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 2015 and 2018 you guys were really paralyzed really because you were rewriting the code base to take out technical debt and just in 2018 you started shipping again yeah yeah that's probably the the right way and also just like creating the structure and like you know like getting people productive uh like also like we like we experiment a lot uh and questioned so like we also had like a uh uh you know like a love affair with like no hierarchy and that didn't like don't try that like it's not working yeah it didn't work that well yeah and so let's keep going on the customer we understand sort of the team struggles and growth well let's go back to sort of customers so 200 customers in 2007 your first year it's a side project you're making a couple grand a month in profits you're covering your aws or your server spend et cetera if that was even around back then when did you pass when did you pass you know your first you know 10 000 customers what year do you remember yeah i mean honestly like um the thing to note is like we never actually celebrated any of the milestones uh so 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 and the same thing like with customer numbers it's like i really didn't track that much uh and i didn't really care that much about it uh so i think like it's kind of like very different from most of other like uh founders that kind of are like hoax you know on the numbers i was i think just i think just because you don't celebrate something doesn't mean that it's not important to document your story right as a business case study for future which is what i'm trying to do so i totally get it wasn't a focus and you didn't pop champagne and wine bottles uh but generally i mean some general customer numbers in terms of as you were growing would be helpful especially if you're in the hundreds of thousands right now i mean do you remember the year you were around 10 000 yeah i mean uh something that really accelerated a lot our our growth was basically the native mobile apps so probably i would say that like the you know because if you look at our growth curve it's based like almost flat from like uh 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 yeah so do you think you passed 10 000 customers in 2015 i i we passed that before probably like 2012 or 13 like when we uh yeah okay and then the mobile app goes live in 2015. so the mobile app then gets adopted 2015 2016 2017 i mean you me do you remember you know when did you pass hundred thousand customers um yeah i i i mean i could actually maybe look that up but uh i know you don't know them by heart because you guys don't celebrate them uh which is fine i'm just looking for i mean everything like 2015 or 20 18. yeah i can i can look this up okay let me actually try to to do that okay great um and so and we'll sort of keep chatting as you're doing that so so you're building you're building you're building doist again launched in 2007 as a side project you're scaling you hired some people uh and started scaling really in 2015 and you started shipping things like the mobile application which helped drive a lot of growth even as you were dealing with a lot of technical debt you've done all this bootstrap correct yeah yeah we didn't raise any money and we still have not raised any money love that which means you're profitable correct you're not burning cash i mean we have actually been profitable like from like mo all years yeah now are you i mean when you say prof where you basically at break even you reinvest everything or you as founder helping create like personal wealth because you're really pro like twenty thirty percent ebitda margins per month i mean the thing is like uh the the general strategy has been to kind of like reinvest everything uh back to the company i have of course like taking some money off uh the table over the years but it's not like you know i'm not dhh that kind of like you know do you still own it do you still own 100 of the company uh i like we are actually like rolling out the like employee stock options right now but like i i own most of it and the employees will own in the end i think 25 okay that's great and you just set up that 25 kind of employee option pool this year in 2020 exactly yeah so like yeah like some uh like yeah that's basically it yeah and did you decide this year was the right year to do that i mean honestly like i think um i mean i was kind of like against this you know like the bootstrapping especially like if you like here the base camp guys like equity has no value and stuff like that but it's kind of because like equity is like if you want to get wealthy you know it's true equity uh and i think it's kind of like a way to align people as well uh on just like building something bigger and also just to reward people like there's like some a lot of actually of our team have been we do this for like over five years and yeah you know i don't really think it's like fair for myself only to make myself like wealthy i also want to to do the same thing for for other people no it makes a lot of sense do you have that customer number up what year was did you guys pass 10 100 000 um i i don't actually but i mean i would probably say like 2015 or 16 or something like that uh yeah okay and do you i mean do you have eyes on passing a million paid customers or is that really going to be a stretch in the next year or two i mean the thing is basically like we want to pass like 100 million in revenues uh in the next five years or like it's right now probably more like uh four and a half years so that that's kind of like the the goal and it's basically finding out like the strategy to to achieve that and what are you at right now in terms of revenue um yeah i mean um i think like this year we'll probably pass 15 and maybe a bit more if we are lucky and next year i think we'll definitely pass like 20. that's at least the plan would you like to would you finish 2019 with i think it's about uh yeah i'm actually not 100 but probably around 10. uh yeah well that's great so you basically have grown over the past 12 months from a 10 million dollar run rate to a 14 million run rate bootstrap yeah yeah that's awesome that's it that's amazing you need to be on the cover of like the wall street journal and tech crunch the bootstrap you know good growth this is how you build a sas company that actually generates real wealth uh yeah yeah but honestly like i think like the opportunity is huge in this market that we're in so uh yeah yeah i think that the opportunity is much bigger than than that what year did you pass a million dollar run right do you remember i mean here's the thing it's kind of like uh like i said like we don't actually track uh but come on amir a million i get you don't track it i understand you don't track it but that's like a big number yeah i actually like i think we probably passed that probably like in you know i would just like to imagine sure 2015 maybe but like the thing is like we didn't like i didn't even notice that because i was not really focused on on on the number this is this is crazy this is what's interesting to me though you launched on center as a side project you are slugging basically even though you had another social network you are slugging for basically eight years to get your first million bucks in revenue and then over the past four years you've basically 14x that yeah yeah that's what's impressive to me i think that's a very interesting story so so um and you today i had about 200 000 customers today uh yeah yeah we we probably have more than that okay so i guess the what i'm going down here the line of questioning is how many freezers do you like what's your average conversion rate from free to paid i mean honestly like the market that we're in is like brutal you know it's kind of like con consumer uh like it's almost like consumer um so both like the conversion rate attention rate are really really bad because uh you know it's just the market your part so i would probably say like a few percentage we convert from free to to paid yeah okay and also like the retention isn't as great as like if you actually had like you know business says or enterprises using your product yeah it sounds like your growth cause you told me earlier lifetime value was about 100 bucks so if people are paying five bucks a month that means it's 20 months of lifetime value which means your revenue your churn annually what is something like 70 percent uh yeah i actually i don't know each month how many customers you turn i i don't know exactly yeah so how do you how do you know that churn is bad then if you don't know what the number is i mean i know that the churn is bad like compared to the benchmark but honestly i don't really care that much like there's some people inside a company that care more about this than me like uh um yeah so why don't you care about turn you don't you want you work so hard to get customers don't you want them to follow them with your product and use it forever i do but i think like there's a lot of like focus on the numbers and you know the dashboards and stuff like that and honestly like yeah well let me ignore the number ignore the number yeah you put your life into don't you want people to use it forever ignore what the actual cac and ltv and chernarpu numbers are don't you want people using it for a long time doesn't it upset you when people churn because they're basically killing your baby i don't really feel like that it's i kind of feel like i'm creating a tool and if people you know find it useful they find it useful if they don't you know they have other tools they can use so that's kind of like a very you know uh zen-like uh philosophy and i think like it makes me like sleep much better at night than kind of like you know um like dreaming about like nightmaring about that what what's the plan for the next year what are you most excited about i mean we really want to tackle like the the collaboration space adding like proper multiplayer sharing um and twist like we also have a really great ideas for asynchronous communication um so all of these like you know i think actually we'll be kind of like like just increasing our lifetime value a lot usefulness as well because honestly like creating a tool that is mostly for individuals is brutal like if you're doing anything like that's not something i can recommend doing because uh you have like very hard time to actually keep users uh because you don't have like a natural way to bring them back like with collaboration it's much much easier and your whole team by the way we should point to that as fully remote correct you have no office yeah yeah we have been remote since day one yeah we i love that now so so on twist real quick you said you'll break about 14 million revenue this year is any of that revenue coming from twist or is it almost doist yeah i mean um i mean twist is also like a freaking like slugfest you know like most companies would have given up by now um uh and it's like really really good on market as well there's a lot of competition but i really believe like in the asynchronous way so i would probably say that um yeah probably like maybe 600 000 um or maybe even more uh like yearly so it's like very small compared to today's very good but yeah if someone approached i know you want to break 100 million in revenue amir but if someone came to you like monday or one of these bigger companies and said hey we want to buy the company for 200 million dollars all cash up front do you sell the company i would say you dude there's no even to any number you'd say you yeah yeah like i you know i have already like declined you know as like i don't even like entertain that uh those ideas what's the largest offer you declined i i mean i don't even go into them so like if somebody like uh sends me an email and then she's like i just ignore it or like i have like a template that i send them back but no one's put a number in front of you uh no because i i don't even like entertain like the the idea of going because like i don't actually why would i want to sell like this you know it's kind of like my life's work so yep on that on that note of mirror let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh yeah um so i would probably like recommend let my people go surfing by the patagonia founder yeah number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i really like love the podcast invest like the best i'm not sure if uh your listeners know it but i would and there's like a lot of uh people is there a ceo you're following those specific one i mean i really like the tobi lutke from shopify his interview there is like amazing uh yeah so probably that and maybe also the the stripe founders number three what's your favorite online tool for building your company beside your own yeah i would probably say like git uh you know and like get workflow so we have based like a handbook that's kind of like uh versioned and lives on github but you can also use like gitlab and that is like very very powerful because you can kind of like do the development aspects but do like knowledge base of your company number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night um i'm not a great sleeper and just you know it's not really because i i work a lot but i probably get maybe seven hours to sleep and what's your situation married single kids oh i'm married with with two kids two kids and how are you i'm 35 35 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 um yeah something yeah um that 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 guys dewist.com a multi-million user productivity tool has passed 14 million dollars in terms of run rate up from 10 million last year but this all started back in 2007 as a side project where he hit his first 200 customers was profitable from day one they've bootstrapped the company today also now launching twist which is a new product line doing 600 000 a year in revenue he says absolutely no interest in selling amir thank you for taking us to the top thank you for having me one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live 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