The previous founding father of a To Do lists app which offered for as a lot as $200 million, comes again, 9 years later, with one more app to do the identical factor. Actually? It’s a narrative that may be arduous to make up, nevertheless it’s occurring.
I assume you may’t hold a superb founder down. After promoting his first startup – ‘To Do’ lists app Wunderlist – to Microsoft in 2015, Christian Reber (pictured above) may have kicked again along with his Angel investing (he’s an investor in Notion for example). As a substitute, he launched a brand new firm, Pitch, for which he’s now had to find a new CEO. However way back he additionally determined his ‘To Do App’ itch still needed scratching.
This week he lastly introduced Superlist out of Beta. It’s a smartphone and desktop app that takes the slick interface method of the previous Wunderlist and brings it into the twenty first century.
Now, earlier than we get into why the heck Reber determined to leap again right into a startup, let’s cover-off the fundamentals of the app.
Superlist is a well-rounded To Do record app (it ought to be, it spent an entire 12 months being beta examined) which, unusually, permits you to break up off private to-do lists and share them with members of the family, associates, and even co-workers (that latter level is vital to what comes subsequent). These To-dos or duties may also be enhanced much more deeply than different apps of this sort: with lengthy notes, photos, you identify it, giving it much more firepower than comparable platforms.
There’s additionally a reasonably primary “AI” perform that may flip unstructured emails or Slack messages into duties and their contents with different productiveness instruments like Gmail, Slack, GitHub, and Google Calendar. The minimalistic consumer interface is straightforward to make use of, however the primary level to recollect is that Superlist is designed for groups. You may make an inventory for a challenge, share it with a crew, after which pack it stuffed with notes, information, duties, photos and so on. The Professional account is $8 per thirty days per consumer, however a free account will truly be sufficient for most individuals.
So sure, it’s designed to be private, nevertheless it has an interface that makes it simple to modify between private and work areas. Reber says he discovered when surveying Beta customers, that the majority of them didn’t need to use their firm instruments “because of privateness issues or usability points”. As a substitute, they’re extra seemingly, he says, to convey their private process record into the work surroundings, and begin utilizing it there. In different phrases, Superlist has a ‘malicious program’ technique the place it is going to use individuals’s private process lists — which additionally embody work lists — to reverse into the enterprise.
As for the corporate, it has a extremely skilled founding crew in Reber and Niklas Jansen (founding father of Blinkist). To this point, the corporate has raised €13.5m in funding from Cherry Ventures and EQT.
Superlist app
What is vital to all that is that Reber is satisfied there’s a area between planning apps and to-list apps that Superlist will fill. And you’ll wager he’s pissed-off that Microsoft turned his child right into a fairly boring model of his authentic imaginative and prescient, and then shut it down. Paradoxically, Superlist has no integration with Microsoft 365. Maybe they must purchase Superlist another time?
That is an edited dialog with Reber on what he plans to do:
Reber: “The complete story is that in 2015, we offered, and I personally as a founder and the pinnacle of product, I felt I hadn’t truly completed the job. What we needed to perform was a greater to-do app that works for particular person customers, and that scales into groups, principally. We’d needed to construct a product for individuals to handle their private in addition to their skilled tasks. As a result of on the market you might have instruments like Issues or Reminders . These are properly crafted instruments to organise your private life, however you may by no means convey them into the enterprise world as a result of they’re probably not meant for sharing and collaboration.”
TechCrunch: What about all of the planning instruments on the market?
Reber: “Within the enterprise world, you might have instruments like Asana, Monday.com, Basecamp, and different items of software program which can be optimized for challenge managers. However we did a whole lot of analysis that confirmed us 75% of customers don’t use these instruments. They get purchased for the corporate however individuals don’t actually take pleasure in utilizing them. After we offered to Microsoft, Microsoft determined to remodel the product into the Microsoft stack, however actually, the product wasn’t for me. I used it. I respect the work, however I didn’t actually take pleasure in it.”
TechCrunch: There have been different notice and task-making instruments although. What did you see that was fallacious?
I actually imagine it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise alternative… Each individual on the earth is working with lists
Reber: “Evernote was this particular person first productiveness app to take notes and write down duties and put in enterprise playing cards. After which Notion (I used to be a seed investor) took this to a completely new degree the place you might have workspaces. You may add crew members you may collaborate on actually easy doc varieties. I completely love the corporate and it grew right into a $10 billion juggernaut within the productiveness area. And I’m an influence consumer of Notion. I take advantage of it in each single challenge I’m in. However for me, it all the time felt like, if somebody constructed the successor of Evernote, why is nobody constructing the successor of Wunderlist, like a team-first app? A collaborative To-Do app that bridges this hole between private life and enterprise life?”
“And I actually actually imagine it’s a multibillion-dollar enterprise alternative. I imagine it’s a big market. Each individual in on the earth is working with lists, organising their lives personally and professionally. I attempted as an angel investor to seek out the corporate that excited me however then COVID occurred.”
TechCrunch: Why did it take you three years to construct Superlist?
Reber: “There have been hassles like truly determining what the fuck is Superlist and the way will we remedy this downside? And the way will we make the product really feel good, distinctive and never similar to a like an inexpensive Wunderlist copy. So there was a whole lot of pondering and a whole lot of iterations and slightly little bit of founder conflict.”
TechCrunch: Did you see the chance in the truth that we’ve had an explosion of instruments for collaborative working, like Slack, Groups, Notion and so on?
Reber: “Apple Reminders is a really private product. Asana is a really business-oriented product. I don’t personally know why each single firm on this area is both engaged on the buyer area or the enterprise area. However nobody is tackling the true downside. What we seen is that individuals need flexibility. In addition they need to add lengthy paragraphs to a fast sidenote, or they need to add extra headlines or add photos into the lists, attachments, PDFs, numbered lists, and so forth. What we did fallacious within the software program world was, for example, Evernote was all about notes. And that’s nonetheless the issue. Lists are a lot extra.”
TechCrunch: What’s going to be the AI facet?
Reber: “We’re enjoying round with a whole lot of AI options for the time being, like ‘create me a due diligence record for a brand new firm.’ Perhaps you possibly can ask Superlist to create a brief abstract out of one thing.”
TechCrunch: How do you see this turning into greater than merely a client app and one thing that integrates with different enterprise platforms?
Reber: “You will be part of a number of groups. You truly begin utilizing this product by your self, after which afterward, you convey your personal software program right into a enterprise. And then you definately simply begin organizing your lists at work as properly. And then you definately invite your colleagues to develop the groups that you simply create. That’s the concept we’ve got right here and that’s, I believe, a pleasant a part of the entire expertise is which you can simply swap off these groups after which your work lists disappear. And in the event you’re in your work, you may disable your private record. You don’t have this ladder of switching between a tonne of various workspaces.”
TechCrunch: It jogs my memory a little bit of the Dropbox technique the place individuals would use it of their private lives, as a result of it was a lot simpler than making an attempt to make use of an inside intranet or one thing.
Reber: “Proper. That’s what we failed at with Wunderlist. We had 10s of tens of millions of customers. All we achieved was constructing a pleasant interface to handle buying lists. However we had a few customers utilizing it at Fortune 500 corporations, and none of them paid. None of them actually invited their groups as a result of it was too messy. It simply didn’t work. And I believe that’s the problem that we’re making an attempt to attempt to deal with. How will you bridge this. How will you arrange your life and work, however not be distracted by both.”
TechCrunch: Do you see this being picked up on exit by Notion or Slack or Salesforce or anyone else?
Reber: “Look it all the time sounds tacky, however I don’t need to begin an organization to promote it. I didn’t need it with Wunderlist and I hope we are able to keep away from it with Superlist. I discovered the arduous means that everytime you write a line of code, it may be overwritten the following day, the following month, or the following yr, so nothing lasts without end. I additionally need to take my co-founder’s vote into the equation, like in the event that they need to have a chance the place they flip their shares into actual cash and so forth. There are all the time ways in which we are able to discover to unravel this. However I don’t need to promote this. I actually imagine that Superlist could be a Decacorn, if we simply deal with executing it very, very rigorously, we don’t get right into a characteristic conflict with rivals, and simply actually deal with our mission.”
