The former founder of a to-do lists app that sold for $200 million is back, nine years later, with another app to do the same thing. Really? It’s a story that would be hard to make up, but it happens.
I guess you can’t keep a good founder down. After selling his first startup — the to-do list app Wunderlist — to Microsoft in 2015, Christian Reber (pictured above) could have backed off with his angel investing (he’s an investor in Notion for example). Instead, he founded a new company, Pitch, for which he now had to find a new CEO. But a long time ago he also decided that his “to-do app” itch still needed scratching.
This week finally brought Superlist out of beta. It’s a smartphone and desktop app that takes the elegant interface approach of the old Wunderlist and brings it into the 21st century.
Now, before we get into why the hell Reber decided to go back to a startup, let’s cover the basics of the app.
Superlist is a complete to-do list app (it should be, it spent a full 12 months in beta testing) which, unusually, allows you to split up personal to-do lists and share them with family members, friends or even colleagues ( this last point is key to what follows). These tasks or tasks can also be enhanced much more deeply than other apps of this type: with long notes, images, you name it, giving it much more firepower than similar platforms.
There’s also a pretty basic “AI” feature that can turn unstructured emails or Slack messages into tasks and their content with other productivity tools like Gmail, Slack, GitHub, and Google Calendar. The minimalistic user interface is simple to use, but the main point to remember is that Superlist is designed for teams. You can create a list for a project, share it with a group, and then pack it with notes, files, tasks, images, etc. The Pro account is $8 per month per user, but a free account will really be enough for most people.
So yes, it’s designed to be personal, but it has an interface that makes it easy to switch between personal and workspace. Reber says he found when surveying Beta users, most of them didn’t want to use their company’s tools “because of privacy concerns or usability issues.” Instead, they’re more likely, he says, to bring their personal to-do list into the work environment and start using it there. In other words, Superlist has a “Trojan Horse” strategy where it will use people’s personal to-do lists — which also include to-do lists — to get back into business.
As for the company, it has a very experienced founding team in Reber and Niklas Jansen (founder of Blinkist). To date, the company has raised €13.5 million in funding from Cherry Ventures and EQT.
Superlist application. Image Credits: Superlist
What’s key to all of this is that Reber is convinced there’s a void between programming apps and list apps that Superlist will fill. And you can bet he’s pissed that Microsoft turned his baby into a rather boring version of his original vision and then shut it down. Ironically, Superlist has no integration with Microsoft 365. Maybe they should buy Superlist again?
This is an edited conversation with Reber about what he plans to do:
Reber: The full story is that in 2015, we sold, and I personally as the founder and head of product felt like I hadn’t really finished the job. What we wanted to achieve was a better app that worked for individual users and scaled to groups, basically. We would like to create a product for people to manage their personal and professional projects. Because out there you have tools like Things or Reminders. These are well-made tools for organizing your personal life, but you can never bring them into the business world because they’re not really meant for sharing and collaboration.
TechCrunch: What about all the design tools out there?
Reber: In the business world, you have tools like Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, and other pieces of software that are optimized for project managers. But we did a lot of research that showed us that 75% of users don’t use these tools. They are bought for the company, but people don’t really enjoy using them. When we sold to Microsoft, Microsoft decided to rework the product into the Microsoft stack, but frankly, the product wasn’t for me. i used it. I respect the work, but I didn’t really enjoy it.
However, there have been other note and task tools. What did you see that was wrong?
Evernote was that single first productivity app that took notes and recorded tasks and put together business cards. And then Notion (I was an early investor) took it to a whole new level where you have workspaces. You can add team members, you can collaborate on very simple types of documents. I absolutely love the company and it has grown into a $10 billion productivity business. And I’m a heavy Notion user. I use it in every project I’m involved with. But for me, I’ve always felt that if someone built the successor to Evernote, why isn’t anyone building the successor to Wunderlist, like a first-party app? A collaboration app that bridges that gap between personal and professional life?
And I really honestly think it’s a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. I think it’s a huge market. Every person in the world works with lists, organizing their life personally and professionally. I tried as an angel investor to find the company that excited me but then COVID happened.
Why did it take you three years to make the Superlist?
There were hassles like figuring out what the hell Superlist is and how do we solve this problem? And how do we make the product feel cool, unique, and not like a cheap copycat of Wunderlist. So there was a lot of thinking and a lot of iteration and a bit of founder conflict.
Did you see the opportunity in the fact that we had an explosion of tools for collaborative work like Slack, Teams, Notion, etc.?
Apple Reminders is a very personal product. Asana is a very business oriented product. I don’t know personally why every company in this space works in either the consumer space or the business space. But no one is facing the real problem. What we’ve noticed is that people want flexibility. They also want to add long paragraphs to a quick side note, or want to add extra headings or add images to lists, attachments, PDFs, numbered lists, and so on. What we did wrong in the software world was, for example, Evernote was only about notes. And that’s still the problem. The lists are much more.
What will be the aspect of artificial intelligence?
We’re working on a lot of AI features right now, like “build me a due diligence list for a new company.” Maybe you could ask Superlist to generate a short summary of something.
How do you see this becoming more than just a consumer app and something that integrates with other business platforms?
You can be part of many groups. You actually start using this product yourself and then bring your own software to a business. And then you just start organizing your lists at work too. And then you invite your colleagues to grow the groups you create. That’s the idea that we have here, and that’s, I think, a nice part of the whole experience is that you can just turn these groups off and then your worklists are gone. And if you’re at work, you can turn off your personal list. You don’t have that ladder of switching between many different workspaces.
It reminds me a little bit of Dropbox’s strategy where people would use it in their personal lives because it was a lot easier than trying to use an internal intranet or something like that.
Correctly. This is where we failed with Wunderlist. We had tens of millions of users. All we managed to do was create a nice interface for managing shopping lists. But we had a few users using it at Fortune 500 companies and none of them paid. None of them actually invited their teams because it was too messy. It just didn’t work. And I think that’s the challenge that we’re trying to focus on. How can you bridge this. How you can organize your life and work, but not get distracted by either.
Do you see this being picked up on exit from Notion or Slack or Salesforce or someone else?
Look, it always sounds cheesy, but I don’t want to start a company to sell it. I didn’t want that with Wunderlist and hope to avoid that with Superlist. I learned the hard way that every time you write a line of code, it can be replaced the next day, the next month, or the next year, so nothing lasts forever. I also have to put my co-founder’s vote into the equation, like if they want to have an opportunity where they turn their shares into real money and so on. There are always ways we can find to solve this. But I don’t want to sell it. I really think Superlist can be a decacorn if we just focus on executing it very, very carefully, not getting into a feature war with competitors and just really focusing on our mission.
