Amir Salihefendić founded Todoist in 2007 as a university side project. He grew it to 500k paying users, ~$30M ARR, and 100 employees without any outside funding. He retains ~80% ownership with 20% allocated to employees via buybacks. Born in Bosnia, raised in Denmark, lived in Taiwan, Chile, Portugal, now Barcelona. Advocates bootstrapping, remote/async work, hands-on leadership, and founder independence over VC-driven growth.
no scored calls yet — needs a stated position or a categorical verdict, with a matured window vs SPY
Amir Salihefendić describes a highly profitable, bootstrapped productivity SaaS with 500k paying users at $60/year, 100 employees, profitable 19 of 20 years, and 80/20 founder/employee ownership. The company reinvests profits into growth and new AI-driven products (Automations, Comms) rather than optimizing for short-term profit or exit.
Todoist Automations targets Zapier/n8n by letting users create cross-app workflows via natural language, not just for Todoist but for all proprietary apps. AI lowers the barrier to build integration platforms, but distribution remains the moat.
Amir reveals Todoist's ~50 developers almost entirely switched from Cursor to Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex within months, stopping payment for Cursor. This signals extreme volatility in AI coding tool loyalty and winner-take-all dynamics.