Most of our waking hours are spent working.

And we don't need to suffer through it.

Work should bring fulfillment and meaning to our lives but we often feel overwhelmed, overworked, and overcommitted.

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We deserve tools that help create a healthy relationship to work, ensure our time is well-spent, and that we can do good work, day-in and day-out, without burn out.

We built Sunsama to be that tool - to help us work with focus, calm, and harmony.

Our philosophy
of work

A few ideas on how we think about work. Our philosophy guides every product decision we make and how we run our own business.

Read the full manifesto

Work that makes you feel bad should not be normal

For many people, work is a source of great stress and anxiety. Going to work isn’t something you eagerly look forward to each day. It’s something you dread and wish you didn’t have to do.

We don’t accept that. We want work to be a great source of meaning and fulfillment in our lives. This is important to us because work takes up more of our lives than just about anything else.

We think this should be possible for most kinds of work (the exception being work you feel is inherently evil or harmful to the world).

We work for fulfillment

Work, once it delivers on our basic necessities, is only worthwhile when it acts as an avenue for fulfillment and human flourishing. Working in a way that causes anxiety, stress, and burnout is not acceptable. We should demand that our workdays and work environment create fulfillment and joy.

Work never ends

For ambitious and motivated people, work never ends. There’s always more to do than can be done. We need an approach to work that emphasizes prioritization, focus, and deep attention. An approach to work that focuses on getting more done faster is akin to asking Sisyphus to move faster.

Work like a human, not a machine

We’re suffocated by ideas of productivity that come from industrialization. Human beings are not machines whose success is measured by efficiency (output per unit time). Our success isn’t measured, it’s felt and understood within us. We should work in a way that cultivates an inner sense of well being and success.

Focus on how you feel, not what you accomplish

It’s human nature to never be satisfied with our accomplishments and hungry for the next one. Since we won’t feel fulfilled simply reaching our goals and milestones at work, it’s important to cultivate a feeling of fulfillment and harmony each day as we work towards those milestones.

Choose “deep work”

Long sessions of uninterrupted focus allow us to do our best work and feel fulfilled doing it. Because meetings are the default way we collaborate, true Deep Work is inaccessible to most knowledge workers. However, even people with a lot of meetings can access the benefits of Deep Work by intentionally timeboxing working sessions on to their calendar.

Our Story

Building the tool we always wanted to help us organize our day

In 2013, we'd just finished our first years of working "real jobs" after meeting in university. We couldn't shake the feeling that there had to be better ways to be thoughtful and intentional with how we spend our time each day, especially at work. The idea of using Google Calendar to accomplish that for the next forty years of our careers was so dreadful that we set out to build something better.

- Ashutosh & Travis (Sunsama's Cofounders)

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We failed a lot

In the first four years of working together, we scrapped by on a tiny bit of angel funding. We built, launched, and shut down six different products that we thought might help other people navigate work with more intention. None of those product got significant traction but in the process, we spoke with thousands of people about their work, their work tools, and how they approached their days. Those conversations honed our intuition for how people work and how they aspire to work.

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The dawn of Sunsama

Then, in 2018, with just a few months of cash left, we started over. In a few short weeks, we built a prototype of the tool we'd always wanted for ourselves to manage our work days, not what we thought the market wanted. We launched on ProductHunt and heard hundreds of early users tell us they'd been looking for something like this for years.

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That time we almost closed down the company

We now had a handful of customers but still only had a few weeks of runway left. We emailed all our early users letting them know we could either shut down the product or we could end free plans and double our prices. To our surprise, people wrote back happy to upgrade and pay the new price. This bought us a few more months where we could cover rent, servers, and some groceries.

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Backed by YCombinator

With the extra weeks our early customers helped us secure, we applied and got into YC in late 2018. YC helped us prove out a real business model for a beloved early product and we raised a $2.4M seed round. We now had the resources to go from rough beta product to a daily planner our customers could rely on day in and day out.

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Growing sustainably

Over the next four years we grew consistently, finally hitting profitability in 2022. Untethered from the whims of venture capitalists, we're able to fully focus on just building what matters to our customers instead of arbitrary revenue milestones.

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