How Doist CEO Amir Salihefendic grew Doist to $26.5M revenue and 300K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is amir sally offended she is abused life differently ever since his family fled war-torn bosnia for denmark and he began to see the world becoming truly borderless that world view influenced his mission to change the future of work as founder and ceo of dewist a fully distributed bootstrap company that creates productivity tools used by over 13 million people globally amir are you ready to take to the top let's let's do this yeah so folks have not heard it's do ist.comdus.com what are you guys doing what's your average customer uh using you for yeah so we have like a task management app one of the most popular to-do apps called todoist and then we have also recently like some years ago actually uh launched a team communication app asynchronous team communication app called twist so basically to do instant twists are our core products yeah so so give us the back story when did you launch dewist what year yeah i mean i launched it for my own usage in 2007 so you know i just created like uh my my background is development so i created a to-do list and then i kind of stick to it and code coded on it for many years and then i actually like co-founded a social network in between and then this social network didn't really work out so i went back and worked on my to-do list yeah so what years did you work on the social network from like 2007 to 2010 yeah okay and then so this was sort of a side project in your evenings and then after 2010 you shut the network down and you said i'm gonna go back on doist exactly yeah yeah so i mean i you know it's just like my passion project and most developers kind of start with a to the list not many continue doing that for like over 10 years so that's basically what what i have done yeah so what year did you get your first paying customer in uh on the first year actually like in the first couple of months because like 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 was this 2007 or 2010 uh 2007 yeah okay so who who was it do you remember how you where you found your first customer i had a popular blog so i was a blogger you know and uh yeah so basically most of the first customers were via my blog so what was the blog url uh amix.dk yeah it's kind of like uh some of the stuff i'm not really super proud of because like sometimes i would just like drink and then come home and write something stupid okay wait so it's it's a it's a m i x dot d x uh uh omix.dk so finish like uh domain name yeah can you can you send that to me on the chat here on riverside i'd love to i'd love to check that out as we're chatting so okay so you you use that community blog to get it going and then after that um help me understand today how people are using the tool and maybe start with sort of what they're paying on average or you strike me as a low arpu high volume no touch play is that accurate yeah i mean we have like hundreds of thousands of customers and most of them pay like you know the lifetime value is like uh i would say uh about like 100 or something like that so it's like very very low uh but we have like a lot of volume and honestly like we still lack kind of like the multiplayer aspect um so we have kind of figured out like the single player mode because today's is used a lot by individuals and i think like when we actually figure out like the multiplayer mode and uh then i think the magic will happen because we basically have like millions of active users you know using this uh yeah well so let me let me so let me break all that down though so instead of giving me a lifetime value number when people sign up for doist what do they pay you per month on average it's like five or six bucks uh yeah i mean it's it's like a freemium model so we have a very powerful free version and then we have a like premium version uh that's uh i think uh it's like five uh dollars per month and then like if you pay yearly it's four yeah okay it's very low yeah so there's only one pricing plan everyone pays five bucks a month yeah we also have like to do this uh for business but it's kind of like i mean it's a huge hack actually like uh like we kind of like it was an afterthought and then we're kind of like trying to improve that now but we have this that created this like i think we spent three months and he basically had generated like 30 or more of our revenues uh for many years now and we have not really improved it so your enterprise tool i mean it's not really enterprise tool it's basically like if you want to buy premium for your your employees then you would use to this for business yeah so what do you charge for that um it's a bit it's a dollar higher so uh yeah um so it's like about 49 dollars per per uh per year or like five or six dollars per month yeah sorry i'm actually not like we have updated our pricing maybe a year ago so it's something in that range yeah yeah no no you're fine i'm just trying to so i want to understand the story here so basically between 2007 and 2019 you only had one price point it was five bucks a month yeah yeah and honestly like i said this initially like very low price point and basically all the other competitors complete this or like so i kind of like because we were like one of the first online to do apps and we basically set the price point and everybody's kind of have the same price point and i don't think like they were probably like what does this charge and then the base like do uh price similar to us so let's go back to that let's go back to the customer growth story so you use your blog get your first customer what year do you pass to 100 customers do you remember i mean honestly like you know it was a side project for me so i didn't really care about the numbers like um that much i basically care like is this actually covering the silver cost and it actually made some profit but it was like a few thousand bucks uh per month maybe um yeah so it was like very very like small scale in the beginning i understand i understand that though but do you remember what year even as a side project what year you passed sort of 100 or 200 customers i did that like i think in the first like six months because i already had like a lot of like um like traction like people were really excited about this so a lot of them just paid so by the end of 2007 what you're saying is this was generating a couple thousand dollars per month in profit and you had over 200 customers yeah yeah yeah yeah that's great and you still was just you on the team or were there multiple people i mean it's just me yeah so i did the the support the marketing the design the development everything you're one man yeah yeah one-man machines so when did you hire your first employee in 2011 yeah so like four years in okay and how many people did you have at the end of 2011 i mean once i kind of went full time on this i kind of began to hire more rapidly uh so right now like we're about uh i think 85 people maybe 90 uh because we are we are hiring more now how many initially most are engineers like probably 50 engineers we don't have any sales people so yeah that's great yeah do you remember because you're 90 people today 50 engineers back in 2012 do you remember what the team size was at the end of the year uh it's a very good um question i mean initially like we actually ramped up so i probably hired maybe five to ten people initially and then we kind of like integrated those people in and then uh we created like mobile apps like native mobile apps and then after that we hire a bunch of more and then we kind of struggled uh for a bit to kind of what year was the mobile apps uh it's probably like 2013 or 14. yeah so we were actually very late to the market with the well you launched the newest mobile app in 2013 uh yeah today's mobile apps native mobile apps in 2013. maybe you said you struggled what do you what do you mean by struggled i mean 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 so what was the team size let's just go to 2015 um like i think probably we ramped up to like about 40 or 50 people and that's where we actually struggled to kind of like uh like i think actually we got a lot less productive than when we were like 10 or 20. um yeah and are you measuring that off like like revenue per employee or something like that uh i mean just like shipping like we didn't ship anything so yeah like we struggle a lot to ship uh between probably like 2015 and maybe 16 and 70. so it's only like in the last two years that we actually like reset this and began to ship and and change stuff also something nice like there was a lot of like legacy crap because i basically did this at the side project you know so a lot of the choices that i made initially weren't really the smartest ones uh yeah between...