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 plans and pricing free#
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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