Todoist developer unveils Twist, a Slack competitor that focuses on asynchronous communication by organizing all team conversations into threads
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Twist arrives days after Slack finally shipped the feature it was built around: in January, Slack rolled out threaded messages across all platforms after Stewart Butterfield had promised them a quarter earlier — an admission that its firehose channel model needed structure. The Todoist team is betting that bolting threads onto real-time chat isn't enough, and that a tool designed asynchronous-first can carve out a defensible niche.
The timing matters because Slack has been steadily absorbing adjacent work: it revamped Posts to compete with email for long-form discussion, and now faces a dedicated challenger whose entire product is the thread. Two years later, Sequoia would back another entrant in the same lane with $10.5M for Threads, suggesting the async wedge kept attracting capital.
First-order effects
- Slack's just-launched threaded messages become the comparison point for every Twist review — Doist must argue its threads are structural, not a sidebar feature grafted onto real-time chat.
- Teams drowning in always-on notifications gain a credible alternative that treats responsiveness as optional rather than default.
Second-order effects
- Slack's response options narrow: it can deepen threading (as its design-challenge writeup shows it already wrestled with notification and layout tradeoffs) or concede the calm-communication segment to specialists like Twist.
- Other productivity developers learn that shipping a hit app first (Todoist) funds credible platform attacks on category leaders without venture-scale war chests.
Third-order effects
- If async-first tools hold their niche, team chat splits into two camps — real-time hubs versus structured, thread-native workspaces — forcing incumbents to serve both modes in one product or lose one of them.
- The pattern prefigures the later wave of funded async challengers (Threads' Sequoia round), indicating investor appetite for unbundling chat by communication style rather than by feature checklist.
The trend: Team chat is fragmenting along a synchronous-versus-asynchronous axis, with thread-native challengers attacking Slack's real-time model from below.