Deuest

Amir grew up in Bosnia to entrepreneur parents, which initially made him want to avoid starting his own business. But by age 15, he was already building and selling websites to local libraries. Throughout high school and university, he maintained a personal blog where he wrote about technology, programming, and whatever interested him—sometimes even random posts about hangovers. He never planned it strategically; he just wrote for five years, accumulating over one million unique visitors, building an audience purely through authentic, high-quality technical content mixed with personal observations.

At 22 or 23, still in his dorm, Amir built Todoist for himself—a simple task management app he wanted to use. He spent about six months developing it, then launched it. His popular development blog became the distribution channel; users found him there and started using the app. It was featured on Lifehacker, which drove significant early adoption. He charged $3/month for reminders and got paying customers, but he didn't believe it had massive potential at the time. "I could not really see like huge potential in it," he said, so when a cold email came from Plurk's founder asking him to be CTO, he left Todoist as a side project to pursue what seemed like a bigger opportunity.

Todoist's first customers came through Amir's blog—"via that I got like a lot of early users, maybe like a few hundred or something like that." They were developers and tech enthusiasts who followed his writing, and they spread the word organically. The Lifehacker feature amplified this. But Amir abandoned active development for three to four years while building Plurk into one of the world's fastest-growing social networks, scaling from three co-founders to managing exponential growth with tens of thousands of new users per day.

After burning out at Plurk—working 80-hour weeks despite being "on paper a multimillionaire"—Amir applied to Y Combinator's Startup Chile program on a whim and got accepted. He started building a new project management tool but realized it was desktop-first and couldn't adapt well to mobile. Meanwhile, Todoist already had a strong mobile-friendly foundation and an existing user base. He pivoted back to Todoist full-time.

This time, he brought lessons from Plurk: proper analytics to track user health, landing page optimization, and—critically—SEO. "The SEO element because that brought in like customers every day that kind just searched via google to find like this task management app." He also implemented his original vision of being "everywhere"—web, iOS, Android, browser extensions, Apple Watch—because he wanted a tool that followed him everywhere. This omnichannel approach became a massive competitive advantage.

Early mistakes included building the initial app for web only without an API, making it expensive and difficult to add mobile clients later. He also didn't do serious pricing analysis, just charged what felt fair ($3/month), yet this became the market standard that competitors copied.

Todoist is now one of the world's most popular task management apps with millions of users. Deuest, the company behind it, is remote-first with ~53 employees spread globally, proving you can outcompete Silicon Valley companies without being in Silicon Valley. Amir's ambitions have evolved: beyond Todoist itself, he's building Twist, an asynchronous communication tool designed for remote teams as an alternative to Slack, because real-time chat destroys productivity across time zones. "We are very happy that we kind like created our own thing," he said. The company's philosophy is about building mindful, non-addictive products that respect user attention and empower productivity globally.