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Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

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Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#91

Post by ehurrell »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #76

I love Trello. We use it as our editorial workflow board at Mashable (meaning it is where stories live from assignment (or sometimes conception) to the various editing/publishing phases. We use it to visually see what is publishing next, to see embargos or scheduled posts for different areas and more importantly, to see what everyone else is working on. To me, that's the hallmark of a good tool: when it can be used i…

I think especially with management tools like Trello robustness is a huge factor, everyone seems to have their own series of cobbled together processes that kind of work for them, but with the feeling that maybe if they could digitise $PRODUCTIVE_METHOD it would be more productive. Trello's robustness to this helps make it really valuable.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#92

Post by 67726e »

ssalenik wrote: post #68
petenixey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot. Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging…

Really? How young are you talking about? I graduated about a year ago and almost everyone I knew who was really interested in writing software read at least some of his stuff from joelonsoftware...

Same. I even went so far as to buy his books that are compilations of his writings and compilations of his curations of other great writings.

However, I feel like we might be self selecting here for people who give a damn about their craft on this thread ;)

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#93

Post by DigitalJack »

fencepost wrote: post #85
DigitalJack wrote: post #72

I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me. The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of co…

Since they're apparently planning paid Business and Enterprise versions, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of those be a fully in-house solution. If they're not letting people do their own installs they may follow the path of the Google Search Appliance. On the other hand, it may not be affordable depending on the size of your shop, but that's a different matter.

we're enormous, with all the fun that entails, but for a purchase to be involved, the following criteria must be met:

1) it must be sufficiently expensive. free is bad 2) i must convince everyone on my department that this is "the new way" that we operate (i.e. everyone has to use trello just like I would) 3) i must show through some pseudo science how it improves efficiency to several layers of management

Unless something is super compelling, it's not worth the effort. And if it is super compelling, it probably won't be approved anyway.

I guess I'm pretty jaded about the whole thing. If there is a neat tool, or some productivity enhancement/stress reducer, I usually just find a way to use it myself under the radar and don't share it with anyone (which offends me greatly as it's a terrible waste).

I'd actually have to go through that process for emacs 24, though in that case it's getting past the IT gatekeepers and proving to them that emacs 24 won't bring down the cluster. So I find a way to compile and run it and just don't talk about it a lot.

But anything web appish is out of the question. I settle for org-mode in emacs, but it'd be nice to collaborate. Sadly with our process of onboarding something, there's no room for experimentation or feeling something out or developing a workflow that would be worth demonstrating.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#94

Post by efaref »

johnyzee wrote: post #53

Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years). From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably playe…

I think FogBugz's worst problem is its name. I feel stupid even suggesting it at work, and the name sounds silly so people ignore any suggestion I do make.

Trello is a good example of a much more (word-of-mouth) marketable name.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#95

Post by rjbwork »

efaref wrote: post #94
johnyzee wrote: post #53

Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years). From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably playe…

I think FogBugz's worst problem is its name. I feel stupid even suggesting it at work, and the name sounds silly so people ignore any suggestion I do make. Trello is a good example of a much more (word-of-mouth) marketable name.

We use it at work, and in fact my boss considers it and Kiln the best source control and bug/issue tracking software around, and I think it's pretty fantastic as well. The automatic gantt chart and probability of shipping metrics are pretty amazing. I don't know of anything else that lets you use git or Hg on the same repositories, which is great since you don't have to force your team to use one or the other.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#96

Post by mhp »

fencepost wrote: post #85
DigitalJack wrote: post #72

I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me. The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of co…

Since they're apparently planning paid Business and Enterprise versions, I wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of those be a fully in-house solution. If they're not letting people do their own installs they may follow the path of the Google Search Appliance. On the other hand, it may not be affordable depending on the size of your shop, but that's a different matter.

We are planning new features for those products, but we've already been selling those things for over a year: https://trello.com/business-class https://trello.com/enterprise

We also have no plans to make an in-house solution. While the tide has not 100% turned, in most places at big companies like Amazon and Microsoft, they can already use SaaS solutions (you sign a big contract, but even if your app is on AWS, msft employees can use it). For the companies that cannot, the added complexity to development and support is likely not worth it (for us).

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#97

Post by sahil_videology »

Congrats on the funding from a happy gold member. I use it to manage (and not forget) all the many small things I need to do or to keep track of ideas for the future. One of the biggest features is that is does not mandate a workflow because it's just boards with lists with cards. I use it in ways partly inspired by Kanban, Getting Things Done, and the typical calendar.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#98

Post by Kluny »

petenixey wrote: post #61
johnyzee wrote: post #53

Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years). From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably playe…

I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot. Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging…

I'm 24, I've read all Joel's stuff in the past year.

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#99

Post by mhp »

efaref wrote: post #94
johnyzee wrote: post #53

Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years). From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably playe…

I think FogBugz's worst problem is its name. I feel stupid even suggesting it at work, and the name sounds silly so people ignore any suggestion I do make. Trello is a good example of a much more (word-of-mouth) marketable name.

I know that for some people, this is an issue. The problem is the cost of switching to another name. For a ten year old product, the cost is IMMENSE. It can definitely be done, but it's a hard problem.

Naming is also really hard. We spent TONS of time picking out the name Trello and just narrowly avoided naming it something really stupid by serendipity. (The code name was Trellis, but all the domains were taken and we insisted on having a dotcom url).

Re: Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M

#100

Post by mhp »

gecko wrote: post #67
jhonovich wrote: post #47

So Trello is not currently profitably? "Fog Creek is profitable and could afford to fund Trello development to profitability." Given its growth rate and presumably low sales / marketing expenses, it would seem to be easy for them to be profitable. What is their revenue? There's 4.5 million 'members' though less than 25% have used it in the last 28 days, from what the chart shows http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/20…

I am no longer a Fog Creek employee (I left to join an education startup a bit ago), so this is not an official opinion, but anyway: Joel wants Trello to grow a lot faster than Fog Creek could bootstrap it. In my personal opinion, a big reason why Copilot and Kiln never quite made it was that we didn't have the developer resources to dominate the market when we were in a good position to do so. Because we insisted on…

I don't agree with what you wrote at the end. It's not a "mistake" to bootstrap and have a much higher probability of success with a lower possible return. I know that's probably not what you meant, because you wrote earlier that we could have been "more successful", but it also ignores what would have been a much higher risk and loss of ownership in your assumption.

Joel and I are naturally conservative in nature and having succeeded at Fog Creek with what we set out to do (building a successful company where devs wanted to work) allowed us to swing for the fences with Trello and Stack Exchange. The risk is much higher. The reward is bigger, but we own a lot less of those VC funded companies.

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