Image Source<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\u201cYou pulled all of my hot takes, haven\u2019t you?\u201d Loury laughs. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody on the team feels comfortable dumping money into something that\u2019s not showing positive results. Our approach is doing small investments, seeing what works, and iterating.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, her quote is less about marketing with abandon, and more about not getting so lost in your KPIs that you forget you\u2019re talking to real people. And people respond to what\u2019s real, not what\u2019s ideal.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of brands in the productivity space have a message of \u2018Do this. Do that. Get more done.\u2019 and it\u2019s a very unrealistic expectation for people. We try to be really honest about what human beings can actually do. <\/strong><\/p>\nAnd, in return, Doist is also honest about what its own human beings can do. Which is why lesson two is\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\nLesson 2: Your faults are your forte.<\/h2>\n
Working in the productivity software space, Doist\u2019s eight-person marketing team often finds itself the David to Goliaths like Apple, Microsoft, and Google.<\/p>\n
But Loury says they find a competitive advantage in an unlikely place: \u201cWe\u2019re very authentic with our users and not afraid to mention some of the shortcomings we\u2019re working on.<\/strong> That\u2019s not something that Google is ever going to do.\u201d<\/p>\nIt all started with some very public missteps that Loury opened up about, but it ended with a new philosophy: \u201cMaking sure that the humans that are creating Todoist are visible to the humans that are using Todoist.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\nThat\u2019s why Doist\u2019s YouTube presence is usually just an employee named Naomi who uses Loom to make videos from her living room.<\/p>\n
And \u201cif you look at the Todoist change log, you\u2019ll see little face bubbles. We\u2019ll say \u2018Carrie released this update on Android\u2019 and there\u2019s Carrie\u2019s little face, so that people know there are real humans working on this stuff.\u201d![](\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\")
<\/p>\n
Lesson 3: The customer is always right. Sometimes.<\/h2>\n
To help prevent any more missteps, Loury\u2019s team makes sure to keep communication open with their audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been really conscientious about communicating with our users. We let them know what we\u2019re working on and gather feedback.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she cautions that you absolutely can go too far in that direction. Loury laughs and points to that famous quote often attributed to Henry Ford: \u201cIf I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cIt has to be a balance with trusting your gut and using your intuition,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019ve always had a strong intuition of what we wanted to build. And we always felt strongly that we wanted to build things that we ourselves would use, and in doing that, would help other people as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can lose sight of how you want to build the product in the first place if you only <\/em>listen to your customers.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Click](\"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/e1f0958d-1b15-418e-b4db-45ee531f71af.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today\u2019s master bucks more trends than probably anyone I\u2019ve interviewed. She ignores the competition. She refuses to put \u2728AI sparkles\u2728 on everything. She runs on intuition as much as data. Yet her small, scrappy marketing team regularly punches above its weight \u2014 and wins. When Todoist first launched, it was the original personal task manager. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1982","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1988,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions\/1988"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Click](\"https:\/\/no-cache.hubspot.com\/cta\/default\/53\/bcbe2652-03f9-49fe-b517-acedc47b6f27.png\")
<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Brenna](\"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/brenna-loury-mim-blog.jpg\")
Brenna Loury<\/h2>\n![\"Screenshot](\"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/brenna-loury-LI-post-mim.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/blissfulyogaandmassage.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/brenna-loury-mim-quote.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/track.hubspot.com\/__ptq.gif?a=53&k=14&r=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.hubspot.com%2Fmarketing%2Fmemorable-marketing-embracing-mistakes-and-a-faster-horse&bu=https%253A%252F%252Fblog.hubspot.com%252Fmarketing&bvt=rss\")
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