Most new apps fail because they ask users to learn something new.
A new keyboard shortcut. A new workflow. A new way of thinking.
Each additional thing you ask people to remember increases the odds they’ll forget your product exists.
Raycast took a different approach. They hijacked a 20-year-old habit instead of creating a new one.
The Muscle Memory Goldmine
Apple introduced Spotlight to macOS in April 2005 (announced at WWDC 2004). For two decades, millions of Mac users have been pressing Command+Space to search their computers.
That’s 20 years of muscle memory. Burned into people’s fingers. Automatic. Reflexive.
Raycast was founded in 2020 by Thomas Paul Mann and Petr Nikolaev, both ex-Facebook engineers who left Meta to address a pain point they regularly encountered.
Their hypothesis: if you can make a product 10x better than Spotlight, triggered by the exact same Command+Space, you can ride that existing habit instead of creating a new one.
No behavior change required. Just a better version of what users already do.
The Numbers (What We Know)
Raycast is famously tight-lipped about specifics, but here’s what’s public:
The company raised $30 million in Series B funding in September 2024, led by Atomico, with participation from Accel, Coatue, Y Combinator, and Atlassian Ventures.
Total funding now stands at $47.8 million across 4 rounds.
Raycast claims “hundreds of thousands” of daily active users, and a community of more than 20,000 developers who build extensions.
The team consists of 30 people, three quarters of whom are engineers, all based in Europe.
Revenue? They won’t say. But CEO Thomas Mann confirmed that Raycast Pro, their $8/month paid tier launched in 2023, “was pivotal to the company’s latest fundraise” and “has been received very well”.
For context, if even 10% of those “hundreds of thousands” of daily users pay $8/month, that’s millions in ARR. But this is speculation - they’re keeping those cards close.
How The Hijack Actually Works
When you install Raycast, the first thing you see is a prompt to remap Command+Space from Spotlight to Raycast.
Not “use both.” Not “try us when you remember.” Remap it completely.
They actively encourage disabling Spotlight entirely. Replacing it, not supplementing it.
This only works because there’s zero downside:
Everything Spotlight does, Raycast does better. You lose nothing. You gain everything.
Spotlight: Find files and apps Raycast: Find files and apps + control your entire computer
Here’s what that actually looks like in practice:
Native file search (like Spotlight)
App launcher (like Spotlight)
Calculator and unit conversions (like Spotlight)
Window management (Spotlight can’t do this)
Clipboard history (Spotlight just added this in 2025, Raycast had it years ago)
Script commands and extensions (Spotlight can’t do this)
Direct integrations with GitHub, Jira, Notion, Slack (Spotlight can’t do this)
AI chat with multiple LLMs (Spotlight can’t do this)
Users don’t maintain two systems. They just upgrade.
The Design Paradox
Raycast faced a unique problem: their core users are command-line-loving developers, but they want to expand to design-conscious “prosumers” who use Macs.
These are almost opposite aesthetics. Terminal minimalism vs Apple polish.
Most companies would pick one. Raycast did both.
The interface channels CLI immediacy - instant responses, keyboard-first navigation, powerful extensibility - wrapped in pixel-perfect aesthetics with subtle animations and gradients.
It’s terminal-level power with Apple-level polish.
The result? Initially targeting a “niche audience - Mac users, and developers,” Raycast has since “expanded more toward the prosumer market”.
What This Means for Everyone Else
Most products ask users to change their behavior:
“When you download a file, open our app to organize it”
“When you get an email, check our tool for XYZ”
“When you need to do X, remember to use our Y”
Every new habit you ask people to form is a point of failure.
Raycast didn’t create a new habit. They replaced an existing one. Command+Space was already muscle memory for millions of users. They just made it better.
This strategy has limits. You need:
An existing habit to hijack (Command+Space for Spotlight)
A product definitively better than what you’re replacing
Zero compromise - users can’t lose anything in the switch
But when you can pull it off, you’re not fighting muscle memory. You’re riding it.
A 2022 Harvard Business Review study found that workers toggle between apps nearly 1,200 times a day, with each context switch costing about two seconds - adding up to five weeks of lost work time annually.
Raycast doesn’t ask people to add another app to that chaos. It becomes the central hub that reduces the chaos.
What’s Next
Raycast is expanding to iOS and Windows. The iOS version will focus on AI-powered features as a “companion” to the Mac app. Windows support is in development.
The Windows market is “a couple of magnitudes bigger” than Mac, according to Mann. If the Command+Space strategy worked on macOS, imagine the Windows equivalent.
The Raycast Store has over 1,500 open-source extensions integrating with tools like GitHub, Zoom, and Notion.
That’s the moat. Not just the product, but the ecosystem. Once users have customized Raycast with extensions that fit their exact workflow, switching costs become prohibitive.