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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

#111

Post by vidarh »

danmaz74 wrote: post #96
vidarh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That they were bought by Atlassian fills me with dread because of precedents set by their other products. I use Trello (and pay for it) exactly because I don't want anything like Jira.

Hopefully they are smart enough to keep the products differentiated. Otherwise, a Trello clone will surely arise.

There is at least one, but I don't know whether it's any good. I'm a bit tempted to write one, partially because I have a thing about self hosting my data, but also because I love the overall idea and design of Trello, but I'd love it to be more extensible/flexible/hackable.

E.g. being able to make layout changes(have lists that span columns for example, or cards that show more of their information on the cover). Or more flexibility in colour changes/background, or ability to style cards.

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

#113

Post by user5994461 »

beat wrote: post #93
user5994461 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google had no enterprise sales for a decade. They did fine.

Completely different business model. Atlassian and Trello are much more similar. Google was selling ads, not software.

Trello and Google are SaaS, they sell a service, not software.

They made it so that one could register easily and use the service quickly, without special training or any setup. That's how you grab tons of free users.

Atlassian is mostly shrink-wrap entreprisey software. They software with expensive licenses that also require extensive installation and maintenance by the client. They need a sale force.

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

#114

Post by valuearb »

jasode wrote: post #80
rlucas wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is regrettably out to lunch, my friend. A 10x return (and a nine-figure absolute return) in two years is "failure" all around? Only in the waning days of a market top would such an assertion (that such a return is a "failure" to anyone involved) even have a frisson of plausibility. Also, most of your numbers & ratios are order-of-magnitude right, but as they say, "horseshoes and hand grenades." A $442 M fund siz…

>is "failure" all around? It's definitely not failure all around. >A $442 M fund size is big enough that returning even a 3x-4x overall, with any consistency, would be downright virtuosic. A 3x return is 11.6%/year which isn't much more than Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (9.6% last time I checked) -- given the increased risk of VC funds. BH stock also doesn't have overhead of 2/20 fees. Every institutional inves…

Personally I doubt most VCs provide better returns than Buffett, in fact as a class I'd be surprised if they are significantly better than the stock market. But their model is that they need 10x return investments to pay for all the 0x return investments they make. A 3x return is viewed as a disappointment from that perspective.

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

#115

Post by mehaveaccount »

vidarh wrote: post #111
danmaz74 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully they are smart enough to keep the products differentiated. Otherwise, a Trello clone will surely arise.

There is at least one, but I don't know whether it's any good. I'm a bit tempted to write one, partially because I have a thing about self hosting my data, but also because I love the overall idea and design of Trello, but I'd love it to be more extensible/flexible/hackable. E.g. being able to make layout changes(have lists that span columns for example, or cards that show more of their information on the cover). Or…

Checkout selfhosted.reddit.com there are a lot of self hosted Trello clones already

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

#116

Post by bosie »

user5994461 wrote: post #113
beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different business model. Atlassian and Trello are much more similar. Google was selling ads, not software.

Trello and Google are SaaS, they sell a service, not software. They made it so that one could register easily and use the service quickly, without special training or any setup. That's how you grab tons of free users. Atlassian is mostly shrink-wrap entreprisey software. They software with expensive licenses that also require extensive installation and maintenance by the client. They need a sale force.

> They software with expensive licenses that also require extensive installation and maintenance by the client.

They also host the software. Do you know if the majority of their revenue comes from the self-hosted customers?

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

#117

Post by vidarh »

mehaveaccount wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is at least one, but I don't know whether it's any good. I'm a bit tempted to write one, partially because I have a thing about self hosting my data, but also because I love the overall idea and design of Trello, but I'd love it to be more extensible/flexible/hackable. E.g. being able to make layout changes(have lists that span columns for example, or cards that show more of their information on the cover). Or…

Checkout selfhosted.reddit.com there are a lot of self hosted Trello clones already

I'm not surprised... Thanks for the suggestion.

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

#118

Post by rlucas »

valuearb wrote: post #114
jasode wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>is "failure" all around? It's definitely not failure all around. >A $442 M fund size is big enough that returning even a 3x-4x overall, with any consistency, would be downright virtuosic. A 3x return is 11.6%/year which isn't much more than Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (9.6% last time I checked) -- given the increased risk of VC funds. BH stock also doesn't have overhead of 2/20 fees. Every institutional inves…

Personally I doubt most VCs provide better returns than Buffett, in fact as a class I'd be surprised if they are significantly better than the stock market. But their model is that they need 10x return investments to pay for all the 0x return investments they make. A 3x return is viewed as a disappointment from that perspective.

You're confusing the fund level return with individual portfolio companies. This entire thread has been premised on the idea of getting a 10x on an individual investment. The instant matter of a 3x is a 3x at the fund level, which I'm trying to say is no slouch, and if it's consistent would generally be considered outperformance.

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

#119

Post by beat »

user5994461 wrote: post #113
beat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely different business model. Atlassian and Trello are much more similar. Google was selling ads, not software.

Trello and Google are SaaS, they sell a service, not software. They made it so that one could register easily and use the service quickly, without special training or any setup. That's how you grab tons of free users. Atlassian is mostly shrink-wrap entreprisey software. They software with expensive licenses that also require extensive installation and maintenance by the client. They need a sale force.

That "no training or setup, tons of free users" model? You can't sell into the enterprise like that. And Trello can be very useful in the enterprise - into an environment that doesn't really think twice about paying $1000/year/user. Enterprise is a far more lucrative market than freemium. And if you need to keep doubling your revenue on a regular basis, that's how you get it.

Don't let the SaaS thing fool you about sales. Salesforce is SaaS too, but they're a lot more like Atlassian than Google, business-wise.

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

#120

Post by erre »

fiatjaf wrote: post #22
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.

To add to other people's anecdotal evidence, Trello is painfully slow for the board I use the most. Perhaps I over-use it - I have 27 lists, the longest of which has some 1500 cards. But it's slow to the point where Chrome asks if I want to kill the tab at least once every 2 days.

It works fine for other boards, so I assume it wasn't built with so many lists+cards in mind. But the fact it, it can be slow, almost unusable, at least for certain use cases.

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