
Why Trello failed to build a $1B business - amorsly
https://blog.usejournal.com/why-trello-failed-to-build-a-1-billion-business-e1579511d5dc
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Whitespace
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13839738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13839738)

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dang
Thanks, missed that one.

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brudgers
From an internal rate of return standpoint, Trello may have come pretty close
to the value of a $1billion company to its founders and employees because it
only took one round of funding - $10 million for non-controlling interest [1]
- and existed at $450 million. So the pool of money for common stockholders
was $225 million or more.

[1]: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2014/07/24/trello-
inc/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2014/07/24/trello-inc/)

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amorsly
Yeah the title of the article is misleading, it should have highlighted the
strategy part of growing a business (as in the article) instead of the focus
on the valuation. We are probably missing the intention of the founders when
they started. Anyone should be happy with such an income, no question about
that I think.

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gumby
> From the article: “We see Trello as a feature, not a product.”

That's pretty much the answer. In this case it wasn't a horizontal/vertical
issue, simply that the feature was easily added by other, more comprehensive
platforms.

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craigvn
I agree with this. Trello could have added a lot more features, gone for
Enterprise, but it would then have no longer been Trello.

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s73ver_
I feel this focus on valuations, and saying that Trello "failed" just because
a bunch of people who were not involved with the company at all thought they
should have hit a different number is truly bad for our industry. There is
zero reason to use the words "fail" and Trello in the same paragraph, let
alone the same sentence. And yet, here we are.

We need to move away from the growth at all costs mindset, and go back to
focusing on building world class products. It is perfectly ok to slow down
once in a while, and not just chase the next quarter's numbers.

Trello was a success, and we should celebrate what they did. Not deride them
because they didn't live up to some VC's hyper-inflated expectations.

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maxxxxx
It's pretty insane to use the word "fail" in the same sentence with Trello. Is
"Why Amazon failed to build a 10 trillion dollar business" next?

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bjt
Agreed. It's a very skewed perspective that treats $425 million as a failure.

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juandazapata
I'd like to know how many $1B businesses has the author built.

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CamelCaseName
This is unfairly dismissive. The author recognizes Trello's success [0] and is
sharing his thoughts. Is there something in particular he said that you
disagree with?

[0]

>Hindsight, of course, is 20/20\. While I’ve spent most of this post talking
about Trello’s missed opportunity, we shouldn’t forget that building a SaaS
business that’s worth over $10M, let alone one that’s worth $425M, is a huge
accomplishment.

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jbob2000
>It looked a lot like a whiteboard with sticky notes translated into a web
browser and an iPhone App.

That's pretty much it. It was an insanely easy idea to copy, you can already
do it with sticky notes if you work in an office. I don't really think you can
improve the service beyond that; It's a note tracker, it tracks notes.

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lostphilosopher
I've said this on HN before. But this is what I love about Trello - they
resisted the urge to do more than just reproduce the sticky note/whiteboard
experience digitally. I've used other products that could be described as
"copies" that tried to "enhance" that experience, even slightly, with
additional functionality that ended up detracting from the core product. It
seems like that was a harder balance to hit than it might look.

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hobofan
The thing is that it is so limited, that you'll move away from it sooner or
later when you need more structure. I've used it in a significant capacity in
4 teams, and we always ended up migrating to another tool, once it was clear
which other tool would fit the needs of the team the best. Sure, that's good
for you as user to have an early-stage playground, but probably bad for
Trello.

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funnelsgun
I have to use Jira at work, and cannot tell you how much happier I'd be if we
could move to Trello.

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rleigh
The grass is always greener. Trello is so awful as a bug/issue tracker I'd
love to be using JIRA.

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funnelsgun
In Jira you can't even read the issue because half of the screen is occupied
with navs or borders.

This is more or less how it looks on a full-screen Retina 15" Macbook Pro:
[http://pcgen.org/autobuilds/pcgen-
docs/images/jira/jira_04.p...](http://pcgen.org/autobuilds/pcgen-
docs/images/jira/jira_04.png)

