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Trello for small business1/10/2024 You made a change to a board by dragging and dropping a card, and that change was reflected everywhere else in the world.Īll of this stuff was new at the time, and gave Trello a lot of runway. Everytime a user dragged a card to a new list, or changed the entry on a board, Trello pushed this data to every other browser with the board open almost instantly. They built their servers on top of Node and used MongoDB to store data so that the web app would load really fast. After a user visited for the first time, they then cached the page so Trello would load even faster. The single page web app basically worked as a shell that pulled all of the data from the servers in less than half a second, at under 250 kilobytes. To get this to work, Trello implemented a bleeding-edge stack. The product vision was to strip everything down and build around the visual idea of cards on boards. Trello came at this from the opposite direction. This basically created an architecture where you structured data in terms of leads, customers, or tasks. A lot of other SaaS tools at the time were big databases with a visual interface built on top (think: Salesforce). When Trello first started out, it was really technically challenging to create a board in a web browser where you could collaboratively drag and drop cards into lists. When a card moved around a board, it meant that something had been physically moved from a supplier to a factory. The basic idea was that each “card” represented a product, part, or inventory. Kanban was a system for lean manufacturing that Toyota popularized in the 1940s. Trello is organized around a “kanban board” concept. Let’s talk about the opportunity that Trello missed, and what it could have done instead. While that makes Trello a perfect complement to Atlassian’s suite of enterprise productivity tools, it hampered the company from growing further on its own. Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late-they’d already moved on. However, the one thing Trello didn’t do a good job of was keeping track of it’s paying customers. Trello was successful building this horizontal product, achieving rapid growth to tens of millions of users and an acquisition of hundreds of millions of dollars. You can’t charge very much, because you’re competing with other horizontal products that can amortize their development costs across a huge number of users. “Making a major horizontal product that’s useful in any walk of life is almost impossible to pull off. In a blog post Spolsky wrote a couple months after launch, Joel presciently touched on the biggest challenge ahead: It’s also why Trello ultimately had to sell to Atlassian for $425 million when it could have become the next $1 billion SaaS application. The vision for Trello was to create a wide product that was so simple and useful, just about anyone could use it. Within days, Trello succeeded in getting 131,000 eyeballs. Instead of physically moving a sticky note on a whiteboard, you could drag and drop cards on a board from your web browser. It looked a lot like a whiteboard with sticky notes translated into a web browser and an iPhone App. In 2011, Joel Spolsky launched his company Fog Creek’s new product at TechCrunch Disrupt called Trello.
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