Immediate thought, unchanged by the content of the article: how many people (a) know how to build a billion-dollar business, and (b) how to distill the "failure" to reach the billion-dollar mark into simple talking points? Something that big has so many moving parts and intangibles, I'd imagine a rigorous analysis would be very difficult.
Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
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Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#12This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?
This is called alternative facts :P
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#13What is this article, I can't. In what world do we live in where we paint a $425m exit in a bad light?
> They built their servers on top of Node and used MongoDB to store data so that the web app would load really fast.
I stopped reading here.
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#14Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#15Interesting, but I can't help thinking that this was fairly obvious, am I the only one? It already blows my mind that it is that big already. The app is a todo list with several columns. Todo lists don't make billion dollar businesses... and yeah, SMBs are fine with actual post-its!
Kanban boards have existed since the 50s. The "magic" of trello was the instant updates. It was a perfect example of software eating the world.
The trello UI is also great. If you don't need the back-end features of something like Jira, trello's limited functionality greatly reduced the friction to tracking your activities.
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#16This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?
In fairness to the author there is this text in the conclusion:
> Hindsight, of course, is 20/20. While I’ve spent most of this post talking about Trello’s missed opportunity, we shouldn’t forget that building a SaaS business that’s worth over $10M, let alone one that’s worth $425M, is a huge accomplishment.
Ignoring the ROI question for Trello investors/employees, I think it's fair to portray Trello as a "failure" if the goal is to build a large self-sustaining independent business, especially if it's true that they "had to sell" rather than stay independent.
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#17$450M... for a todo list. #perspective
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#18Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#19This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?
IMHO you're missing the point. Sure many of us want to get rich, but probably more of us want to built a profitable, sticky long-term business. The article makes it clear that they didn't succeed as well as they could've in building a business. Getting somebody to buy you doesn't mean you created a business. The benchmarking of business achievement gets even murkier considering the notoriety of Trello's CEO, Joel Spolsky. It's the same issue as with Path's $100M or Slide's $200M exits, which also featured prominent CEO's with products of dubious business value.
RE: Trello, e.g., see the part in the post about "Trello's value proposition". Their $5/month Gold plan was really poorly thought out. Many other areas, again as articulated in the article, we're also not well thought out in terms of building a sustainable, profitable business. Signups != locked in, paying, happy customers.
> The 2013 blog post that announced the launch of Trello Gold highlighted three main reasons users should pay $5/month for Trello:
> Customizable board backgrounds
> 250-megabyte attachments for each card in Trello (vs. 10 megabytes on the free plan)
> Stickers and custom emoji
Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kanban boards have existed since the 50s. The "magic" of trello was the instant updates. It was a perfect example of software eating the world.
The trello UI is also great. If you don't need the back-end features of something like Jira, trello's limited functionality greatly reduced the friction to tracking your activities.
Their API is outstanding as well.
You can talk to it from just about everywhere including the terminal, that's a big reason I use it, it acts as a clearing house for all my stuff, I even use a chrome plugin to store "bookmarks" to stuff I've clipped.