075 - Bootstrapped Businesses, with Amir Salihefendic (Founder @ Doist)

What can you achieve as an entrepreneur without leaning on venture capitalist funding? How can we communicate more effectively in the modern work landscape? Today's episode is a deep dive into the riveting world of bootstrapped businesses, communication, and entrepreneurship with our esteemed guest, Amir Salihefendic, the CEO and founder of Doist.

Amir breaks down his journey as a solo founder and unveils the secrets behind thriving in a competitive market without VC funding. He unveils the role of community and transparency in his business, highlighting the power of sharing and building in public. Our conversation also unravels the intricacies of asynchronous communication. While it may seem challenging, Amir argues that it's a pathway to more thoughtful and productive discussions. His insights on maintaining a successful business amidst a constantly changing tech world are an inspiring call to adapt and innovate relentlessly.

As we round up, Amir lends us a peek into the future, touching on the impact of AI in product development and his vision for seamless integration and functionality. He shares his thoughts on legacy building, setting a motivational tone for aspiring business owners. Whether you lead a small startup or a large enterprise, this episode is a gold mine of strategies and practical advice to help you navigate your business journey. Be ready to be inspired, challenged, and educated as we delve into the business world through Amir's lens.

Transcript

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 0:00

Hello everybody, alex here, ceo and MarsBased of , and in this episode we bring you Amir Salihe fendic. He's the CEO and founder of Doist, the company between the two popular products to Duist and Tuist. We had hosted him on this very podcast about a year ago to discuss async work. They are a very well-known, entirely distributed team doing product, a completely bootstrap company, and he's also been a very, very, very big evangelist for async work. He takes pride in his schedule full focus time, basically to do deep, deep focus work. Very, very few meetings per week. That's something he boasts publicly on his Twitter when he shares screenshots of his agenda. And so we wanted to continue the conversation we had hosted on the we had had on the podcast in this startup brand event. Startup brand is this event that we organize monthly and we also sponsor from Mars based. That happens in Barcelona. We garnered about 100 people and we host and we interview some of the best leaders in the industry, be it founders or still levels of companies, of high-growth startups mostly, sometimes some big corporates and then VCs and angel investors occasionally. So in this conversation we talk more about being a multi-product company, about how to have this long-term vision, because they are entirely independent as a company, because they're bootstrap how he is a solo founder, and this is something quite rare in the industry, because usually investors like to invest in companies that have two, three, four founders, but never just one, because it's a clear no go. It's some, like you know, it's a red line for most investors, but then again, of course, they're incentivized to maximize the profit of their investments. So you know, they miss most of the times on these outliers like companies like like do is when the first time probably, they didn't seek to raise funds at all. So, that being said, let's jump right into the question of the day have you had any kind of experience with asynchronous work? And, whether you like it or not, share your experiences with asynchronous work, because this big part of our conversation at Mars based, as I mentioned, we're not loving it. We implemented it two years ago and you know we have had some learnings that, if you are more interested, just check our previous podcast episode with Amir. But otherwise, let's jump right into this conversation Now.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 2:30

Hello, lots of people tonight. Oh, that's really loud. I think it's easy. I think it's this way Bank. You see, I run a tech company. That's how I know. I know things. Ooh, some people are coming late. How are you doing? Good to see you All right.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 2:54

First off, welcome to StartBrain. There are a few things we could be talking about tonight. We didn't have a preparation chat. It's going to be casual and uninformed, pretty much like every band we've ever had. But in this case I've got some suggestions for the title of the talk. I mean, there's obviously how to do bootstrapping, remote work and async, because you're an expert in that, but you're also an expert in turning off all the VCs because you're like you don't say that, but I will say that it's like fuck VC money. It's healthier yeah, it's healthier to run this kind of money. You pick which one you prefer. There's also like one man, two companies, three meetings per week, which is more or less the way you run things. Or, I'm a businessman, but I'm not a son of a bitch, because it also defines you pretty much. It distinguishes you from most business people in the scene, or American. We all come to work for you because you built amazing companies. Thank you for being here.

: 3:52

Thank you, alex, for having me. Which one do you prefer? I mean, we could start at the fuck VCs, all right, all right.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 3:59

Let's go there. Let's go there. I didn't plan for that. I thought you wanted to keep the easy one. But yeah, let's do like that. How many times have you been welcome on stage as a rock star, by the way?

: 4:11

Never. This is my first time and it feels awesome. I want to do this again.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 4:17

It's amazing, because it's like before, when he walked in, it's like, oh, we're going to have 100 people in the audience. It's like, oh, I feel the pressure, dude, you've got thousands of followers on Twitter. Why don't you feel the pressure there?

: 4:29

Because I'm just like in my pajamas tweeting, you know.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 4:35

All right, let's talk about. Okay, let's start with the VC. Your company is entirely bootstrapped and you've been advocating for bootstrap businesses and that, in for a lot of people, has got an ending date. Do you ever see yourself raising money for your company? Have you ruled out completely that option? What is the future like for you guys?

: 4:56

Yeah, I mean, you know, like we started this many years ago and something that I never really understood and I grew up in Denmark, so it's kind of a very like different environment than, like the valley, you know, the American way of what most others are building and I couldn't really see like the business sense because it's just like burning money and some get very lucky and they get rich, but most of that is just, like you know, burning money and they're not really building businesses.

: 5:30

And in our space, which is like productivity space, there has been so much money burned. That's kind of insane. Yeah, so our approach is really like building a sustainable, like you know, a great company, a impactful company, but not like in an unsustainable way. We're basically burning money and just like growing, growing, growing and even like right now, if you look at like some of our competitors, like Prince Asana, you know they are burning a lot of money. So I think they maybe have like 500 million in ARR, which is a lot, but then they burn 800 million. And then you ask yourself, you know, yeah, and something to note as well is yeah, I also asked myself yeah, yeah.

: 6:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another thing as well is, you know, I've like spoken to a lot of VCs over the years and all some of the best, and the thing is it's just like what are you signing yourself up for? You know, and for me, like I'm not sure if I want to sign myself up for for like a billion in ARR. That needs to be like you know the goal, because if you look just like the history, like there's very few companies that reach that scale. Yeah. So I don't know. And right now, I think it's a great environment for bootstrap companies because you know, the market is really cooled down. It's really like efficiency, profitability, building sustainable stuff and that it should have been like that, but like the last 10 years has been like insane.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 7:02

Yeah so can you give some, some context to the audience, Because I failed to do that and you know you run Duist, which is famous for Duist. You got another product. Can you give some context as to, like the some metrics, some dimensions of the company?

: 7:18

Sure, so we are like a fully, like remote first company. We have about 100 employees and about like 20 million in ARR. Yeah, so that's about it.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 7:29

Yeah, how many years have you been doing this?

: 7:31

I mean, I started to do this in 2007. And the company was incorporated maybe in 2011, something like that. Yeah, so for 16 years.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 7:42

Why did you take that long, like for years, to incorporate?

: 7:45

Because it was a side project Okay, yeah, okay.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 7:48

Now the reason I'm asking is one of the epiphanies I had recently is I've been doing Star Brand for almost 10 years and I was looking back because we want to bring back some of the first speakers. There are companies don't exist anymore, like they, probably they haven't done anything wrong, but it's the VC game. Some startups, they just, you know, they go south and they don't recover. I was like, oh, this company still exists, this one doesn't. This one shrunk back to three people, only this one you know about to shut down, whereas bootstrap companies, they seem to be around for longer, precisely because maybe we come across as not very ambitious or here for the long term, man. So what do you have to say about that? When people say you're not ambitious, you're not raising funds?

: 8:32

I mean, you know it's a marathon not a sprint and like a lot of our, I mean, for it's like von der List, who was a big competitor of ours, got bought, I think, by Microsoft Microsoft 200 million. They shut them down and kind of ruined the product, yeah. So you know like we survived by just you know like not being acquired, yeah, which maybe you know like, okay, 200 million could be very nice, but also we're still in business and we're growing our business while they are dead.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 9:05

There's something about the whole narrative of startups having owned by VCs, right, and so the whole idea of move fast, break things, go big or go home, fail fast, fail off, and all of these shit man's press, you know probably were created by Mark Zuckerberg and the like, but they were echoed by the VCs, which are people who have never created a company in the first place most of them. But the second thing I wanted to point out here is, of course, they are in a cent device to make you go fast, because if you go fast, you burn money faster and then you need their money even faster, right? So, while it can be, it can look good to cash out on a couple million in an early exit. You can do so in a longer period of time by having a good business that pays dividends. So was it intentional that you never raised money? Or just kind of like you realized after 10 years of like, oh fuck it, we never raised any money.

: 10:05

I mean it was very intentional because initially, like maybe 2008, I actually talked with like a very famous VC firm like we had insane growth in the beginning, and one of the first things they wanted to do was like replace me as the CEO. So, and honestly, maybe it could have been a good call to do because, yeah, like I was very technical and like not you know, very CEO-y, so yeah, and at that time, you know, the VCs had a lot more power than they have right now. Yeah, so that's why. And then, like, as we kind of just like got the business started, like yeah, it just never actually made a little sense, yeah, but the thing is the downside to running a bootstrap business it takes longer to do shit right.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 10:53

So your competitors might be running faster. They can also crash and burn faster, but you're always being surrounded by people who say like, oh, you got to be the first in the market, you got to conquer the market before others do right. So how do you keep yourself from feeling, you know, like you're not running enough? Or how do you convince yourself that the long-term strategy is actually to be slower than the rest?

: 11:19

You know, something that I have learned over the years is that actually, sometimes you can become very complacent, and I think definitely we had a period, maybe around like 2016 to I don't know like a few years, where, like we were way too complacent and maybe with like VCs or a board or something like maybe would have been pushed into like you know, like more growth and stuff like that.

: 11:49

So I think, definitely, like this route, you kind of need to combine it like with self-discipline of pressuring yourself and, you know, setting the bar higher and keeping setting the bar higher. So that's definitely something like I have learned. Like the hard lesson is kind of like, and the reason isn't so much competition is basically like you're not really like having the impact that you want, and then some point you wake up and say, fuck this. You know, like you know I don't want to be part of this. You know I want to do something that's more important or bigger. So, you know, for me that's also like always this question of like having a vision, but like in a balanced way, and that's always like very hard to do. Yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 12:31

But when you say complacent, what happened exactly? Can you elaborate on that? What happened? How did you measure it? How did you find out?

: 12:39

Yeah, I mean. So that's kind of like you find out like afterwards that, yeah, like we could have done this much, much better if we have known. I mean, for instance, like for us like getting any kind of analytics took us a long time. So that means like we were not, even, like you know, data driven or like analytics driven, like we were not even analytics aware. Yeah, so that's like a big problem, you know, and maybe like if we had this.

: 13:13

The thing to note as well is kind of like I think the whole markets like changed completely the last few years. I mean, people like yourself have like so much access to knowledge that I didn't have, because a lot of like stuff that we needed to do in the beginning, you know, it was just like trial and error, like brute forcing, and right now you have, like Lenny's newsletter and, like you know, even Twitter. You know people are just sharing the best stuff and you don't need to like recreate things. Yeah, and even right now, I think, like, as we are like building like a bigger company, it's much, much easier, like you know, because there's like so much knowledge that's shared. Yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 13:53

How did you learn to be a CEO? Because it seems like at the very beginning, you were running very fast but you didn't know where you were going right, which is kind of cool. You wanted to run fast, but then you realize that, oh, we didn't have the metrics within use. Analytics probably didn't understand our customers. I don't know, you're very much of a product person and so but how do you build yourself to be a CEO? Understand the other things finance, operations, hiring, technology, legal, all of that as you scale, yeah.

: 14:25

And I think that's kind of like the hardest part is kind of like that you need to learn a lot all the time and you can't really stop. And if you stop then the company is fucked because you know like you're probably going to have some kind of like huge issue. So something that I think and you know, I know, like some other founders most founders I know that are very successful, like most of them are like learning machines. You know that's something you spend a lot of time on, like reading. You know a lot talking with other like smart people and stuff like that. So that's like the way that I do. It is basically like I spend a lot of my time just like trying to learn and become better.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 15:08

Yeah, but you also share a lot like. You're very active on Twitter, but always sharing what you're building, with videos of what the new features, your thoughts on AI, your code, your you know your marketing campaigns, things where you fucked up, and your blog posts. You used to write the blog post of the company for many, many years. I don't know if you still do, but you were doing it for so many years. One thing you've done particularly well and I admired you for that you've created a community, kind of like a drive, if you will, around your company, and was that also intentional? Was that something that you have gathered and found out? Like, wow, look at these people. Like where do all these fans and followers come from?

: 15:51

I mean honestly, for me it was very natural, like when I started to develop, you know, I was still at the university, I had like a blog and like I would just like go in and like post every day almost of stuff I did.

: 16:04

And I'm actually on Shopify like it's just like sharing stuff and like you know, and eventually that became like very popular. So maybe like advice here would be that actually, like you know, having a more open like building in the public, like Mande Indi, haggaz Du, is actually a very good strategy and even right now, like at our scale, you know, people actually appreciate if I share like the internals of like I go design or some code or like whatever it is like you know, like having transparency and also like I mean for us it's kind of like we want to be transparent. You know we with our community and then you see, like some of our competition you know you don't even know who they are Like there's no face, there's no human. You know like behind it. So you know that makes like our position much stronger. So you know, right now I do it because I think it's fun, but I also think it's like super valuable for for the company and even like if you're starting out. I think that's also super valuable.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 16:58

Yeah, on the topic of transparency, which is one of your core values, and then we share it. Of course, one of the principles of Indi, makers and the and this kind of community in the hackers and these communities, is building on public. For those who don't know what building public is is basically creating some sort of social accountability of what you're building, saying like hey, I'm going to build this, here's my code, it's public, you know, they even do like live coding sessions and stuff like that, so that they feel the pressure of actually delivering. Right, there's always this mantra of ship, ship, ship every day, and so maybe that's a replacement for the board that you didn't have or that you don't have the sort of social accountability of oh, I've announced this new feature. Now we got to go and fucking build it, because it's going viral on Twitter.

: 17:48

Yeah, yeah. And I think like one of the best things about having like a bootstrap company is, like you know, your board is your customers and, honestly, like we have like I think, like over 50,000 on Reddit, like the Reddit to this community, and it goes to be like very interesting like because if you do a fuck up like they are going to let you know there's going to be a threat there.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 18:13

Okay, who will not post this video on there, on your, on your Reddit? We'll know it high jacket, but no, but it's. It's really interesting. So do you actually get also analytics from the social media and the reactions to what you're posting on your personal profile?

: 18:29

Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean this we get a ton of feedback and I think that's the best thing about building in public or like sharing stuff, is you can kind of have feedback, especially as you build like a community or audience. Yeah, so that's definitely like a super trick that that is useful.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 18:49

One thing that we can all learn from is also how you run your personal schedule Right. You're very vocal about not having meetings. You have very few, if any, recurring meetings. You got some direct reports and maybe you got one recurring weekly meeting or two, but usually for a CEO of a company of over a hundred employees, it would be a full week trend with meetings all day long from seven am to 11 pm. Something like that. Something crazy and you you share screenshots of your Google calendar is like I got two meetings this week. Like how the fuck do you do it, mate?

: 19:27

I mean that's something like that we have promoted a lot and, honestly, like we have stopped promoting that that much. Like I told you, like initially, and it's like asynchronous communication. So most of our communication inside the company is like in written form and there's like a ton of that. So I read a lot, but it's also like I can read whatever I want. I can kind of structure my days as I work what I want, and then we don't really do a lot of meetings because of that. So you know, like written, like asynchronous, that works, yeah. So that's how? Yeah, asynchronous communication.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 20:02

On the topic of asynchronous communication, because my company also works async. We had up to two years ago and we are we're not loving it. There's a very American expression of not loving it, which is like it's shit. But no, it's not shit, I'm kidding it's. It's very great. It comes with a lot of trade offs, right.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 20:21

So with synchronous, everything is immediate and you got like Slack and notifications from base cam and emails and colds and you're in Zoom all day and maybe you get too many things that are not your element but they are urgent, so they pop in your inbox. But, given it proper thought, then maybe it will be like now I'm going to discard this idea, right. That's one of the good things about async, which is like oh, I want to talk to you about something. It's like when you write it, that's like it's actually not a good idea. I'm going to you know, I'm going to discard it, and so, on the other hand, it creates like really long posts that maybe it doesn't feel like you're advancing enough, but it's very easy to postpone stuff like, oh, I'll read this later, read this later, read this later, and then it feels like you're always doing somebody else's work. I don't know how do you manage this trade off with async work? I assume to be loving it more than I do.

: 21:14

Yeah, I mean, and that's, you know, like something that I have kind of realized is it's definitely not for everybody and I think it's maybe like a super niche, because I think it's extremely hard and extremely hard to hire people that fit into these cultures, because it really requires like very, very good writers and communicators, and most people aren't that yeah.

: 21:40

So, like you know, even like you know, in development, like if you want to do like more asynchronous development, you need like developers that can communicate very well, like you know, do specs very well, and that's just not true. So I think that's that's the hard part. It's kind of like realizing, and you know that's also something like our mission of the company was kind of building the future work and we really thought like async is kind of the future. I think maybe it's the future for, like the minority, unfortunately, because I think there's just like a huge barrier and maybe, you know, at some point we can get there, but like we are very, very far away from that. Yeah, and I like I really cherish our culture, but I also think it's like an extreme one, yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 22:25

But yeah, I feel you when you say that you think that async is the future. I think it was the future when everybody else, when everybody was doing remote right 2020, we're forced to go remote, Everybody goes remote, Everybody's loving it, and all of a sudden, you know, somebody says, oh, we got to go back to offices because we're paying for the offices and everything's back to normal. And all the companies that lured talent by saying we're remote, we love remote, we love everything. They took away her talent. Now they're like no, remote didn't work. Just go back to the office and you're like I leave three hours away from the fucking office. I cannot go to the office. They're forcing people to relocate, otherwise they get laid off. Do you think it was a tactic to help them to attract talent in very competitive times and now they're reverting it because they have to lay off people? Or am I just being too paranoid here?

: 23:20

I'm not sure I think there was a lot of excitement. I just think the sacrifices you need to make to make this work are very, very severe and I think most companies are not really willing to do that. I mean even something to notice. 90% of the employees are introverts. Maybe normal companies you have likeable people, extroverted people. They will advance. In remote it's maybe not the same people that are going to advance or they become leaders, because it's a very different environment. So yeah, I mean honestly the COVID remote is kind of like a fuck up. Remote was much better when it was kind of a super niche before that and then suddenly it kind of turned into like a thing. Personally inside our company we love this. We love ability to hire the best people around the world and make this work. But right now we have stopped kind of like promoting this and trying to convert because we will let the results speak for itself by focusing on building our tools and stuff like that. But I think the conversion is very, very hard.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 24:37

But you built a product that's called Twist, which is essentially like Slack, without being shit. So it's for async companies. It's very toxic. I'm sorry it was going to be a very opinionated talk. You know him, you know me, so but the thing is, in that blog you wrote something exceptional your team I don't know if you were involved in that blog post or not but something exceptional is how to be more inclusive within an async. Async environment.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 25:04

And that's true. We also realize in our companies there are 20 people and most of them they're really introverts. There are kind of people that don't want to go to anybody's office, don't want to meet people in real life. They don't even want to talk to people on video calls. They participate if they have to, but they're rather not and they see longering companies because they don't feel forced to go to an office, to travel, for work, to meet people, to talk to humans. And so I didn't realize. And when I read that piece of content I was like, wow, this is what we've been doing for years and I didn't realize. So thank you for doing that, because it's truly amazing that async is really good for introverts. They have some companies where they can work and feel comfortable and included.

: 25:49

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the most maybe beautiful part of this, and also they can kind of just mix and match cultures and such. We have people all around the world and everybody kind of fits. We don't have these HR nightmares either. Yeah, so it's a wonderful thing, but maybe not for everybody. That's kind of my conclusion on the async.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 26:17

And what are the downsides to async? Like, for instance, for a services company like mine, some clients don't want to work with us because they want us to be in the office. They're like, oh, how do I know your people are working? Well, I have been in an office. I know people don't work in the office, but how about in product companies like yours? What's the downside of using async?

: 26:39

I mean I think there's various downsides. One is I think it's probably going to be slower than if we were all based in an office and all work at the same time. So that's maybe the biggest downside. It's like everything is kind of delayed, especially here at time zones in between. Then also the whole communication form of written text. That also has not as much appeal.

: 27:08

Yeah, and also even reading a lot. I mean I spend a ton of time, I think inside our Swiss workspace. We have like 3 million messages, so there's a lot, and we are 100 people. I mean you can do some calculation and see how much gets communicated in text. So all of that it creates a very different environment and for some people they think, oh, this is amazing. For some others, this is a nightmare. So that's maybe the downside and maybe something I've also learned about cultures. These great cultures are not very good where you're kind of trying to appeal to everybody. Maybe you need to actually appeal. You either need to love it or hate it, and maybe those are cultures that are kind of like good company cultures.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 27:58

We're highly opinionated and that probably prevents everybody from joining our companies. But the ones that join fucking love it because it's tailored for them. But one thing I don't agree with is just that we're actually slower. In async environments probably it is slower to reach consensus and to make decisions Because, oh, I got to wait for somebody else to chime in and share their opinion.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 28:23

But if they are given the work, if they are not part of the decision, then it works as a continuous shift. It's like I finished my shift and then you pick up where I left off. Somebody else picks up as if it were a night shift, something like that. And we found that for production it's extremely productive and you can be really efficient. For decision it is indeed slower Because, oh, I have to give it some more thought, I will sleep on it one more night. And I was like, oh, I wrote this three-pages article and nobody's reading it, of course, but yeah, so let me challenge you on that. But otherwise I think it's pretty good. How about the return to office? Have you found that as an expert in the industry, because you're also very opinionated on remote work, distributed teams and all of that? What is your opinion on everybody else calling the back to office.

: 29:17

It's amazing for us.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 29:18

It's amazing for you why it's counterintuitive.

: 29:21

I know why, but we can hire the best people, and that's something Before this remote that everybody went remote. We would do a job ad, we would get thousands of applicants. Then COVID hit and everybody moved remote. Then it became very, very competitive to hire remotely, and right now we are back. So you hear it first If you want to have a huge competitive advantage as a founder, go remote, because you will be able to hire amazing people.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 29:54

That's what we did with Async, for instance. So we had been remote since the inception in 2014. And in 2020, we're like fuck, we're not getting applicants Because now everybody is hiding remotely. We're losing our edge. So we adopted Async because we're like nobody's doing Async. This is going to be the next cool thing, and so part of our philosophy was to do Async. And then we saw that some people were applying because they're like oh, you're the only ones doing Async. That gave us an edge. But now that there's back to the office, we don't need the Async anymore to hire. So I feel you there.

: 30:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's always about finding the edge.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 30:36

And how about the running two companies? Because do you run it effectively as two companies, so Twist and Todoist? Where are the trade-offs of running the companies like this way? Maybe we should go to this.

: 30:49

I mean, the truth is we don't actually have two companies, it's like one company and two products. And also, something we have done as well is we have mostly prioritized Todoist. Right now and honestly again, I think one of the really hard things is becoming multi-product, because you have I mean, that's a whole different ballgame, because you need to split resources, investments what are you going to prioritize? It becomes much harder, but our goal is to become multi-product and we actually even talked about moving Twist out as a separate company. There can also be a solution, but I don't think we were going to do that. So that's kind of the context of this. When you decided to create Twist?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 31:44

how did you decide which part of the team was moved to the new project? Was it we're going to bleep this out Was it your best engineers or worst engineers? How did you select people? Beep? Beep. No, I mean seriously.

: 32:02

I think you know, like, honestly, like I think, if you're going, if you have this position where you need to start a new product and you have another product that's already working, you should hit yourself in the head and be sure that you are thinking straight, because I'm not sure if it's a very good idea honestly, because it's very hard to balance and even saying, okay, you put your best people on this, then your other product that's always successful suffers. So we did actually put some of our best people on twist and we spent a ton of money, a ton of time on this and we are still kind of trying to make it work. But I think that's maybe another ball game and maybe just creating one successful product is really, really hard, like doing it with multiple. It's much, much harder. Yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 32:56

No, of course. But you never know whether, like, if you put in, let's say, your best engineers, then of course the main product is not going to suffer immediately, but in the long run it's not sustainable. But maybe they don't want to work on the small new thing because the big challenges are on the main product, right? If you put the not so great engineers, they're like you don't know whether the product is not successful because they didn't have the right talent and it's a way of losing money. So how did you? Because you don't have the pressure of a board, you don't have the pressure of maybe like APIs, but it's your own money, right? So it's dividends at the end of the year. How did you calculate the opportunity cost? What was the initial investment like? More or less? Give a ballpark, if you want, of how much money you wanted to invest to see whether twist was flying or not.

: 33:46

Yeah, that's a very good question. And the thing I mean honestly, like we have like burned a lot of money, like I would say millions on this and we have still not recuperated our investment on this, and that's also something to notice. Like I think building successful products is like incredibly hard, like finding product market fit incredibly hard, and I think like over time, it has become much, much harder. Yeah, so that's something you know, like we have like so many great people, we have so much experience and it's still super, super hard. You know, I heard like some phrase saying like it's like, you know, catching like lightning in a bottle and yeah, so that's all something. And I'm not sure like how you can do it easier. I don't think there's any formula, because if there was like a formula or like you know something you do, then everybody would just follow that and everybody will have like product market fit and growing products and yeah, it's just like a grind like regardless of how much experience you have. It seems for me, yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 34:55

And what is the strategy to kind of like, do you cross sell the product? Because one product to do is a generally software is like pretty much, or everybody in the room could use it, whereas Twiz is something very specific. Probably my company, you could use it, that company of that gentleman over there could use it, and that's it right, because it's a very, very specific or like very strict niche. So you have a super generalist software and something that's really, really specific. Is there some like correlation? Do they complement each other? How do you cross promote them? What is the strategy to help each other grow?

: 35:27

That's another like hard lessons learned.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 35:30

There is no strategy.

: 35:34

There was a strategy. It was not a good strategy.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 35:38

What was it not like?

: 35:39

So, honestly, like something I would do and I would like actually recommend any of you that are starting like your own businesses or whatever. It's kind of like you really need to think hard about what is your mission? That's one, and like align everything around that. The thing is we didn't really have a clear mission and then our mission kind of became like building the future work, which is like asynchronous and remote. That's why we kind of went into Twiz, but then we kind of have like Todoist, which is like project task management, and it kind of like does not really fit well. And then another thing is as well is like we have like so many, like like a 50,000, like different companies around the world that are using Todoist, and these are like SMBs that don't really care about future work, they don't care about asynchronous.

: 36:36

So it's just like you know, so we have kind of like really actually recently, like we did our mission, which is kind of like building, like empowering people with like simple, powerful tools, and that's basically what we do. And if we have done that, then I think also like we have built twist in a very different way. Yeah, but I'm also like you know, I can easily like reflect back and say, okay, that was a mistake or like whatever, but it's very hard to know that when you're in the trenches. You know, yeah, but you know that's something like if you could like hit that early on, then you can save yourself like a lot of money and a lot of like headaches, yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 37:16

What is the future of work? Because I run a small business. That's why I don't care about the future work. No, just kidding. What is the future of work in a context where the world is changing every year, every six months? How can you build something for the future when the present is changing so drastically, almost month over month? War, pandemic, recession, then there's all remote back to office, like you know all of these things, how can you do it?

: 37:43

Yeah, that's why our mission is yeah, and I think like I mean that's one aspect. And I think also like we became like very centered on ourselves and you know we thought like okay, asynchronous, you know, this is the gift to the world. Maybe it's like give to some and it's like a niche. So I think also, like I mean I know like I think very critical learning experience for me was kind of like it's really about a customer, empowering the customer, understanding them and their context, and if you don't do that, then you have a problem, especially, maybe like in a service company, you have a different dynamic, but, like for a product company, but you also have, like you know, your customers. You know like, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's the same yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 38:32

Yeah, I mean, obviously all the companies are suffering and startups. They're not raising money. As you can tell, like, who here has raised money in the last 10 months? Raise your hands, one person and very shy about it and, like you see, probably three years ago it would have been 30% of the audience. That's how it used to be, right. It's very harsh. Even corporate laying out like everybody's laying off people everybody except Travel Perk, of course, but nobody.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 39:02

If you take a look at you know Domestika, five rounds of layoffs type form lay, huge layoffs. All of these are global huge layoffs and everywhere but the big corporations as well. So the future is changing so rapidly that we have to that. So my next question is you've been doing this for so many years and one of the things I struggle with is the we're companies without employee turnover. We don't have rotation, so people tend to stay for very long in the company 10 years. You probably got employees that are like seven years into the company, eight, nine years, which is not usual for tech. How do you build career plans for them? How do you? Do you encounter this nice to have problem of people not leaving your company?

: 39:45

You know something to note about like a lot of like async and remote companies is. I saw like some stats like the retention is like insane, yeah, like almost nobody leaves, and that is also a problem because it, you know, that is again like complacency can easily be built or, like you know, people are not growing. That is also like it's a lose lose for the company, for the individual, you know, and that's also like and actually like this year especially, like I have been much more like driven to you know, like, yeah, move the company to like the next level and pressure everybody around, because I think that is what kind of triggers growth, like personal growth, like if you're just like you know, if you're flat, if not like pressured, I don't think you're growing a lot as individuals, not only as a company, you know. So that's maybe it's still something like as a bootstrap company is kind of very chill, like you actually need to have some pressure to perform, or else I think it's kind of lose lose for everybody inside a company. Yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 40:53

And how about for yourself as a CEO and founder of these? So you started in 2007, incorporated in 11, but whatever you've been working on these for, it will be 20 years and four years time. So how do you keep the motivation year over year? How do you keep pushing yourself Like? This is still the thing I want to do.

: 41:15

That's a or you don't. I mean, you know, something that I think is wonderful with like a bootstrapped culture is you can kind of design it as you like and you can make any changes as you like. So that means like you can really build the culture that you want to like kind of be part of and attract people that feel the same. And in the VC companies it's very hard to do that because you have much more like many more stakeholders. So what I kind of tried to do in my company is like you know, I start every day, I'm energized, I want to do this. You know, I love my work and I think it's very important to feel that way, and it's basically designing the culture and the environment that you want. Yeah, so I think that's like one of the privileges of like being in the bootstrapped environment, yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 42:09

And let's get serious for a moment here. So what happens when, in the days where you don't feel like it, you're also solo founder, right, yeah, okay, so it's well, you don't have a shoulder to cry on. It's like when people have co-founders right, you probably have got board sea levels and advisors or whatnot, or like really close friends. So those days are really hard and you're like, no, I don't feel like it. How do you overcome this?

: 42:35

Yeah, I mean honestly, like everybody has shit days, like I would not say like yeah, like you know, everything in this is just, like you know, like wow. So like I think there's like different ways that you can tackle this, like on a personal level. Like for me, like like doing some sports is a great way to you know, just get like the bad energy out. Having, like you know, close friends, especially like most of my friends, are kind of like founder types, so you know, we kind of like talk and then we cry yeah or the group therapy yeah.

: 43:14

Another thing as well is like coaching. So like I have an amazing coach that I've worked with for many years. I know that he's also just like mental help as well, like if you need that, you know. So there's like many different ways and I think honestly like that is also maybe super critical to take care of yourself. Like yeah, so when you have these shit days, you know, having like different tools, you can yeah, what has been your worst day running doist?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 43:43

Just one. I mean. I know it's terrible, right, but just one Okay.

: 43:47

I mean I mean initially, like I actually started the company in Chile and I I mean it's kind of a crazy story Like I got introduced to a lawyer in Netherlands that did a very weird setup involving, like Cyprus and Seychelles.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 44:07

Sounds interesting yeah.

: 44:09

Yeah, so the bottom line is is our lawyer went to prison and we lost like 200K on this. Yeah, so that is maybe like it's not like it's a multiple days, but you know like when your lawyer goes to like to prison for, like, evading tax and you lose a lot of money, you know there's.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 44:30

There's only Panama missing in the equation. But Well, I didn't expect it to be to be like that. But wow, that's, thank you for sharing. I mean we all should be more honest about this, like especially because VCs or other people. You will see people saying like, oh, this is great, I can build a company of my dreams and I get to hire super talented people. It's like, fuck that shit. That's 10%. I mean 50% of the days probably are like that. The other 50 is like dealing with problems.

: 45:01

Yeah, yeah, I mean honestly like that was a close call and that after that we kind of say, fuck it, we move it to the US and now we're like a Delaware company and that's been like an amazing change.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 45:12

Yeah, has that helped you to? Because your company is, you know, entirely distributed. You've been running, you've been moving around, you've lived in at least three different cities that I have recollection of in the last 10 years. So was it intentional? So you chose Delaware because you wanted to keep it. You know economic as to where you're living. Or was it because of other reasons? Running on taxes Somebody say taxes.

: 45:38

No, no, I mean actually like a stripe has like this Atlas program.

: 45:42

We kind of did like Atlas on our own and the reason is and you know that's also like a tip if you're like like I have run company in different parts of the world and the US, you know there's like there's so many services and everything is kind of systemized and like you have a lot of knowledge, like running in other countries is just like I mean, there's so much crap that you need to deal with.

: 46:07

I mean, yeah, just to give like a concrete example, for instance, like like we had a company in Portugal we needed to hire somebody and you need to do like a freaking like new news ad and then we had like random people coming to our office that had like zero experience in like system development, wanting a job, and you know, yeah, in the US you don't really deal with that. So that's like one of the is basically streamlining and then you have like access and you can automate most of the stuff. Yeah, and also, like when we actually did this, like stripe was not really available in low places, so that was also one of the reasons. It's kind of like you know, getting access to better tools.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 46:48

Let's just talk for a minute about AI, because that's something I guess we could have spoken for for an hour, but I think you guys are getting it right, because a lot of people are just building their company. It's basically a fucking wrapper around a touchy PD, but I think you guys are getting it right. Like, the good progress about AI with AI will be these seamless functionalities that we don't know they're being done with AI that make your life much easier, right? You're writing a text in your app and then it automatically gives it format, corrects it or tells you like you're creating a task to say like oh, this task has already been created before it had this tax, it had this, things like this. So what's your opinion on AI in product nowadays?

: 47:36

I mean that's a great question, and there's only great questions.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 47:39

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

: 47:40

Yeah, and a hard one in a hard one, you know. I think, like we have had different shifts, like I think mobile ship was a very huge one where, like suddenly you needed to actually become very good at mobile. And I think, like AI is also something that will be very, very, very critical, and right now it's kind of like it's very hard to actually do it right. But I mean, for instance, like some of the products like Google photos is a good example that's kind of like if you don't have AI, if let's say that you're creating like a Google photos competitor and you don't have like AI tagging of people, would you even like use that?

: 48:19

Probably not, and maybe like a lot of our products right now, like done, really include a lot of intelligence. I mean, even you know to do this right now it's kind of very dumb, gmail very dumb, like most of the stuff that we use is very dumb, but actually if you add intelligence to them like, for instance, google photos is a great example of that Then it makes like a huge, huge difference and it can kind of save people a lot of like front work. So that is how we look at this is kind of like how can we actually, you know, just insert intelligence, like remove front work from people?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 48:53

And the last question before the stupid last question is as a CEO, as your company grows, you get a lot of spam. You get people coming with projects. I want you collaborate. I want you to become the mentor of this acceleration program. I want you to be the mentor of this whatever university challenge and the jury of this startup pitching competition. How do you deal with all that nonsense?

: 49:18

So I have an amazing like a life hack that works in many, many different ways. So, like, the inventor of this is Derek Sivers, he's like an author and also a founder, and it's called the Hell yeah principle. So share it, yeah. So, like things should either be like a hell yeah or a no. So if you're kind of like yeah, this looks kind of nice, then it's a no. So that's how I do. A lot of my decision making is like either I am committing to something and I'm super excited about it, or it's a no. So, like on conferences, I only do like a few a year, maybe like one or two, and same thing is like all other stuff, like yeah, it's just like yeah, so that is like you know, that's good, that's good.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 50:08

I had heard another version which was it's either a fuck yes or a fuck no.

: 50:12

Right, but yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a more civilized exactly.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 50:16

And the last question this is a signature question of startup grind is what is your useless superpower? That's something that's fucking useless, but you do it very well, you did it every day, but it's useless. It's how, what? Why do I know these four Right? Why do I do these all the time?

: 50:35

And it's useless.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 50:36

What's yours?

: 50:37

So something that, like I have done for many, many years is like I'm really a fan of like strategy games, like Starcraft, and I know a lot about it and I still watch like Korean pro Starcraft scene grow how many hours per week. I mean, honestly, it's a few hours per week. It's kind of like, you know, just like when I want to relax, I kind of watch that and it's like it's very relaxing, do you know?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 51:03

the shortcuts to Starcraft, to like doing all the actions, be a useless superpower.

: 51:08

I guess I mean I like yeah, I have played a very high level in in age of like Kings and Starcraft as well, yeah, so yeah, all right, that's a good one.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 51:17

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Amir. That was amazing. All right, that's going to be Q&A with this thing over here. We're just going to bounce it around. Oh, there's a lot of people actually. Thank you for coming Questions. There are some rules to the questions. One question per person. Say your name, don Peach, and just be cool because you're amazing. All right, you start. I think it's the other way around, but I don't know. Yeah. Does it have a microphone?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 51:49

It has a microphone. Yeah, it's a microphone. Yeah, sorry, I failed to mention that. Is it on? Yeah, I think it's on, right. No, it's not on. Yeah, yeah, I think it's no. It's not on or no? Okay, it is on.

Speaker 8: 52:02

Okay, it's on.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 52:03

You against the wall mate.

Speaker 8: 52:06

My name is Vlad. The question I have is how did you approach marketing in the early years and what would you make?

: 52:15

different if you were to bootstrap a project right now. No easy questions. Yeah, I mean something to note, and I think that is always like we talked about is like trying to find an edge. And also in marketing, like I think you need to try to find an edge. So, for instance, like initially, where today's got a ton of users, is like getting promoted on dick I'm not sure if anybody remembers dick and like a life hacker blog and I kind of like hacked that or like tried to like. You know, I chatted with the like the journalists that kind of worked on life hacker and stuff like that and really pitched them for a long time and then they featured to do. Is that it was like a life changing event for the company. Yeah, so maybe like that is something like guerrilla tactics, you know, like trying to think out of the box and not thinking, okay, you know, let's buy some Google ads because everybody can do that. It's not really very interesting. So maybe right now, for instance, some kind of like weird Reddit community could be one. Or like trying to build your own audience. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I don't, I would need to go in and like think, but like I think being creative could maybe be the best advice.

: 53:37

And the bootstrapped question I mean, that's a very, very hard one. I think, like something that has changed a lot in the past is kind of like competition has become insane, like you need to build very, very like good quality things to even have like any kind of traction. And in my days, you know, you could just like I did the freaking like design of everything and there was shit and people still used it. And right now, I think if you do that, then you have a problem. This said, I also think you have a lot more leverage. So I would kind of like try to pick tools where you have a ton of leverage, so for instance, like AI. You know, like if you can utilize that and leverage that, then suddenly maybe that's a way. Yeah, yeah, so I hope that gave give some inspiration Next up, if you can.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 54:34

It's funny because we never get this sofa filled with people. It's like it scares the shit out of everybody. It's not for VIPs. Next event. You know it, just take it. All right, can you bounce it over there? There's a gentleman behind you, just toss it around.

Speaker 8: 54:49

This one. Yeah, so it will be like some HR question. You showed us like two sides of the business from the people management perspective. You say from one side that people don't live, and then you say that in order to attract new people, it means that you only grow how it works for you. Do you really keep those people, because we know that there is a big rotation, usually in the business.

: 55:23

So something like that comment was the COVID period, so basically like there was a dip where a lot of companies went remote and then suddenly the market became very hot and it was very hard to hire. Right now it's kind of becoming cold again. Thank you all the office lovers, thank you real estate re-enters, so yeah.

Speaker 8: 55:43

What's the question? The question was how is the reality in the company? Do you really keep those people? This is a core of the people. And then there are some people like circling around.

: 55:54

So our retention rate, I think for the last five years, is like 95% BSA yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 56:06

Some questions over there.

Speaker 9: 56:07

Always behind you. I want to ask a simple question, but for the first I want to comment about. We are like doing John Stewart thing on Apple. We are in TravelPrec, who are famous for bringing people back to office. I know If not nobody's reading the news or these email sequences from weekly Barcelona. My question is why, barcelona? Your company is in the United States right now and you are here and you are born not here.

: 56:42

Yeah, so like my wife is Chilean and we need to find a compromise. Yeah, so this is like Latin enough for her and yeah, I mean honestly like it's an amazing city and like we have lived here for many years now and we really feel like it's a great place to live. So that's kind of like we have been looking at different options and we also lived in different places, but this is kind of like our home now.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 57:09

So yeah, If you want the long answer on our podcast, Mars based podcast, I need to read him. He tells a different story. Yeah. He tells a full story. Actually, I remember that one. I thought you were going to go for that one. More questions, yeah, oh, you got them.

Speaker 6: 57:27

My name is Ashton, first time I'm here, just wanted to quickly ask what about legacy? Do you think about your legacy in any way? Or and the fact that your bootstrapped does that affect how you think about the future? How long do you wish to stay involved with the companies until the company decides that it no longer wants to, or you feel that you can pass it on to good hands? Is it something you look at? I get the impression that you're very hands on, even though you give this asynchronous approach. I just wanted to know again how can you sort of almost let it go, because it is very much your baby?

: 58:05

Yeah, I mean I think on Alex's podcast we talked a bit about this, and I mean something to note as well, and this is also maybe a hack that you can use, but it's a very extreme one. It's kind of like that as the exit strategy. Most founders don't really commit this, but if you do that, then suddenly you know like you have a huge advantage over others that are kind of looking for an exit. So for me, it's really like you know that's my legacy and I, you know I want to die doing this. Yeah, Once you make that commitment, then it becomes like a very different ballgame. Yeah, but most founders don't really do that. But I think, like it's a huge, like, yeah, you need to find your edge, and that's like a huge edge. Yeah, Wow.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 58:53

So, felix, I'll take this over here, yeah, marco here.

Speaker 10: 58:56

Well, first of all, thank you so much for to do this. I'm a long time user, so first of all, thank you, thank you for using.

Speaker 10: 59:03

Yeah, and my question is related asking communication. I mean, when I read the post it was great idea and I always try to, you know, to use asking communication in my company. I mean it's not mine, that's my, that's the problem. So it's really hard to push this culture right If it's not coming from sea level or whatever. Do you think that inside a company that cannot adapt because it depends also on the kind of business of this company, a team can work in a sink environment, or do you think that should be like a culture embrace for the entire company? That's the only way it could work.

: 59:41

I think maybe you can do it like on a team level Most likely, yeah, but you really need to have commitment from everybody. And yeah, I mean, if you have like a manager that's like creating a lot of meetings and you want to do a sink, then you have like a mismatch. Yeah, I'm not sure if you have any.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:00:01

I mean, our company is not that big to have different teams, but I've been running it in different projects, for instance, and some projects require to be synchronous, right, for instance, some more space is async entirely. But if we were bigger, probably some departments would be like hey, we require immediacy, like I don't know, sales, for instance. Maybe sales is that something that requires to be more, like in the we always hear this Like sales requires people to be in the room because it's about the adrenaline of that. I'm not sure. But other projects they run. They cannot be run async because people aren't used to working remotely in the first place.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:00:41

And I think you can do async if you're not working in a distributed way, for instance. I I'm not sure, like, I haven't tried async in an office, but I think it wouldn't work because the office is about being there In the same place, right, and there will always be like, oh, let's, let's get coffee now, let's talk about this, and then you know you could, you couldn't prioritize long written form blog posts or, you know, updates in an environment that is intrinsically synchronized or synchronous like an office. So I'm not sure whether that answer to question, but yeah, give me some hope, yeah.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:01:24

I got a question over here, chuck.

Speaker 5: 1:01:27

That's all right. Yeah, thank you. So I checked my Gmail. The date was June 2010. And we had a product idea that required integration with a couple of to do list managers, and so I have the list here. It's like to do list vital list, remember the milk and a couple of others. So do you keep track of the competition and how are they doing now?

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:01:51

The milk.

: 1:01:52

Yeah, I used it. I think they're still alive. Yeah, I mean, we do track, yeah, but honestly like and that's like something that's like very specific to our market. It's kind of like, if you look at like spreadsheets, spreadsheets have, like you know, depending on which stats you look at, but between like two and three billion people, like monthly active users. Most task management and project management jobs have a few million max. So, like our competition isn't really, you know, like other task managers. It's more like okay, how do we actually build something on a much greater scale? So that's something that we're working on right now and I think that's a much harder problem and I think anybody has sold that. So that's one aspect, and another aspect is basically out living the competition, because a lot of these companies you mentioned, like most of them, are dead and they have not really evolved. So I think it was like you know, being a lot of the years in the business and keep like pushing, you know that makes that's also a advantage as well. I hope that I'm for a couple more.

Speaker 7: 1:03:00

So actually I just wanted to follow exactly on this. So why do you think that you survived? Like that's the simple question. I think you could elaborate a bit of like everything you talked about today, but the simple questions like why do we survive those 10 years and didn't fail like the others, given that VCs are getting money, everyone is maybe running faster, growing faster, but you're still there.

: 1:03:26

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a very hard question to answer and I think also there's kind of like a like survivorship bias, but honestly, I think like commitment and consistency matters a lot.

: 1:03:39

So you know like we are just at it you know, we don't stop and we don't have, like these up and downs or, like you know, microsoft coming in buying us, shutting us down. So level even like something. That was a problem for me and that's something like a tip. And if you're starting like with a co-founder, is done split 50-50. That is like the worst mistake you can do. Like I think you always you should have somebody that's in charge that can make the hard decisions. So actually, like this isn't my first company. My first company was a social network where we had like 33% everybody and then it kind of became like a like a very indecisive, very like fighting spirit and then we didn't really do fast decisions and that can also kill you. So maybe also like there's many ways of dying as a company, yeah, so there's one over there in the back.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:04:33

So if you can just toss it over there, no worries, it's not gonna break, it's made for that. Where are we going Toss it? To Marina? Come on Without fear, no worries.

Marina Aisa: 1:04:44

Okay, so I'm Marina and I work at Apple and they don't allow us to use any third party that source data in external servers, of course. But I find very interesting how to do is. Well, I used it for personal usage for like 10 years now, maybe like a big fan, and like I find interesting how you put like to do is on like B2C market and then twist on the B2B when I find that to do is cool, also be a B2B product itself, when you have like all this ability of inviting people and like it could also work as a B2B product. It's a bit that Apple will not allow me to use it and they will force me to use reminders instead, which I'm like feeling right there. So I'm like, oh, to do is to that deal, so reminders will do it and they don't just do it. But anyways, like my question was like have you ever thought about like creating like a B2B version of to do is within the app without like creating as different product, as you did with twist?

: 1:06:04

Yeah, I mean that's a. I mean I could like talk about that specific thing for a long time and actually, like when you asked me what was the worst time at do is like actually we have tried to create like a B2B teams extension of to do is for like the last maybe two years and we are like very close to launching that. But honestly, that has been a freaking nightmare. Yeah, and the reason is and honestly it's my fault because I built the initial models like in a very stupid way and they were built for individuals and then you kind of like need to add a multiplayer component you know for like companies and teams to use that, and then it becomes like a nightmare, especially given how much data we have.

: 1:06:52

So, you know, I think right now the playbook that seems to be working best is kind of like you have something that attracts individuals, like B2C, and then you also have a B2B component and then you tie that together. But honestly, like that is super, super hard to execute and it kind of like you know it's a kind of like a different level because it's very like it's very different to serve consumers versus businesses. You need like different motions and, by the way, if you make that work, then suddenly you know it's amazing, but it's also super challenging. Yeah, so excellent question, thank you.

Marina Aisa: 1:07:36

I would be so happy if you could like just store in the local machine like all, like paying an extra something and then like not the starting after 14, like locally, I'll be willing to extra pay for like.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:07:52

Or you could talk to Mr Team Apple. Yeah, the.

Marina Aisa: 1:07:57

Remanders team is kind of like annoyed by me, like all the time feeling writers like hey, yeah, do this, do this, do this one Okay.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:08:07

I remember 15 years ago when we were not allowed in my previous company to use Dropbox because it was evil. And now, good thing of a company without Dropbox nowadays. Well, anyways, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that's okay. Now you got one. You got one Last one. I wanted to make no pressure because I'm hungry.

Joan Boixadós: 1:08:25

I just wanted to make that, to say that you shouldn't give information to Apple because they are going to use it against us.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:08:30

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh yeah. You get something to say about it.

Joan Boixadós: 1:08:35

Yeah, it's funny that she's asking for a feature that Apple fights against. So I have the same problem, but I'm just saying Mary, no, I actually wanted to ask about. I mean, you mentioned that AI is obviously going to be a big shift. We still don't know how. But my question to you is do you think you have a competitive advantage because you already have a big business that can leverage AI, or do you think this can be negative because if you were starting, you would be able to have to start without constraints?

: 1:09:09

That's deep, yeah, easy question.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:09:13

Yeah, the easiest one.

: 1:09:16

Yeah, I mean, I think that is going to play out. But if you look at the market today, then those that have a huge advantage are Is it existing apps or services that already have a lot of traction, a lot of distribution? So if you look at Adobe, what they have done, they are probably going to kill all the other startups in this Like AI imaging space, and maybe that will play out in a lot of stuff. So, from my perspective, I think we do have a huge advantage because people already have the app installed, this set. This is also going very, very fast. So we will see where this actually ends Like. If the form factor becomes very different, then maybe we lose our advantage, but right now, as it is, it's just like doing things better or smarter. It's not really like doing it completely different way. But I don't know, it's still a very early field. So, yeah, it would be interesting to see.

Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit: 1:10:21

We'll see what happens. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, Give it up.

: 1:10:26

Thank you, Thank you guys.