"I’m sure many of Altlassian’s employees don’t understand this decision. Because it makes no sense for them. In their minds, Trello is a shitty product compared to Jira."
everyone inside thats not a manager thinks jira is shit too
How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sounds like you're using jira wrong. So are 90% of Jira's users. That's the point.
Jira used correctly will triumph over Trello used correctly any day of the week. But for the lazy with simple needs, sure use Trello.
Yeah dang, who would've ever thought that lazy people with simple needs was a big market?
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#73I 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 alr…
I would add that the disruptive innovation also cannibalizes your existing market business in addition to being something that customers do not want now but will want in the future. If you build something that customers do not want now but will want in the future and it does NOT impact your existing business, that's also just regular old innovation.
Indeed, and an obvious example is Apple cannibalizing the demand for it's personal computing systems, by offering mobile devices that nearly replace and obviate key features offered by personal computers.
Had somebody else beaten them to the punch, they'd have suffered from the same disruption, AND lost business.
Because they were early, and had the muscle to withstand the temporary discomfort of being ahead of their time, they could land ahead of schedule and wait for everyone to catch up. At which point they were able to guide a massive avalanche in their favor.
It's not a requirement that the cannibalized market should be held by the disruptor. The market that gets destroyed doesn't have to be your own, but 'tis better to be the disruptor than the disrupted.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#74I 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 alr…
Part of the problem is that Prof. Christensen used the word disruption to name his theory. It's a common word, and has partial overlap with the process he describes. As a result, some people mean what he did when they say "disruptive innovation" and other people just mean an innovation that can disrupt someone or something. That said, if he had named it something else, it may not have been as popular or widely refere…
See also Paul Graham and 'startup'.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#75The authors advice - >Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later. seems rather different from the thinking of the Trello team when they actually made Trello, as described by Joel Splosky: >After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction wa…
That sounds more like marketing than actual history. We had four programmers and two summer interns working on it, is not what you do for an internal project at a small to mid sized company that's what you do when building something to sell.
"Pretty soon" meaning once they got excited about the product.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#76The article makes some excellent points. However I'm not sure I understand how acquiring Trello would save JIRA.
First off, I'm not sure that JIRA is in need of saving. IMHO it has grown to become a very bloated product which very few people really know how to use. If I were to pick a tool for project management, I wouldn't consider JIRA for one second. On the other hand, they have a fine game going in the enterprise segment. Enterprises value a bloated feature set because they pay up big money and because Bob in purchasing needs something semi-substantial to justify the high cost. Besides, Bob won't be using the product anyway.
Trello, on the other hand, would be favored by different types of customers. Small projects, small companies. It offers low pricing, has a small sales department and a large customer base.
According to Joel Spolsky, in his "Camels and Rubber Duckies" blog post (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...), there is usually no middle road. There is rarely a segment for a mid-range product with half the feature set of the enterprise product and a far higher price than the simple product.
Which begs the question: What does Atlassian hope to achieve?
1) create some unified product which will cater to both the garage startup and to Bob in purchasing? Good luck with that
2) turn off Trello? That's what Darth Vader would have done but there is a certain amount of negative publicity to using the death star ray
3) Make Trello rot, either by
3a) stopping funding of Trello and let it become slowly obsolete
3b) sprinkling with bloated features, such as JIRA integration or what have we
Probably 3b).
Anyway, move Trello too much off its current trajectory and boom, some new startup will pop up, offer an "Import Data from Trello" feature and do things right. Trello is pretty simple by design, and the APIs are open. There is really no customer lock-in. I think Atlassian is smart enough to know this.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#77so is Spolsky still blogging, or is he too busy counting his money?
haha!
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#78So, what startup ideas can we create from this?
Same as always: take a complicated, expensive product, strip it down to an MVP, put it online for free with a SaaS price tag for premium features, and market it like hell.
Actually, this is something different to the "solve your own problem" mantra! Your suggestion sounds simple, but for many hard to understand. I think that's the right direction, at least to raise some venture cap! Logical explanation.
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#79The authors advice - >Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later. seems rather different from the thinking of the Trello team when they actually made Trello, as described by Joel Splosky: >After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction wa…
I have a hard time believing anyone promising you success, instead of going on to get it themselves. Its exactly like selling Agile; mostly people who can barely build working products in the first place, but will happily teach you how to run your projects. Its "one weird trick" all over again with different demographics. I firmly believe you need to dogfood your own product in order to fully understand its potential…
He seems to be giving his strategy a go with his trello rip off like startup clever.do
Dunno how well - 470 views in 3 months on the demo vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEL06gDIBw
Re: How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more
#80As 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 simpli…
Jira can be configured into sthg unusable, Trello can't. But Jira can be configured to be nearly as simple as Trello, if not as much user-friendly.