We made a to-do list because every other one kept asking us to upgrade.
An honest origin story, lightly seasoned with frustration. No revisionist history, no founder-myth fluff. Just what actually happened.
klaar ✓
we even got butter
It started, like most bad ideas, with a meeting about a meeting.
One Tuesday in winter, somewhere in Pretoria, three of us were on a Google Meet trying to decide where to put a single task. A buy-bread task. Not a project. Not an epic. Bread.
Forty-six minutes later we had created two new “workspaces,” one “sprint,” assigned three OKRs, given it a priority score of 8/10 (which is high, apparently?), tagged it with #urgent #personal #shopping, and forgotten to actually buy the bread.
dis genoeg.
The apps we tried. And rage-quit.
This is not a brag list. This is a confession. All names changed to protect the guilty.
- 01RejectedThe Famous One With The Rocket
We hit free-tier limits in 11 days. The upgrade page wanted R420 a month. R420. For lists.
Rejected - 02RejectedThe One That Replaced Itself Three Times
Wrote our tasks in. Got an email two weeks later: 'sunsetting the legacy product, please migrate.' Imported. Got another email six months later. You see where this is going.
Rejected - 03RejectedThe AI-Powered Workspace OS
A 14-step onboarding asked us about our 'productivity personality.' We closed it. Still got the email sequence. Blocked four addresses. Still gets through somehow.
Rejected - 04RejectedA Notepad
Honestly the best of the bunch until the dog walked over the keyboard and saved a file called ;lkjasdf over our entire week.
Rejected - 05SavedWhatsApp
Actually... we just kept losing the messages in groups. But the seed was planted.
Saved
problem.
We don't open a fresh app for bread. We open WhatsApp.
The pattern wasn't hard to spot. We don't open a fresh app to remember bread. We doopen WhatsApp roughly forty-three times an hour. So we built a thing where you message Taakie like you'd message ouma, and it just handles it.
Type, voice-note, or forward — it figures out it's a task, when it's due, how urgent it is. No tags. No projects. No swimlanes. No quarterly retrospective. Just a list.
Four nos. Tattooed on a whiteboard.
No upgrade nags.
Two plans. Pick one. Move on.
No AI assistant for your AI assistant.
Taakie does NLP for dates and tags. That's it. It will not write your emails. You can write your own emails.
No projects-within-projects.
There's vandag. There's môre. If a thing is bigger than that, pin it to the fridge.
No spam.
One email when you sign up. One email if you lose your password. After that, radio silence. Promise.
A small team. 2,481 taakies klaar today.
Four full-time humans (Tyron, Calista, Megan, Aylan). Zero dogs in attendance. Made in Pretoria. Powered by koffie and stubbornness.
And the bread? Klaar. We bought it. It was R28. We even remembered the butter.
launched.
small + getting bigger