Building a Jira Killer: How Superthread Grew from 20 to 400 Signups a Week

The Audacity of Going Against Giants

What we have achieved at Superthread is completely insane. Objectively, it’s crazy.

We are going head-to-head with giants like Jira, Confluence, Trello, Asana, and ClickUp. These companies have been around for decades and have raised astronomical sums, anywhere from $400M to $1.4B. Their founders are influential, well-connected, and deeply entrenched.

I was told in no uncertain terms: There is no point in entering this market. But I did it anyway. Why? Because I saw how much users genuinely hated the Jira + Confluence stack, and I remembered how much my own previous startups struggled to stay organized with clunky tools. My big idea was simple: build something lightning-fast with a modern interface.

The 'Hard Toil' of the Prototype

At the start, I was coding both the backend and frontend. I quickly hit a ceiling and hired a frontend dev via a freelancer site who helped push the vision forward. As some early investor interest trickled in, I realized the sheer enormity of the task and raised a pre-seed round.

Even with money in the bank, hiring was a struggle. People are hesitant to join a startup taking on the biggest names in tech. Eventually, I cobbled together a small, dedicated team of programmers and a designer.

Scrapping the Code for 50ms Speed

Our goal was ambitious: Superthread must respond in 50ms, whether you have 10 records or 10 million.

To achieve that kind of scale, we had to make a painful decision: we scrapped all my original prototype code and changed our entire database architecture. This, combined with the massive 'surface area' of building both a task tracker and a wiki simultaneously, meant everything took twice as long as planned.

The Launch and the Reality Check

After 2.5 years of hard toil, we finally launched on Product Hunt. We took 2nd Product of the Day.

But here’s the cold truth: while we were using Superthread internally, the product wasn't 'battle-hardened.' Most of those Product Hunt signups were just curious onlookers. They didn’t stick around.

The turning point wasn't a big launch; it was a 25-person company that actually started using us every day. For six months, we obsessed over their feedback. That 'real-world' stress test is what actually built the product you see today.

The Growth: From 20 to 392

By the start of 2024, we were seeing a trickle of 3–5 signups a day. We weren't even sure where they came from, likely a mix of LinkedIn, local meetups, and word of mouth.

Then, about three months ago, things shifted. Fueled by market changes (like Trello’s pricing shifts) and random wins, like a customer hearing about us in a WeWork, the numbers started to climb.

Lessons Learned (The Hard Way)

1. Technical: The Editor is a Beast

Despite 25+ years of experience, I’m almost ashamed to admit how much the complexity caught me by surprise. Building a high-quality collaborative editor is a massive undertaking on its own. Furthermore, choosing a non-relational path to achieve 'instantaneous' performance is significantly harder and takes way longer than traditional SQL routes.

2. Business: Price Sensitivity is Real

Companies are surprisingly price-sensitive when it comes to project management and wikis. Unlike CRMs, which people seem happy to pay a premium for, collaboration software is under a microscope. You have to be better and more valuable.

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Further Reading & Resources

• The Anti-Bloat Philosophy: Why we prioritize speed over complex features.

• Superthread vs. Jira: Why teams are switching to a faster, cleaner alternative.