Eric Siu explains how he built a productivity tool by obsessing over efficiency after a near-death experience. He combined list and board views, solving a problem that existing tools like Asana and Trello didn't address, driven by competition and the need for better workflow.
First of all, I think I've always liked competition. It keeps things really fun. In certain categories, you're always on your toes and I have an extreme urgency to what we're doing. But the reality is that we didn't choose it. We're building this as our own tool and not trying to get into this category until we really started building the tool and realized how, frankly, obsessed with productivity. And I had had several near-death experiences and I had one prior to right to this one. And I really just We overvalued time and overvalued efficiency. And so when you think about even that category back then, those tools were highly opinionated in how you had to use them. And so you did have to use multiple tools in order to get work done. And so the very first concept that we created was really just— it was being able to switch between lists and boards. So you could have— at the time, Asana only had lists, and at the time, Trello only had boards. And so that was what we created as a tool for making ourselves more efficient.
