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Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

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Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#21

Post by gist »

d--b wrote: post #4

Interesting, 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!

> SMBs are fine with actual post-its!

I've tried many things (including Trello) and even bought a dedicated laser printer and wrote a small shell routine so I could print 3x5 cards to keep on my physical desk. By force of habit and ease of use nothing so far has topped post it notes (other than printed 3x5s or hand written 3x5's) for keeping track of things that I need to keep on top of.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#22

Post by fiatjaf »

rco8786 wrote: post #13

What 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.

Trello is actually slow, because of that backend stack, I imagine. I thought the author was going to point to that.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#23

Post by notahacker »

rrdharan wrote: post #16
colinramsay wrote: post #2

This 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" i…

The flip side is that if you regard them as having built "a feature not a product" (as discussed in the article) and having started at a time when developing real-time shared card dragging/dropping was a relatively technically difficult problem and since been copied by every competing service and plenty of OS library demos, a $425m exit is seriously impressive...

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#26

Post by fiatjaf »

Besides all the comments about his article being from a bizarro-world, it should be noted that once Trello infrastructure was in place it was impossible to move it.

Turning a todo-list app into "the single-source of truth for a company" would require monstruous schema changes and changes in all the live updates thing etc., and everything would be slower, heavier etc., all that and you couldn't have known if that would catch up or if you would end up losing your users that liked Trello just because it was a simple board thing. It would be better to start a new app.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#28

Post by yokisan »

"Because it's a todo app" is an obvious response to the title but the content is interesting.

Trello Gold with emoji support and custom backgrounds was a weak proposition and they could have moved into enterprise faster. Still, it's amazing they did as well as they did.

Kanban boards and Chat apps are the new todo lists - ten a penny - which makes people dismiss the notion of building a business around such a trivial feature.

This is a mistake. Most of those apps are badly designed, meaning for those looking to eke out a living rather than break $1 billion, there's still plenty of opportunities.

For example, Diigo the highlighting app is relatively unknown but is a hit with educators and so makes cash in a corner where few competitors are looking. The top stopwatch on The Play Store makes over $400,000 with in-app sales.

And Wunderlist sold for $125 million. And Todoist is profitable.

It's a big Internet out there.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#29

Post by sixdimensional »

As far as I recall (and I've been a Trello user nearly since it was released), it wasn't necessarily Fog Creek's intention to build a huge monetized business out of Trello.

In fact, at some point, users started to get anxious that Trello was free and actually WANTED to throw money at the company. I suppose part of that was the perception that if you're paying for it, it will be more likely to survive and won't go away? This was what spurred Trello to create an offering of something (via Trello Gold) - simply so people could pay for something they liked and feel good about themselves, and get something in return.

Actually, I don't know this for sure, but I think they genuinely built Trello because it was a tool that they really felt should exist, and wanted to make it work as inexpensively as they could and support as many as they could, while staying permanently free. I think Trello was an experiment for them, one which succeeded at gaining the huge userbase with a simple tool (which I believe was their goal).

Once the realization that the huge userbase itself was valuable, it was inevitable that someone would buy it out. Atlassian wanted to be associated with that huge userbase, to help with Jira... maybe or maybe not to actually bring Trello into the fold with their existing products.

In any case, Trello is a huge accomplishment, before the buyout, and as a business, even moreso afterwards. I was thinking about building (and actually working on) something like Trello before it existed, but I didn't necessarily think the world needed something so simple. I would have been quite happy with this result!!! They made an absolute ton of users (self included) very happy with the results of their labor, and now they have a wonderful reward from it.

Trello did not fail to build a $1B+ business. Trello succeeded at building a $425M business through good faith and hard work. Bravo.

Re: Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business

#30

Post by stefco_ »

There are some interesting points in this article, but I can't help but feel that the author takes the final value of hundreds of millions of dollars as a given. As a resut, there are several recommendations in this article that I can easily see having led to a lower valuation!

> Trello could have created a stickier business product by making sure that it was so deeply integrated with other tools, teams couldn’t rip it out.

But if they had focused on having even more integrations, maybe they wouldn't have been able to focus on creating simple features with broad appeal, or creating a snappy app, or they would have had to spend more money and pivot away from a robust free product.

All of these things would have hurt the user base by ruining one of Trello's main value propositions: it is free and simple. I never would think about learning to use Asana for a personal project, but Trello is an easy sell to teammates for small/medium businesses and personal projects. It is even easy for one-person teams. If Trello wasn't free and easy, then they would just be another Asana competitor, and I can imagine them fizzling with no buyout, let alone an IPO.

I think this sort of business case analysis can be useful, but even in hindsight, the consequences of various decisions are far from obvious.

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