How
did you guys came with the idea of Trello? Could you please also explain our
readers about the role of your co-founder Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software and
the relation with Stack Exchange? How did you meet?
Joel and I met while we
were working for another company, and decided to launch Fog Creek Software in
2000. We didn’t have a specific product in mind, but we started with a few
software consulting clients and then began building products in house. Our goal
was only to build a place where developers would love to work. So we built
private offices, brought in catered lunch and made sure everyone got two
monitors when they started work.
Stack Overflow, which we launched in
2008 as a place for programmers to ask and answer questions, spun off as its
own company and raised venture capital in 2010. Trello was started as another
Fog Creek project back in 2010, and we released it to the public at Techcrunch
Disrupt in 2011.
How did you acquire your first
1.000 customers? Wasn’t it difficult to communicate a different (and probably
more natural way) to manage tasks?
We opened Trello to the
public on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt, and we began to see massive organic
growth as people used Trello and added friends and coworkers to their boards.
Trello is a naturally collaborative product, and because of its visual nature
people understood how it worked from the first few interactions.
How did you overcome the “blank
page” syndrome for the first sign ins? Did users understood how Trello worked?
This is something we
continue to work on- New users who are invited to existing boards have higher
engagement rates than those who just sign up on the site. Luckily, our first
demographic of developers understood the concept of kanban, and were able to
see what we were doing right away.
Do you remember any notable error
you did at that time? How did you overcome it?
We added markdown in
Trello which in retrospect, was a mistake because it’s a developer centric
feature in a non developer focused product. We overcame it by adding guidance
on how to use markdown within the app, but users sometimes still get confused.
Now
you probably have zillions of users… How did you scale so quickly to so many
users? Is there any inherent virality in Trello? We’d love to have your insights
It’s not easy, but we
built a product that people love to use. Like they really, really love it. We
took an experience (planning) that isn’t super exciting and made it fun. We
also built something super flexible, so it could mold to how people wanted to
use it and not enforce our methodology on them (which is hard without building
something complex). That means that people enjoy using it and naturally use it
for a million different things, but then they tell all of their friends and
people they meet how they are using it. For example, a person getting married
uses it to plan their wedding and loves the experience and makes the effort to
write a post on their blog. Their readers are people getting married, which is
not an audience we would normally have access to. The users market the product
for us.
How does Trello earn money? Is
Trello Gold a profitable product? The free version is so awesome that sounds
difficult to have companies willing to pay for more
Our business model is
to have a 100 million people using the product, of which 1% pay us around $100
a year. Simple way to make a $100 million business right? The idea is that we
target features to the people that are getting the maximum value out of Trello
and have integrated into every aspect of their life, and because they are
getting so much value out of the product, they are happy to pay for it.
The other 99% drive our marketing to
new people. We’re confident that building a product people love is the best way
to build a successful business.
Coming back to the new of the day…
Why Spain?
We’re so excited to be
launching in Spain. Startups and entrepreneurs have been using Trello since we
launched a few years ago, so for them, it’s no news that Trello is coming to
Spain. However, having an English product restricts our ability to grow to mass
markets where English products aren’t readily adopted. We want both
entrepreneurs and their less tech savvy friends to see the simplicity and
beauty of using Trello to manage their lives.
How
are you going to manage your presence in Spain… what do you expect from this
market?
We will see how having
the product in Spanish affects user growth, and will hopefully develop a much
larger local presence with Spanish content and sample boards in the coming
months. Hopefully at some point in the near future, we can also translate to
Catalan and Euskara.
What will we see the next in
months in Trello… what are your next steps in your masterplan to conquer the
world? :-)
Trello will be
launching in German and has already launched in Portuguese. We’ll be launching
in different countries as well as working on features to make the product more
useful for businesses and consumers alike.
Based on your experience both as a
founder, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs that might be
starting their own companies?
If you are building a
software company, remember that your software is not the secret ingredient and
can probably be copied in a short amount of time. The design, the execution and
the originality of your idea is way more important. Seeing where the world
could go when your idea is a big hit, when no one else can see that, probably
means you are on to something.