Wunderlist

» see wunderlist.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

wunderlist showed up on phones around me around 2014. the engineers at work would compare which todo app had won that month, and wunderlist was the one that kept winning for a while. it was berlin-built and free on enough platforms that you could share a list with someone whose phone was different from yours, which was rare back then.

6wunderkinder shipped the first version on november 9, 2010. christian reber led the company, and by september 2013 they had five million users. by december 2014 they had ten. the apps looked the same on every major platform the team could ship on, and they synced fast across all of them. the german team had quietly out-engineered every american todo app in its weight class.

microsoft bought the company on june 1, 2015 for an amount the press never quite pinned down, somewhere between one hundred and two hundred million dollars. the original team became the team building microsoft to-do. wunderlist itself stayed alive in maintenance mode for almost five years before microsoft finally turned it off on may 6, 2020.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the original hook was simple. the lock-screen widget showed your day at a glance, and shared lists actually synced in real time. you could share a grocery list with someone in another room and watch them tick items off as they walked through the store. for 2012 that was a small piece of magic, especially in europe where evernote was bloated and todoist was still niche.

by 2014 the press had stopped writing about wunderlist as a startup and started writing about it as the category leader. the wundersexy redesign in 2013 made every other todo app look dated. christian reber ended up on every european tech-conference stage of the year. then satya nadella's microsoft, in its early acquisition spree, made an offer that 6wunderkinder accepted in june 2015.

~ what it became ~

microsoft to-do shipped in april 2017. it was the same team and the same calm aesthetic, only with the wunderlist name stripped off. there was an explicit announcement that wunderlist would be retired once to-do reached feature parity. the actual shutdown then took three more years.

the long retirement was the kind of slow death microsoft sometimes manages. people kept using wunderlist past the announcement date because to-do still did not have everything wunderlist did. christian reber publicly tried to buy the product back in 2018 to keep it alive, and microsoft declined. the lights finally went off on may 6, 2020 in the middle of pandemic lockdown, when nobody was paying attention to what an old todo app from berlin was doing.

~ the long tail ~

reber went on to build superlist, which is wunderlist with a different team and a different name. it is also good. but the wunderlist moment had something the second-time-around version cannot replicate, which is the feeling of a small berlin team building software that was friendlier than what california was shipping. it was, briefly, evidence that the best version of a category did not have to be the silicon valley one.

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