For this forty-fourth episode, I talked to Amir Salihefendić, Founder and CEO of Doist, the company behind the leading to-do app Todoist and the asynchronous team communication platform Twist.

Amir started working on Todoist in 2007 while he was a student, got some immediate coverage and a good amount of users, but then worked on other things for a while. He was the CTO of a social media company called Plurk and then tried building a project management system called Wedoist. Then in 2011, he decided to focus back on Todoist, which had hundreds of thousands of users by then and he’s been focused on growing it for the long term ever since.

We talk about the advantages of building products for yourself, how synchronous team communication is stressing us all out, the difficulties of finding product-market fit in a busy industry, and how to stay competitive in the long run.