The Idea:

Amir Salihefendić’s family fled war-torn Bosnia for rural Denmark when he was a small child. By 2007 he was a computer science student at Aarhus University. He was also holding down two programming jobs on the side, and his life had turned into a pile of deadlines that no app on the market could keep in order.

So he built his own.

There was no company, no co-founder and no pitch deck. It was just a to-do list for one overstretched student. Then strangers started finding it, and the app picked up press coverage and users almost straight away. Amir barely noticed. He went off to work at a social network and left the little tool ticking over in the background for another four years.

This was the beginning of Todoist.

The Execution:

• 2007: Amir builds Todoist purely to manage his own workload. Todoist’s origin story describes him as a stressed-out student who just needed order. He didn’t see it as a startup.
• 2008 to 2011: Todoist becomes a side project while Amir works as CTO of Plurk and then tries a project management tool called Wedoist. By his own account, he came close to burning out entirely.
• 2012: Amir finally sees what he’s sitting on. He quits his job, goes full time on Todoist, and within three years turns it into a seven-figure business with 40 staff.
• May 2015: Doist hits $1M in revenue with a team of 50. Growth had been almost flat until native mobile apps arrived, and after that the curve finally bent.
• June 2017: Doist launches Twist, a threaded Slack alternative. The remote-first team of around 50 had tried Slack itself, and it didn’t work for them. Twist undercut its rivals at $5 per user per month.
• 2019 to 2020: Revenue climbs from $7.92M to a $14M run rate by October 2020. Todoist for Business, which Amir calls a hack the team built in about three months, now drives 30% or more of revenue.
• 2021: VC money is flooding the market, but Amir refuses outside investment and makes revenue per employee the company’s most important KPI.
• January 21, 2026: Todoist launches Ramble, an AI voice-to-tasks feature. Around 76,000 beta testers ran roughly 290,000 sessions in three weeks, and new entry-level users upgraded about five times faster after using it.
• Today: Doist has $20M+ in annual recurring revenue and about 100 people worldwide, and it has never raised a penny of outside investment. Todoist now has 30+ million users.

The lesson? Amir ignored Todoist for four years, and it kept growing without him. That is the strongest signal a founder can get, and most people would have missed it. When he came back, he didn’t chase VC money to make up for the lost time. He hired carefully, watched revenue per employee, and said no to investors even at the 2021 peak. Not every great company needs rocket fuel. Some just need their founder to come back.