 40 or 50 people”. Salihefendić remembers that stretch as the one where the company stalled, and not because of the market.

“We basically hired more people, and we didn’t really become more productive. We actually became less productive because we didn’t really 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. “I mean, just like shipping. We didn’t ship anything.” He dates the paralysis from roughly 2015 to 2017 and blames two things. One was a codebase full of “legacy crap” from the years when this was a side project: “A lot of the choices that I made initially weren’t really the smartest ones.” The other was an organisational experiment, what he called “a love affair with no hierarchy”. His verdict: “It didn’t work that well.” At about 40 or 50 people, he said, “we got a lot less productive than when we were, like, 10 or 20.”

The reset landed around 2018: “it’s only in the last two years that we actually reset this.” By October 2020 the team was “about 85 people, maybe 90, because we are hiring more now”, with “probably 50 engineers”. And: “We don’t have any salespeople.”

A $100 lifetime value, and churn he does not track

Salihefendić volunteered a lifetime value of “about a 100 or something like that. So it’s very, very low, but we have a lot of volume.” Latka tried to back a churn rate out of that and the $5 monthly price, and Salihefendić would not confirm one: “Actually, I don’t know.” Asked how many customers churn each month, he said: “I don’t know, actually.”

Pressed on how he could call churn bad without a number, he gave the honest version: “I know that the churn is bad 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,” so “both the conversion rate and retention rate are really, really bad” by the revenue churn standards of software sold to businesses.

“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 … I think it makes me 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 introduction said Doist’s tools were used by more than 13 million people; Salihefendić’s own count of customers was “hundreds of thousands”. The gap between those two figures is a product problem he names precisely. “We still lack the multiplayer aspect. So we have figured out the single player mode because Todoist is used a lot by individuals. And I think when we actually figure out the multiplayer mode, and then I think the magic will happen.” He came back to it when asked about the year ahead, and the warning is the sharpest thing on the tape: “Creating a tool that is mostly for individuals is brutal … you have a very hard time to actually keep users because you don’t have a natural way to bring them back. With collaboration, it’s much, much easier.”

The ownership question

No money in, and no interest in selling

“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: “we have actually been profitable, from, like, more... All the years.” One asterisk comes from the public record rather than the tape. Japanese Wikipedia’s Todoist article says that in 2011 the team was accepted into Start-Up Chile, a Chilean government programme, and received about US$40,000 of equity-free funding; TNW described the programme’s package that July as “a $40k equity-free grant”. LatAm List, in March 2019, put the history like this: “Aside from Start-Up Chile, the company never accepted outside capital”. An earlier version of this post flagged a $40,000 funding line dated January 2011 on GetLatka’s record as unexplained. It matches that grant, and the record no longer lists it as funding.

The cash policy is simple. “The general strategy has been to reinvest everything back to the company,” he said. “I have, of course, taken 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, with the team set to own about 25%, a reversal of the bootstrapper orthodoxy he used to hold, that equity is not worth much to employees. “Equity is like, if you want to get wealthy, it’s true equity,” he said, and then made it plainer: “I don’t really think it’s fair for myself only to make myself wealthy. I also want to do the same thing for other people.” Many on the team, he said, have been at it for more than five years, and the company has been “remote since day one.”

Latka tried the standard test, a hypothetical all-cash offer from a bigger company. Salihefendić’s first answer is not printable here. Then: “I have already, like, declined … I don’t even, like, entertain that... Those ideas.” Asked for the largest offer he had turned down, he said he does not engage at all: if somebody emails, “I just ignore it, or, like, I have a template that I send them back.” No one, he said, had put a number in front of him. “Why would I want to sell like this? It’s kind of my life’s work.”

The plan instead: “want to pass 100,000,000 in revenues in the next five years. It’s right now probably more like four and a half years. So that’s kind of the goal.” He was starting from a year he expected to finish past 15 million, with 20 million planned for 2021.

Two later checkpoints, neither from this interview. In July 2024 the podcast The Only Thing That Matters wrote that “Doist boasts over $20 million in annual recurring revenue, operates with 100 team members across the globe, and remains fully bootstrapped.” And Todoist’s terms of service effective August 27, 2026 name the company offering the service as Todoist Inc.; the version effective May 18, 2025 named Doist Inc.

In October 2020 he was 35, married with two children, slept “maybe seven hours”, recommended Let My People Go Surfing by the Patagonia founder, and kept the company handbook “versioned” on GitHub. Asked what he wishes he had known at 20, the answer came from a man whose family, as Latka’s introduction put it, fled war-torn Bosnia for Denmark, and who had spent thirteen years turning a side project into a fully remote company.

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