Thanks for sharing my essay mate!
How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
21–30 of 84 posts
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#22As a Software Developer, working with Jira is just a pain for me. I just don't like much about it, the less time I spend using it the happier I am. There dozens of views of the same information, but just different enough to get me lost. I have to admit, I did not buckle down to 'tame' the beast. It feels like hiking a steep hill on a rainy day.
Trello, on the other hand I introduced to some colleagues, and the simplicity and ease of use is very satisfying. Feels like surfing on the perfect wave.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like you're using jira wrong. I suppose you can encode anything onto index cards. This doesn't mean it's usable.
> Sounds like you're using jira wrong. So are 90% of Jira's users. That's the point.
While that may be true, I doubt switching to Trello would improve anything if you're already on JIRA. You don't join JIRA for the kanban....
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#24The picture comparison of boards is a joke. Why would you show the Trello board view compared to a list of tickets in a sprint? The author must not know how to use Jira and create a Kanban board.
I actually prefer Trello over Jira but, I have to use Jira at work. Still I couldn't take this article seriously after seeing that picture comparison.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#25Trello will never hold a candle to Jira for users with complex needs. Trello is deliberately simple while Jira is deliberately complex. Also the screenshots comparing a Sprint board to a Kanban board is like comparing apples and oranges.
Yeah, that screenshot comparison is like comparing a basket of mixed apples at a market to a vast field of apple trees.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#26So much BS in this article but let's start with these 3:
1) "Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more convenient to use." How many more benefits can he put in that sentence? He's basically saying disruptive tech is typically cheaper or better.
2) "Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later." Trying to predict the future is just betting on luck.
3) That random functionality vs time graph. What is 200 Functionality?
Bonus: "If you want to get ideas for your $400 million startup, subscribe to my newsletter."
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#27No matter how good your JIRA-alternative is, persuading people to manage a project in a different way is exceptionally hard, and has very little to do with your tech. Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies. My startup was in this space (managing projects, with a focus on requirements and change), and we failed because we underestimated how hard it would be to get customers to even try a different approach.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#28I really wish people would stop abusing the term "disruptive innovation" in ways it was never meant to be used. Making a product that's overly complicated, beyond what the market is demanding, is just bad management. It doesn't require any disruptive innovation to correct for this - making something that better matches your customers' needs is bread-and-butter business management, which every competent company is already doing.
The whole point of disruptive innovation is to build something which most customers do not want, with the bet that due to technology/market trends, market demand will grow exponentially in the future. Unlike the above, this is a real dilemma because if you're an established successful company, it's hard to justify pouring energy and resources into something for which the demand doesn't exist. If you're building something to meet a market demand that already exists, that's not disruptive innovation, that's just innovation, period. It's something people have been doing for millennia, and there's no dilemma here.
Sorry for sounding like an angry old man. It just annoys me when I see specific terms with specific meanings get bastardized into meaningless buzz words.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#29This article is making the obvious comparison, but it falls down on the slightest inspection because Trello and JIRA aren't really even in the same space. Yes, Trello can substitute for JIRA if your needs are simple, and yes JIRA has boards to meet different kinds of planning workflows, but the actual overlap of usages is pretty small.
What made Trello successful is that it is an incredibly simple SPA that never wavered in its vision. The minute Trello designers try to go down the road of meeting the needs of a ticketing system then the magic and broad utility of Trello will be poisoned.
There's probably some truth to the claim that Trello was eating some of the low-end of JIRA's market, but it would never credibly kill Atlassian, at least not without branching out into a lot of other products first.
The acquisition makes a lot more sense to me in the portfolio building aspect, Trello can satisfy a very wide array of business needs that go well beyond traditional dev tools. I put it more in the category of Dropbox Paper—simple, modern, real-time-collaboration-based, mobile-friendly tools with a very strong essential vision leading to extremely broad utility.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#30No matter how good your JIRA-alternative is, persuading people to manage a project in a different way is exceptionally hard, and has very little to do with your tech. Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies. My startup was in this space (managing projects, with a focus on requirements and change), and we failed because we underestimated how hard it would be t…
> Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate from known methodologies.
It's treated more as a set of religious rituals justified by received wisdom (which, to be fair, gives even less flexibility for change than if it were viewed as a science, in which case practices would be based on systematically gathered evidence and change in response to new evidence, rather than changing mostly when people indoctrinated in a different tradition come to power in an organization.)