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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

#61

Post by petenixey »

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. You're a great writer and I think you've got such an utterly different perspective on things now after having done SE and Trello that it would be a massive waste for you not to share it back with the world again.

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

#62

Post by twerquie »

mhp wrote: post #49
uniclaude wrote: post #33

That's great! Trello is one of those apps that you can dismiss too fast because you think it doesn't do enough, but which to come back to because everything else is too complex. I've been using it extensively, and it has almost gone viral around me. As in, every time someone needs to manage a project, I hear "Hey, what was this simple project management software you told me you're using for everything you do?", and t…

Sometimes you need a detailed vertical app - like a bug tracker, or an applicant tracking system or a CRM. But a lot of times, you don't. You just need something simple because your needs aren't that complex. And using something you are familiar with is easier than trying to learn something new. Trello is the always going to be a horizontal app. And sometimes people will need to move to something else to solve their…

Or your needs are so insanely complex - as in project management - that modelling the problem in any detail leads to a million features and an inflexible solution.

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

#63

Post by jbigelow76 »

executive wrote: post #26

We would use Trello if they added two things: 1) simple way to delete a card, list, or board (not this archive nonsense) 2) multiple lists in a column

I wish cards could be tagged. I use labels for overall categorization but I need tagging to tie cards back to our project management system (which I find unusable for actual project management). Currently I just make the first line of the notes my faux tag.

It's s minor gripe though, Trello is pretty great.

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

#64

Post by krosaen »

After trying so many tools, pivotal tracker, asana, google docs, Trello was so refreshing and easy to use I immediately became an evangelist. I think a key feature is you can share it with non-techincal folks and it makes sense to at least some degree right away. Yay Trello, happy you will be around for a long time to come!

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

#65

Post by ionforce »

patio11 wrote: post #60
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…

With products like CityDesk, FogBugz, and Copilot failing or seemingly meandering, it didn't really seem like much would come of it. If you ever get lost trying to go to their office, tell a cabby to take you to the New York Stock Exchange, which they're adjacent to. They do not pay the rent with Broadway shows.

tell a cabby to take you to the New York Stock Exchange

More like Stack Exchange!

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

#66

Post by ionforce »

weavie wrote: post #6

It's incredible how such a simple idea could become so big. I'm sat here trying to think up some grand scheme that's going to make me my millions. Its a great lesson that really all I need is a simple idea. The key is in the execution. Take that simple idea and develop (and market) it to perfection.

I think the best ideas start with dog fooding, if at all possible. Notice a trend in the software that FogCreek makes? All easily dog foodable.

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

#67

Post by gecko »

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 bootstrapping, we necessarily had very small teams, meaning that competitors, who were willing to go into debt to have larger teams, were able to come from behind and surpass us in both marketing and features. In other words, while both products are successful and profitable, they likely could've been a lot more successful and profitable if Fog Creek had thrown a lot more resources onto them back at the beginning.

What you're seeing with Trello is an attempt to avoid that happening again. Trello is currently in a strong leadership position; taking VC now to secure that will pay for itself later. While Trello could likely be profitable very quickly if Fog Creek wanted it to be, doing so would require a very small team bootstrapping itself again, meaning that Fog Creek could repeat the same mistake a third time. And that's why you're seeing this.

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

#68

Post by ssalenik »

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…

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...

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

crazypyro wrote: post #51
JunkDNA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My team tried it several times over the first 1 - 2 years it was out. I have not tried it recently. That said, at that time, we could never get it to stick. It was good for high level stuff, but like all project management software, we ended up constantly working to keep it in sync with reality. This was especially acute when using github because for any stuff that was code-related, we were basically duplicating tick…

Sems like a potential opportunity for either Trello, or a third party?, to provide an easy way of combining github issues/commits with Trello lists.

[deleted]
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