
Trello celebrates One Million Users - aritraghosh007
https://trello.com/1m
======
JPKab
I have, in the past 3 months, been forced to work in a location where the only
internet access is on machines with IE8 on them (and no ability to install
Chrome Frame). The loss of Trello has absolutely FUCKING sucked. I'm sorry for
the profanity, but it is an abysmally awful process to have to STOP using
Trello and go back to emailing spreadsheets back and forth or _shudder_ MS
Project.

I think this huge drop in my productivity is a testament to just how awesome
Trello is.

~~~
MartinCron
Have you considered the Trello apps for smartphones and tablets as an
alternative?

~~~
JPKab
Less than 2 years ago, I bought a "cutting edge" Android smartpone, called the
Samsung Infuse. Almost two years later, Samsung has yet to release a single
update to Gingerbread (from Froyo) over the cell network. A few months ago,
they were nice enough to put out a buggy Gingerbreak update to the device, but
it was hosted on their website, required me to install software on my computer
just to load it, and it then failed (repeatedly) to install on my phone. The
Trello app won't work on Froyo, so, no, thanks to the fact that Samsung
doesn't give a shit about its customers, I don't have Trello on my phone. I
just want to add that the Samsung Infuse, at the time of purchase, was a top
of the line phone in the store. Same (subsidized) price as an iPhone. Within 6
months of purchase, it was completely abandoned by Samsung. HTC will be
getting my business for the next purchase.

~~~
IsaacL
Heh, I have the same problem with my Galaxy S1... Count yourself lucky, I'm
still stuck on Eclair!

~~~
rohamg
Samsung is frequently referred to as "the only android carrier that makes any
money". One wonders whether such Apple-sque upgrade forcing has contributed to
their financial success.

~~~
xmodem
Apple doesn't 'force' upgrades anything like what every Android vendor does.
The iPhone 4 is now 2.5 years old and still happily runs iOS6 - I can't find
anyone with a 2.5 year old android phone that's running current software that
hasn't modded it.

~~~
gootdude
even the 3gs runs ios6 and it's from 2009!

------
citricsquid
These sort of product celebrations (with users providing feedback on what the
product means to them) are fantastic. As a user it's great to be able to see
what a product means to others too and how they're using it. We had a similar
page for a website we run and reading user feedback is so much fun, companies
should do this sort of thing more often.

Trello only reached 500,000 users in July of this year, that's some
spectacular growth: <http://blog.trello.com/trello-is-now-500000-strong/>

~~~
michaelkscott
I think you mean, July of _last_ year.

------
richardofyork
I wonder how much, it at all, has Trello's success impacted sales of 37
Signals' Basecamp. We cancelled our Basecamp account and switched to Trello
after we realized Trello was ideal for our project management needs.

------
IsaacL
I'm impressed Trello has managed to succeed in what many had written off as
overcrowded space. I think the key to its success is the insight that Joel
Spolsky explains in his post here:
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html> \- that successful apps
often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes them suitable for many
purposes. (For Trello, that's a "list of lists".)

Fog Creek Employees: can anyone comment on who had this original insight? Was
it Joel himself or another employee?

~~~
zaidf
_that successful apps often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes
them suitable for many purposes_

And I'd argue that that is also a major reason when apps fail: they force
people to change their existing ways of thinking and aren't able to "recruit"
enough users/customers.

Frankly I wasn't that big on trello and still have major issues with it. For
example, when juggling multiple boards, I still don't really know where to
begin my workflow. I still don't really know how to see casually what all has
been going on across my boards...a lot like a facebook feed. These are
critical features that keep me from really engaging with it.

~~~
toyg
Try connecting to Trello through Hojoki.com , it provides a chronological
stream-like interface that might be more to your liking. You can filter by
Project etc.

------
nthitz
That announcement page was buggy for men on Ubuntu Chrome. The page loaded and
I saw the text letter but the smaller "title" card was overlayed on top of the
letter but was mirrored left to right so you couldn't read it. Looks good on
OSX chrome though!

~~~
chollida1
> That announcement page was buggy for men on Ubuntu Chrome.

What about women, did it work fine for them? :)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yes, didn't you know - the XX Chrome works fine, but the XY Chrome is a bit
buggy.

;-)

edit - smiley

~~~
davidbanham
Missed opportunity for "Chrome-o-some". Disappointing.

------
rogerbinns
My biggest problem with Trello is that they don't support multiple identities.
I use it for work and have also created a personal account. What I would
expect is a nice dropdown to switch identities (eg like you get with Google or
Github). The mobile apps also only have one identity.

A work around is in theory to keep logging out and back in again as the
different users, but this is extremely tedious and in my case completely
impractical as I don't know my passwords (stored in a password manager).

On one of Joel's posts it was clear he used Trello for work and for personal
activity, but didn't state how that was achieved.

~~~
binxbolling
I've created multiple boards. Right now I'm at three: one for my personal
life, one for my public work life (i.e. shared with colleagues), and one for
my private work life that has my own to-dos, lists, etc. Then you use the
board dropdown similar to what you wanted for users.

~~~
rogerbinns
Those are all personal, although your last one includes work information. My
work has a separate identity from me, has a separate email address, and has
confidential information that needs to be bounded by that work. Intermingling
it with boards associated with my personal identity is wrong, and in violation
of several work NDAs with partners.

It should also be the case that my work can disable/cancel my work account and
be confident of no further work related access by me.

~~~
kevingessner
This is what Trello organizations are designed for. An org is a collection of
boards and a group of people, with permission control.

This is Fog Creek's org: <https://trello.com/fogcreek>

You'll just see our public boards, but we also have boards that are visible
only to org members. Granting or restricting access to all of them is as
simple as adding or removing a user. You can create and be a member of as many
orgs as you want.

~~~
lessnonymous
But that's not the issue. The problem is the inability to switch between
identities without logging out and back in. Which is significantly harder on
iOS than the desktop.

Not really a surprise. I'm having the same problem with a pile of services.
The only thing I'm using that lets me switch easily is Gmail.

There was a post on here a month or so ago about a guy who lost his personal
drop box because they do a bad job of understanding people have multiple
personas.

------
bane
Ha! It's funny since I literally just finally signed up this past week.

I saw it when it first came out and was blown away but didn't have time to fit
it into my routine until recently. Really wonderful elegant software, I've
gotten a few other people to convert to it too just in the past couple days.

I have boards for misc tasks, various engineering tasks, shopping,
development, sales pipelines etc. It's _fantastic_.

------
joelthelion
How many active ones?

~~~
gecko
I don't feel comfortable providing that number, but I can talk a bit about how
the Trello team would answer it.

The concept of "active" isn't really a cut-and-dried thing. Do you count
people who merely look at Trello, or do they have to do something? If they
have to do something, then what is "something"? If I do one "something," is
that enough, or do I have to do a couple? What if someone does that on my
behalf (i.e., assigning me to or removing me from a board or card)? Are they
active, am I active, or both?

It turns out the Trello team several different concepts of "active" they
chart, but two they pay a lot of attention to are the number of users who have
been active on Trello in the last 28 days (i.e., your pip has gone green), and
the number of users who have performed at least four actions in the last 28
days (e.g., create a card, move a card, join a board, etc.). The awesome thing
is that those numbers, while obviously less than the total member count, are
nothing to sneeze at, and have been moving in proportion to the total member
count throughout the time they've been measured. In other words, we have
roughly twice as many active users today, by the above metrics, as we did at
500,000.

Sorry for the fuzziness, but I hope that at least gives you enough information
to know it's not an empty statistic.

~~~
lubos
what's wrong with providing that number? I think number of sign-ups is pretty
much useless metric. even dead MySpace keeps increasing their sign-ups. It
doesn't mean they are doing well.

To be honest, I would be really really interested how many active users Trello
has. It would be great service to startup community to see what is conversion
rate out there for bigger services like Trello.

Evernote is very public with their numbers, for example they claim 1/3 of
total sign-ups being active users (users who logged into service in last
month).

~~~
gecko
I work on Kiln, not Trello, and I don't feel comfortable ripping numbers off
their dashboard and posting them onto HN. Simple as that. For all I know, they
plan on announcing those numbers themselves soon, and I don't want to get in
their way.

~~~
lelandbatey
I'd just like to chime in and say: thank you for being sensitive to the
desires of the Trello team!

Also, we hope that Trello can make an official statement about this soon, and
we look forward to their data!

------
dodger
. . . and is still super, super fun to work on.

~~~
swah
I could never adapt. I didn't like the way one deals with older items.

Care to tell us how you use it?

~~~
newobj
I think he is saying he's a Trello developer.

~~~
dodger
Yes, I was trying to say that developing Trello is still really fun, even as
it's getting bigger - we are starting to see some minor scaling challenges,
but it's still a great time.

But we do use Trello to manage Trello, with a public dev board
(<https://trello.com/dev>) and also internal boards to track things that are
not yet public or that are too granular to expose externally.

Uservoice has a neat and somewhat complex setup:
[http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-
pr...](http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-product-
management/)

And there are a bunch of good articles about how people are using Trello;
searching for 'How I use Trello' turns up a lot of ideas. That being said,
it's not going to fit everybody every time.

~~~
jcastro
Would love to see what kind of dev platform/technology you use to build
trello, specifically the scaling challenges.

~~~
kevingessner
The team wrote a blog post describing their tech stack last year:
<http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/>

The biggest change since then is that Trello now runs on AWS, rather than
colocated servers in NYC. But the software is the same.

~~~
dodger
. . . and here's an example of an issue with scaling it up:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13770826/poorly-
balanced-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13770826/poorly-balanced-
socket-accepts-with-linux-3-2-kernel-vs-2-6-kernel)

~~~
tedunangst
Shared file descriptors are bad mojo.

------
psteinweber
found in the comments:

"I manage my relationship with my girlfriend using Trello. I stack potential
gifts for her in one list, briefs on arguments we have in another, etc. My
friends share the board and help me resolve the arguments in real time. I use
the labels to convey my emotions at a certain point in time for a specific
card. I really love her. Fingers crossed she doesn't find out!"

------
monty_singh
I started using Trello about 2.5 months ago and its really impacted the way I
do almost everything for the better. It has made organizing a plan of action
for my to-do's and side projects so much easier that I feel like a blow
through my tasks now.

Congratulations and good luck on your way to 2 million users!

------
ChuckMcM
Interesting tool. This is something I normally do in a notebook (or a text
file) so it wasn't like I was out looking for anything to replace that, but if
this can add value to that process I'm all for it.

One of the things I don't have in my home grown process but wish I did was a
way to surface important but not urgent things periodically. Sort of along the
memoize theme you need to keep the important things in your head even if
you're not currently working on them, and having them surface periodically
would assist that. I've had stuff get pushed so far down in the stack that it
basically submerges until it becomes an urgent issue.

------
KevinMS
I'm curious if an app like this could have gotten traction if it wasn't put
out by a shop like Fog Creek. In other words, if some guy built this in his
basement, would anybody have noticed, no matter how great?

~~~
bemmu
I imagine fame would give you an initial boost, but it would be only temporary
without a really good product. The growth curve might look similar to a non-
famous developer, but just start at an earlier point on the curve.

------
thelarry
I really like trello. Something about it feels so natural. I like it a heap
better than jira + agile plugin. I do like pivitol tracker too, but trello can
do more.

~~~
benrhughes
At my last place we used Trello from the day it came out (and had used fogbugz
for years). At my current place we use jira + agile. I do prefer Trello for
high level stuff, but I think jira does a good job of handling both high level
and low level tracking in the same app. Their agile stuff seems to be getting
better too.

I'm glad to see Trello is going so well. It's a great product and a great
example of not having to build something that covers every possible use case.

------
j45
I still wish for the deeper Fogbugz integration with Trello that has been
coming up for a while.

I reasonably use it, would love to use it more, it's Wonderful. :)

------
edanm
I've looked at Trello several times, and it's always seemed like a _great_ app
to work with... but I never got around to actually using it.

So, open question time: How do all you HN'ers use Trello? What kind of things
do you manage with it? Bonus for telling us what you used before, and how
Trello makes it easier. Super-duper bonus for anything to do with running
software projects, and running businesses.

Thanks!

~~~
basicallydan
I used Mingle before in a very large project. It was good enough, but soon I
moved to a smaller project (4-7 people at any one time) and switching to
Trello has proved to be a real asset.

We create cards (story cards, basically) for each user experience and move
them to different columns (Backlog, In Progress, Done) and then archive
columns at the end of each Iteration.

We also have Known Issues columns and we maintain a large amount of our
discussions about implementation on cards.

Also as the developer on the project, I find it useful to put the individual
tasks of each user experience on the corresponding cards, which I can split
into lists (such as 'API Tasks' and 'UI Tasks').

It's very flexible, and I've found it to work very well with the way I
intuitively do things.

I also use it on a small side project that I do with a colleague of mine. We
love it.

Everyone with whom I work on Trello loves it and we avidly follow its
development.

------
halis
I used Trello for a little while, I thought the software was good, but didn't
really match my taste. Just didn't like the cards =/

------
DougN7
There's a great description about the tech stack at
<http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-stack/>

Does anyone know how many servers it runs on? I'd like to see a physical tech
stack description (is it already out there somewhere? If so, my Google-fu
failed me)

EDIT: discussion -> description

~~~
bjt
As of October 2012, it's on EC2. [http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fogbugz-
kiln-and-copilot-...](http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/fogbugz-kiln-and-
copilot-continue-to-run-on-backup-power-trello-moving-to-amazon-aws.html)

I don't know how many instances, or what size.

------
gryphonic
This looks like a great service that i didn't know about before. Definitely
going to be getting one more user. I wish we could use something like this at
work.

Since most of this is rather new to me, are there any other great
organizational/ basic life services out there? I would be curious to see what
other people are using.

------
terjeto
My company has developed a similar product. The philosophy is to combine
productivity with fun-factor.

Instead of lists-in-lists it is based on a customizable grid (spreadsheet)
with sticky notes.

<https://www.symphonical.com/all-you-need-to-know/>

------
michaelfeathers
I've just started using it but now that it has 1M users I'm a little
apprehensive for the usual reasons: no easy way to export or access offline,
and no idea of whether there are any monetization plans on the horizon. It
could be another way to get lost in the cloud.

~~~
thedufer
You can export your data: see "Portability" at <https://trello.com/privacy>

I don't know what I can say to ease your worries about monetization. Its
definitely something we're working on. That said, Fog Creek is an established
company with steady cash flow, so we're not just going to disappear.

------
tesmar2
Great Service. Recently, however, we moved to basecamp because of the
calendaring features.

~~~
egomaksab
If you need more vertical stuff then check out Breeze
(<http://letsbreeze.com>), it's Basecamp and Trello mashup. Plus it adds
calendar, time tracking, budgeting and reporting.

~~~
bonaldi
And is hilariously expensive, with no free plan. More even than Basecamp.

~~~
egomaksab
Pricing is based on the value it's providing. It is not a horizontal tool but
deeply vertical. We are not competing with price and also not directly with
Basecamp or Trello.

------
dfischer
If you're looking for an alternative to Trello take a look at
<http://www.kanbanpad.com> we've been working on it for quite a while and it
fits a niche that many like.

------
uses
Trello is one of those things that I would have said nobody needed, until the
first time I touched it and realized the pure joy of moving cards around
lists.

That's the power of making something that's fun to use.

------
pgrote
Great service. I hope they start charging for the service soon.

~~~
xxpor
From your perspective, why? AFAIK, it's not like it's a social network where
you get an increase in value with the filtering charging brings.

~~~
c1u
I love Trello, but cannot commit to using it more for business until I have an
expectation of service, which comes from paying for it. They're awesome, but
they owe me nothing, and that's just too risky.

~~~
gecko
You know, I've had a fair number of services that I'm paying for just vanish
out from under me, too (e.g., eWorld, iTools, Grove.io, the original Siri).
Sometimes the wind-down is longer, sometime it isn't. And, conversely, some
things I don't pay for have been around for a very, very long time (Freenode,
Gmail, my old Fidonet BBS, etc.). Maybe paid sticks around longer on average,
but I think paid-v.-free is a bad litmus test.

I think there's a much better one: how easy it is to take your data and go
home. With Trello, the answer is "exceedingly easy." On any board, just go to
"Options" -> "Share, Print, Export..." and dump the entire board to JSON. From
there, it should be easy to move your data onto Remember the Milk, Pinterest,
org-mode, or whatever's appropriate for you. You can even automate grabbing
that JSON on a daily basis via the API, if you're so inclined.

So while I understand your argument, your actual risk here is very, very low.

As another Creeker pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the Trello team has
some stuff coming out in the future that you may find appealing, if you would
feel better contractually paying for stuff. But in terms of risk, I think that
it can be very low, today, whether you pay or not.

~~~
xxpor
On the other hand, you have a better argument when the service goes down
temporarily. They're more likely to respond quickly if they have paying
customers.

~~~
gecko
That may be fair. In this particular case, I can tell you we respond to Trello
outages the same we'd respond to FogBugz or Kiln outages, so your concern
should be minimal.

~~~
xxpor
Ah, didn't realize you were a Fog Creek employee yourself :)

------
fady
i love trello.. i use it for everything and really love what fogcreek has done
with it. i do have one suggestion: please make you mobile app faster. the UI,
in terms of moving cards to different list is really hard to use and lags a
lot. i suggest finding a better solution for that feature, instead of trying
to replicate the desktop experience. i rarely use the mobile app for this
reason.

keep up the good work

------
neel8986
Can Trello become for node what twitter was for rails?

------
pla3rhat3r
This is awesome! So happy for these guys! GREAT solution. 1 million is just
the tip of the iceberg. I'm sure they will have millions more.

------
pswenson
I've been pushing for trello over the much slower, less intuitive sprint.ly.

the main hangup is the lack of a daily digest report. anyone have a solution?

~~~
justinlilly
Sorry you feel this way, pswenson. Are you still experiencing the slowness on
Sprint.ly? Please email me at justin@sprint.ly and I'm happy to help as I can.

------
hayksaakian
Too many project management platforms nowadays. I'd rather let them compete
for a few years and see what comes out on top.

------
warrentr
They don't check for uniqueness of email address when registering via google,
so perhaps this claim is dubious :)

~~~
onetwothreefour
All user number claims from anyone are dubious. Just compare them all with a
grain of salt. :)

------
james-singh
Congrats to Trello! It's one service/solution I love dearly.

------
elchief
mad props to spolsky-spolsky, but pivotal is better.

------
lazyjones
So what does the 1000000th user win? Nothing? I'm disappointed. ;-)

