Opinion
Salihefendić claims Basecamp is wrong about equity in bootstrapped startups
“I mean, honestly, like, I think I mean, I was kind of, like, against this, you know, like, the bootstrapping, especially, like, if you, like, hear the base camp guys, like, equity has no value and stuff like that, but it's kind of bullshit, because, like, equi…”
Disclosure
Salihefendić ignores Doist's poor customer churn compared to SaaS benchmarks
“I mean, I know that the churn is bad, like compared to the benchmark, but honestly, like, I don't really care that much. Like there's some people inside a company that care more about this than me.”
Disclosure
Salihefendić refuses to entertain any acquisition offers for Doist
“I would say, fuck you... I, you know, I have already like declined, you know, like I don't even like entertain that those ideas... I don't actually, why would I want to sell like this? You know, it's kind of like my life's work.”
Insight
Salihefendić warns against operating a company with no hierarchy
“So like, we also had like you know like I love affair with like no hierarchy and that didn't like, don't try that. Like it's not. Yeah. It didn't work that well.”
Disclosure
Doist historically ignored metrics and refuses to celebrate ARR milestones
“The thing to note is, like, we never actually celebrated any of the milestones so even right now, like, when you pass, like, one million or ten million in ARR, like, it's kind of, like, not really something that we celebrate a lot, and the same thing, like, wi…”
Insight
Building productivity software for individual users makes user retention brutal
“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 you have, like, very hard time to actually keep users because you don't have, like, a natural way to bring them …”
Opinion
Todoist's low launch price anchored the entire to-do app market
“I said this initially, like very low price point and basically all the other competitors compete 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…”
Disclosure
Bootstrapped Doist employs 90 people with zero salespeople
“So right now, like we are about I think, 85 people, maybe 90 because we are hiring more now. Initially most are engineers, like probably 50 engineers. We don't have any salespeople, so”
Insight
Adding headcount reduced Doist's productivity due to lacking organizational structure
“I mean, 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.”
Disclosure
Doist is establishing a 25% employee stock option pool
“Like we are actually like rolling out the like employee stock options right now, but like I own most of it and the employees will own in the end, I think, 25%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Salihefendić: Todoist has hundreds of thousands of customers and $100 LTV
“We have like hundreds of thousands of customers and most of them pay like, you know, the lifetime value is like I would say about like a hundred or something like that.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Todoist for Business drives 30% of revenue despite lacking improvements
“We basically created this, like, I think we spent three months, and it basically had generated, like, 30% or more of our revenues for many years now, and we have not really improved it.”
Assertion Supported
Salihefendić: Doist has never raised outside capital
“We didn't raise any money and we still have not raised any money.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Salihefendić: Doist has been profitable for nearly all years
“I mean, we have actually been profitable like from like more all the years.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Salihefendić predicts Doist will surpass $100M annual revenue by 2025
“We want to pass like a hundred million in revenues in the next five years, or like, it's right now probably more like four and a half years.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Doist projected passing $15M revenue in 2020 and $20M in 2021
“Yeah, I mean 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.”
Assertion Partly supported
Salihefendić: Doist closed 2019 with around $10M in revenue
“I think it's about yeah, I'm actually not a hundred percent, but probably around 10.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Salihefendić: Doist's Twist generates at least $600,000 annually
“I would probably say that yeah, probably like maybe 600,000 or maybe even more like yearly.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Salihefendić monetized Todoist early by gating reminders to cover servers
“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 paid feature.”
