Reflecting on all the moments and milestones that made 2019 one for the books. 

2019 was a truly amazing year. This year, the Shift Community completed more tasks, saved countless hours, and was more productive, and efficient than ever before. As the year, and the decade comes to a close, we’re looking back at all the moments that made 2019 our best year yet. 

2019: A Brief History

At Shift, we’re on a mission to create the most customizable, intuitive, and highly-efficient workstation the world has ever seen. We built on the momentum from last year and grew our amazing community by 5X. In turn, we added more faces to our amazing team, and more than doubled our numbers at the start of the year. With more manpower behind us than ever before, we released a whole suite of custom-built features—Smart Links, Focused Web Tabs, the Quick Switcher and more—each one designed to transform the way you work. 

“Shift has streamlined my workflow. love that you can access email, calendar and google drive from one screen. I also love that I can have multiple accounts active at the same time.” - William W, Shift Customer

Our incredible growth—10X in 2018, and 5X so far in 2019—was showcased by Facebook in a case study. Quickly, word spread of our success, and naturally, investors came knocking. The closing of our $1M seed round in early December was the perfect way to finish off an amazing year. 

2019 in Numbers

It’s easy to lose sight of how far we’ve come when we’ve got your sights set on the stars. However, every now and then, it’s nice to stop and take stock of everything we’ve accomplished. Here’s a look at everything 2019 brought us. 

WhatsApp takes the cake 

In 2019, the Shift Community connected more than 800,000 apps to Shift. Of those, WhatsApp came out on top as the most-connected app in Shift with Facebook Messenger and Slack following up close behind. Clearly, communication is still at the center of the modern workday. 

Extensions galore

Of all the extensions added to Shift, Grammarly emerged as the #1 most integrated. After Grammarly, LastPass, Zoom Scheduler, Boomerang, Dropbox for Gmail, and Todoist were next in line as the top connected extensions in Shift. Today, we’ve partnered with our friends at Todoist to offer our Shift customers 3 free months of Todoist premium—that’s labels, filters, themes, feeds and more, for less! For a limited time, use the code Shift when you redeem your special offer here. 

1.4M hours saved

Our team crunched the numbers. This year, our community made more than 1.5 million account switches—that’s a lot of context switching. As a result of using Shift, we were able to save our community over 1.4M hours! That’s 1.4 million hours free for doing the things you love most like spending time with family or working on passion projects. 

Take a walk on the dark side

We know that when it comes to the way we work, there’s no “one size fits all.” Since day one, we’ve been on a mission to make you the architect of your own workstation. In 2018, we unveiled Light Theme as a complement to our original dark look. Since then, we’ve been keeping tabs on which version of Shift is the most popular amongst our community. This year, Dark Theme reigned supreme with 84% of our community turning to the dark side—and yes, we did just make a shameless Star Wars reference #sorrynotsorry. 

Features that stole the show

The web plays an important role in how we get work done. Whether you’re Googling the directions to your next meeting or surfing the web for design inspiration, it’s likely that you’re turning to your favorite browser to get it done. For some time, our community has been asking for web-like capabilities in Shift. So in September, we responded with the release of Focused Web Tabs—a convenient Chrome-like experience in Shift. Since its launch in November, the Shift Community has browsed in 2.1M Focused Web Tabs! 

With 1.5 million account switches in 2019, it’s clear that the Shift community is busy hitting send and checking off tasks at record rates. We wanted to give them a hand with the newest addition to the Shift custom shortcuts list. With the shortcut Command + ` on Mac and Control + spacebar on Windows, you can toggle back and forth between your accounts without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. In addition, we added 482 new apps to the Apps Directory and introduced Smart Links—choose how links behave in Shift—to the mix. 

Cheers to 2019

Thank you to our amazing Shift Community. We’re eternally grateful for your support, feedback, and help over the past year in making Shift the go-to workstation for productive people. We couldn’t have done any of it without you. With wind under our wings and our sights set high, we can’t wait to continue building the workstation of the future. Cheers to an incredible and productive year to come.