To the users and friends of Superlist:
First things first: We launched Superlist in 2024! It was amazing to bring our product to market after a challenging journey.
But before we look into the future, let’s rewind a bit.
2022-2024
In the summer of 2022, I received a call from Christian Reber regarding Superlist. We had just begun investing together through our Super angel fund, Interface Capital. After ten years of founding and running Blinkist, I had no plans to return to an operational role anytime soon.
It was Friday evening, and I just arrived at a lake house where I wanted to spend the weekend with my family.
Christian got straight to the point about what happened at Superlist: “We founded the company in 2020 and secured funding from top European investors, but the product is in terrible shape after years of work”. The founding team he assembled had fallen apart, leading to the CEO's departure and Christian separating ways with the CTO. Although the company recently raised new funds, it no longer had a CEO or CTO.
Since he ran Pitch, he asked me if I had an idea for a potential CEO to take over Superlist. Even without saying it, I knew he wanted me for the job. I felt excited about the idea of taking over Superlist. I slept on it, and the next day, I agreed to help him and join Superlist for 3-6 months to put the company on stable footing until we found a new CEO.
The six months became two years. I'm still here, loving every single day!
The first six months were rocky. To ensure the company's survival, we had to rewrite the entire product, stop countless projects, and let people go. Investors almost lost hope but didn’t give up, either. The mood internally was terrible. We needed new energy and motivation because the team was tired of constant changes in direction.
I've never restructured a company, so I made a few mistakes and learned a lot. However, that's a topic for another day.
Superlist 1.0 Launch
After the restructuring, we pushed out the first beta in 6 months and kept iterating. In early 2024, I knew we needed to launch, so I decided to launch embarrassingly early on February 13. The team didn’t like it, but I was sure it was the only way to lift the spirit, get early customer feedback, and regain momentum within the company.
The launch itself went great. Thanks to the fantastic support from our community, we received a lot of attention that day and won Product of the Day and Product of the Week on Product Hunt. But as with every launch, the real work starts once the dust is settled.
In hindsight, the launch was premature. The product lacked the quality and user experience that people would expect from us and, frankly, we’d expect from ourselves, too. However, I wanted us to face reality after 3 years of being in stealth and beta.
These decisions are always trade-offs, but now the machine was rolling. We quickly understood what was working and what wasn’t. Now, it was about perfecting the product.
We worked hard this year and shipped 27 updates right after launching. We launched Superlist on Web, Mac, iOS, and Android – and shipped features like Reminders, Repeating Tasks, Offline Mode, and Natural Language Processing. We also introduced Workspaces so you can collaborate with your team and a new view to see all Updates from your teammates.
We shipped improvements like Tap To Open Tasks, a New Mobile Navigation with an iconic Quick Create Button, a better Content Editing Experience mobile, Search for tasks and lists, Widgets for iOS and Android, and now Sublists to help you better organize your workspace. And, of course, we invested heavily in AI, with features like Make and our AI voice assistant Talk, which turns your voice notes into lists of tasks and notes.
Most of the issues we found after the launch are fixed now. However, some work still needs to be done, and we will keep the release pace in 2025.
Current State
With every release, our core company metrics increase, such as new user activation, usage retention, and Pro conversion.
In Q4, everything was coming together. We shipped many new features and quality improvements, including unique features like Talk, our voice assistant. Since then, revenue has grown over 25% monthly, and growth has accelerated every month.
What stands out is the data and feedback for our Voice AI feature, Talk. It’s a significant driver of growth and retention. Users who adopt this feature have 33% higher retention. The feedback has been incredible. We can still do a lot for AI Voice and Notetaking, and we will double down on that.
2025 and beyond
The world of software and work is changing with the emergence of AI.
Remember all the manual work involved in managing digital music before Spotify—downloading titles, managing folders, naming files, and manually adding artwork and metadata? That’s task management in 2024.
Spotify changed how we collect and consume music. Instead of building and managing libraries of music, everything is instantly accessible and curated for you. You search for what you want or jump into one of the recommendations. You don’t waste time thinking about the organization of your music. You just enjoy it.
Productivity is having its Spotify moment.
The concept of the Apple Knowledge Navigator from 1987 is very inspiring. Although I don’t think the future of productivity will look precisely like that—luckily, UI and hardware design have evolved since then—this concept has some directionally exciting ideas.
This year, we will introduce more AI features to Superlist to supercharge your productivity. Our vision is to build a to-do app that organizes itself so you can dive right into your most crucial work. We’re building a future where your task management app does this work for you so you can focus on what matters: creating and achieving great things.
The Future of AI and Human Potential
AI.AI will elevate humanity. We’ll program and communicate with computers using natural language. It’s intuitive and inevitable—what we’ve seen in science fiction is becoming reality.
LLMs will abstract a lot of the complexity and knowledge that was previously required. We’ll state intent, and computers will deliver the results, making us more productive than we can imagine.
This will unleash creativity. With computers handling the heavy lifting, curiosity, and ingenuity will become the most valuable skills of the next few decades. Just because a computer makes it easier to create things doesn't mean we can't create valuable things anymore.
The future belongs to those who try.
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Thank you for sharing this journey with us. We appreciate your support and feedback tremendously, and we are grateful to all our customers, investors, and supporters.
Here’s to supercharging your productivity in 2025. 🥂
Niklas Jansen
CEO of Superlist