It’s hard enough getting things done when you can simply walk across the office and ask your colleague a question. Now, imagine that you work with 40 people located in 20 different countries spread across 4 continents and 16 time zones who speak no less than 16 native languages. That’s the challenge faced by Amir Salihefendic, founder and CEO of the to-do list app Todoist. But Amir and the rest of the Todoist team make it work to their benefit.
Background
Salihefendic was born in Bosnia, grew up and studied computer science in Denmark, and started his first company in Taiwan with co-founders from Canada and Malaysia. Todoist was a side project which Salihefendic worked to turn into a profitable business while participating in Startup Chile, a government-run incubator program. While bootstrapping the company on a shoestring budget he realized it was getting too big to handle on his own. He found that the fastest, cheapest, and most reliable way of finding high-quality employees was reaching out to candidates on sites like HackerNews, Github, and Reddit, regardless of location. Salihefendic began to hire employees from around the world, and he now lives and works in Portugal with his Chilean wife. Those international foundations have also turned out to be one of the company’s biggest engines of growth.
Aggressive Localization
International roots have been a boon for Todoist when it comes to localization of their app. In the last 12 months, the company more than doubled their user base to over 5 million users. Todoist for Business–the company’s enterprise option launched just last year–has more than tripled its user base in the same time frame. Salihefendic credits this rapid growth to an aggressive localization strategy: Todoist has been translated into over 20 languages. The company runs blogs and social media accounts and answers customers’ support questions in 6 different languages, in addition to English. They’ve built strong partnerships with Asian tech giants like Huawei, and Sony. They wouldn’t have had the vision or ability to do this without the international makeup of their team.
While the U.S. is still Todoist’s single largest market, it represented just 36% of total downloads in the past month. Asian countries accounted for 16% of new downloads with China, by far Todoist’s fastest growing market, representing 10% alone. These numbers reflect economic trends around the globe as smartphone purchases and mobile Internet usage in countries like China, Brazil, and India experience growth rates far above those in the U.S. and Europe where markets are saturated.
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Diversity As An Asset
Salihefendic says employees’ diverse backgrounds has allowed the team to design their apps for the productivity needs of a global user base. “Being an international team is a huge competitive advantage,” he says. “It allows us to see projects and tasks from many unique points of view. It has helped us build a product that’s extremely flexible because our team represents the diversity in how people work around the globe.” He continues, “It also helps us avoid the groupthink that can happen when your team is concentrated in tech hubs. Everyone on the team brings experience and insight from their own communities which serves to make our app stronger for all of our users, not just those in the U.S.”
To serve even more consumers, Todoist recently launched a natural language date parser that recognizes over 300 natural language rules like “go for a run every Monday starting August 1.” It would have been easy to stop with English, but instead the team set to work translating each and every one of the 300 due date phrases into 13 different languages. “Creating a natural language date parser that performs just as well in Chinese as it does in English definitely kept me up at night, but it was completely worth it,” Salihefendic says, “It was never really a decision to translate the date parser into as many languages as possible--it was a given from the beginning because we come from so many countries and speak so many languages ourselves.”
As the company grows Salihefendic and his team plan to double-down on a global strategy, both in terms of app localization and hiring. “The fact that we work from all over the world has bred a team culture that respects diversity and values new perspectives. Every day I see how that culture is driving innovation and growth in markets that other companies our size just aren’t prioritizing. Today’s start-ups ignore diversity at their own peril.”
