Amir Salihefendic, Doist.io
Scaling SaaS With No Marketing Team and Zero Ads
This is Part 2 of the interview with Amir Salihefendic, founder of Todoist. In Part 1, Amir shared how he built Todoist as a student side project, abandoned it for four years, and then returned to grow it into a multi-million dollar business. In this episode, he reveals the specific strategies behind scaling SaaS from 200,000 users to over 4 million. Amir's approach to scaling SaaS starts with distribution, not marketing. Todoist did not hire a marketing or PR person until 2013 - a full year after Amir returned to work on it full time. Instead, growth came from building great mobile apps that ranked highly in the App Store and Google Play, plus strong organic search traffic from Google. The product itself was the marketing engine. Amir also challenges the standard startup playbook on MVPs. He argues that building a dummy solution in a week is not simplicity - it is laziness. Real simplicity means building something powerful that is easy to use. Todoist had subtasks and natural language date parsing from day one, features competitors still have not matched years later. On the team side, scaling SaaS with a fully remote, 40-person team requires a different approach to management. Doist runs almost entirely on written communication with very few meetings. Every Monday, each team member posts weekly OKRs: what they want to accomplish this week, what they accomplished last week, and how they rate their own performance. This gives Amir a clear picture of what everyone is working on without needing a single meeting. Amir also shares his personal productivity system: 100+ Todoist projects, email processed in 30-minute batches two or three times per day, tasks assigned to specific days with priorities, and a strict separation between office and home to prevent burnout.
