A letter to founders: join the local-first movement!

What is local-first, and why should you care?

Local-first apps bring together the speed of the desktop software of yesteryear and the teamwork features of today’s cloud apps. These apps work primarily on your device, syncing with servers in the background. The result? An unparalleled user experience where interaction speed is quite striking. In other words, actions that typically require a server roundtrip happen “instantly” instead, creating a fluid and responsive experience that feels almost supernatural to users.

But it’s not sorcery, and the local-first professional tool revolution is already here.

In this article:

• We’ll examine three successful startups that have challenged the status quo by creating local-first replacements for traditional professional tools: a task tracker, a presentation tool, and an email client.
• We’ll share our own experience implementing local-first architecture in a developer tool.
• Finally, we’ll offer some basic starting guidance.

Irina Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians

Schedule call

Linear is bringing magic back to software

Quick stats:

• Users: 10K+ companies
• Funding: $52.2M

Linear’s story begins with three Finnish visionaries: Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, and Jori Lallo. Frustrated with the sluggish performance of existing project management tools, they set out to create “a software experience that feels magical again”.

Having experienced the effects of hypergrowth at tech giants like Airbnb, Uber, and Coinbase, the trio focused on building a tool that prioritized speed and efficiency above all else. Here’s what Karri Saarinen, Linear CEO, described in a post announcing the product back in 2019:

These tools are supposed to be used multiple times a day and help you do your work. Our goal is to make the experience frictionless, simple and fast so that it doesn’t get in your way.

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As a result, their local-first approach delivers a UI so responsive that it feels like a native app, even for complex operations:

Linear quickly gained traction among tech-savvy teams, who, also tired of bloated and slow software, appreciated the app’s near zero latency and streamlined workflow. As noted when Linear raised a $35M Series B:

Everyone loves using it. It’s fast. It’s so much easier to communicate about issues and projects. We trust Linear as our single source of truth. Our team can focus on what’s actually important: building our product.

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Beyond just speed and snappiness, hear Linear co-founder Jori Lallo in his own words as he goes deeper and discuss why it’s better not to add local-first features later:

Despite a very lean team, Linear has raised a total of $52.2M, led by Accel and Sequoia Capital, with a negative lifetime burn rate.

They continue to experience explosive growth spending just 0.5% of revenue on marketing and were recently included on the Forbes Next Billion Dollar Startup list (and, interestingly enough, their CEO noted that half of the companies on this list are also Linear customers).

I think [Linear is] setting a new standard for the quality of developer tools. It’s almost a Veblen good for developers and high-functioning modern teams. It symbolizes a cultural belief in building quality products.

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Pitch: supercharging collaborative presentations

Quick stats:

• Users: 1.7M+ teams
• Funding: $135M

In 2018, a team of eight friends, the team behind Wunderlist, started Pitch to allow users create compelling presentations in a blink of an eye. Accordingly, their primary focus was on real-time collaboration and speed.

In May 2021, Pitch raised an astounding $85 million in Series B funding, led by Lakestar and Tiger Global. Since then, they’ve had a rough time trying to justify their valuation. Thus, to remove any hypergrowth pressure, the founders bought back and restructured the company. Afterwards, starting in January 2024 the team has focused on finding sustainable, customer-led growth. July 2024 saw them successfully reaching their first profitable month.

We generate >4.4m € in ARR, and we have more than 6m € in cash. We’re changing course towards becoming profitable asap, with the remaining all-star team of ~40 people.

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Superhuman is revitalizing email

Quick stats:

• Users: waitlist of 450K+ uses (2023)
• Funding: $108M

Superhuman was founded by Rahul Vohra, who had previously co-founded and sold Rapportive to LinkedIn. Vohra’s vision was to create the fastest email experience in the world, targeting professionals who spend hours in their inbox on a daily basis. As he said in this article:

Everything we do, every feature we’ve ever built, whether it’s AI or not all revolves around this notion of how can we make you go faster, if not twice as fast, 10 times as fast? We’ve set an audacious goal: the fastest email experience in the world.

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While not strictly local-first, Superhuman’s obsession with speed nevertheless demonstrates the power of near-zero latency in professional tools. They’ve set a 100ms interaction speed benchmark, ensuring that every action feels instantaneous, and thortcuts and AI integration take it over the edge, as seen in this video:

This UX has drawn the attention of industry peers and users:

Superhuman makes email, which is a big, daunting task, feel really digestible and approachable. I was just really delighted by the UI and had never seen anything that took something as mundane as email and turned it into something that felt really fun and easy to deal with.

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Their Series C of 75M round was led by IVP in 2021. As of today, Superhuman customers have sent over 340 million messages and have saved more than 30 million hours, and further, adoption rate has doubled over the last year:

Our own experience

Let’s examine our customer HTTPie, a commercial open-source product, to see how the local-first approach applies to hardcore developer tools.

To combat the frustration of bloated software, HTTPie was built as a lean, efficient API-testing machine with a local-first approach.

Of course, going local-first isn’t a walk in the park: everything happens on the client-side. Accordingly, auto-updates, initialization, and synchronization can be real headaches. Yet, despite these hurdles, local data processing allows HTTPie to deliver lightning-fast responsiveness and offline capabilities that make it all worthwhile.

The founder of HTTPie, Jakub Roztocil, didn’t just adopt this technology—he harnessed its full potential. Overcoming initial syncing challenges, HTTPie has transformed the complexities of local-first into a powerful market differentiator. This approach has dramatically reduced infrastructure costs, enhanced data privacy, and created a level of reliability that turns users into devoted advocates.

Get started now, build your local-first app

So, for founders reading this, the question isn’t whether this trend will take off–it’s whether you’ll be leading the charge or playing catch-up. The time to explore local-first is now, so let’s leave you with a starting course of action.

Start by identifying the core interactions in your professional tool that would benefit most from zero latency. Look into technologies like ElectricSQL for data synchronization.

Technically speaking, as you’re building your new local-first app, think about it like a separate platform for your application: just like the versions of your app on the web, native mobile, and native desktop, a local-first app will be reusing many of your existing APIs, but has to be built from scratch. This means taking new architecture and principles in mind.

At the same time, keep in mind that ideologially speaking, the goal isn’t just to build a faster app–it’s to reimagine how professionals interact with their tools.

From here, start small, test the waters and if you see traction, keep building and keep launching!