Appigo was founded in 2008 by two technology visionaries, Boyd Timothy and Calvin Gaisford, who saw an opportunity to build productivity software on the heels of Apple’s first iPhone released, June 2007.

The product was called Todo. It quickly became an advanced to-do task management application with a number of cutting-edge capabilities including list sharing and 3rd party data sync across five platforms including web, native iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. Hundreds of thousands of users found the app to be full featured, stable and easy-to-use, leading to significant revenue and user growth that pushed the company forward in new ways.

It was during those growing years that in 2014, the founders found Travis Cook, a seasoned entrepreneur, investor and productivity guru. Travis saw the potential to continue growing the company as one of several other businesses in his portfolio and he became the new owner.

Unexpected and soon thereafter, the team realized that they’d need to rebuild Todo from the ground up replacing old technology with new. Market competitors increased with copy-cats entering.

There was also a market shift in app pricing. The one-time sale of software for mere dollars that had driven the first eight years of app growth was proving to be an unsustainable model to fund ongoing maintenance, support and development. Developers, including Appigo, pushed Apple to help them shift to a sustainable business model and in 2016, Apple enabled the subscription model for apps.

The change was a painful pill to swallow for consumers who had gone from paying hundreds of dollars per software license for a handful of programs  to $9.99 or free for tens or hundreds of programs that now litter most of our devices. With the advent of subscription, some consumers still have sticker shock paying $19.99-$39.99 for an annual license despite the pricing being much more affordable than the pre-App Store days.

Since 2008, Todo has served millions of users and evolved through 3 rebuilds and 11 major releases. The Google Play and Apple App Stores have millions of apps and the productivity category in which Todo was likely the first full fledged app now has hundreds of options and some 25 dominant competitors. Todo was the leader for years but it lost its top spot.  Thankfully the long-time user base still supports the company with subscription revenue to fund the next wave of growth.