
How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more - ideaoverload
https://medium.com/disruptivehq/how-to-build-the-next-trello-and-sell-it-for-425-million-or-more-589045c9bd64#.5ukm4vabe
======
whack
I really wish people would stop abusing the term _" disruptive innovation"_ in
ways it was never meant to be used. Making a product that's overly
complicated, beyond what the market is demanding, is just bad management. It
doesn't require any disruptive innovation to correct for this - making
something that better matches your customers' needs is bread-and-butter
business management, which every competent company is already doing.

The whole point of disruptive innovation is to build something which most
customers _do not want_ , with the bet that due to technology/market trends,
market demand will grow exponentially in the future. Unlike the above, this is
a real dilemma because if you're an established successful company, it's hard
to justify pouring energy and resources into something for which the demand
doesn't exist. If you're building something to meet a market demand that
already exists, that's not _disruptive innovation_ , that's just _innovation_
, period. It's something people have been doing for millennia, and there's no
dilemma here.

Sorry for sounding like an angry old man. It just annoys me when I see
specific terms with specific meanings get bastardized into meaningless buzz
words.

~~~
kaspm
I would add that the disruptive innovation _also_ cannibalizes your existing
market business in addition to being something that customers do not want now
but will want in the future. If you build something that customers do not want
now but will want in the future and it does NOT impact your existing business,
that's also just regular old innovation.

~~~
tritosomal
Indeed, and an obvious example is Apple cannibalizing the demand for it's
personal computing systems, by offering mobile devices that nearly replace and
obviate key features offered by personal computers.

Had somebody else beaten them to the punch, they'd have suffered from the same
disruption, _AND_ lost business.

Because they were early, and had the muscle to withstand the temporary
discomfort of being ahead of their time, they could land ahead of schedule and
wait for everyone to catch up. At which point they were able to guide a
massive avalanche in their favor.

It's not a requirement that the cannibalized market should be held by the
disruptor. The market that gets destroyed doesn't have to be your own, but
'tis better to be the disruptor than the disrupted.

------
shortstuffsushi
Hmm. I don't think I can get behind the idea that Trello "disrupted"
Atlassian, and certainly not that it would have killed them (no more than
Medium killed WordPress...). At most, it may have killed Jira, but Trello
seems to capture a slightly different market. Could there be a slimmed version
of Jira that could fit in place of Trello? Sure, but I don't think Atlassian
would have gone that route (thus the acquisition, right?). Then, when their
big product paid off, they bought the sub market as well.

Re:integration, I also think he shortchanges Atlassian. I like Atlassian, so
I'm biased, sure, but I think that they could successfully integrate without
"killing" Trello. Time will tell on that, I suppose. Also, to say that
"Android isn't incorporated into Google" just doesn't seem right. It's also
completely different. Google acquired Android, which is a mobile platform,
where they're a web company. Atlassian and Trello both offer web based
services, and in this case even the same type of product.

~~~
tptacek
One way to look at this is that companies go upmarket from a firm base of
downmarket customers. There's a lot of uncertainty in upmarket enterprise
sales: the engagements can involve RFPs or bakeoffs and involve dogfights that
incumbents can lose to upstarts. A company can do really well in the high-end
markets without ever having a stable, defensible customer base in it.

So if Trello grows to the point where it seriously threatens Jira's downmarket
base, Atlassian has two problems: first, that Trello is sapping their
downmarket revenue, but second, that Trello then has a beachhead from which to
start attacking their high-end prospects as well.

"Killing Atlassian" is surely easier said than done, and probably hyperbolic.
But buying Trello to prevent the emergence of a credible competitor to them
across all their important markets? That sounds like a pretty plausible
explanation for the valuation.

I'm a little skeptical, though, if only because I think Trello has a lot more
potential than Jira (and of Jira's value proposition in the abstract). I think
Atlassian just bought the next Microsoft Excel.

------
tim333
The authors advice -

>Make something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later.

seems rather different from the thinking of the Trello team when they actually
made Trello, as described by Joel Splosky:

>After ten years in management I still never knew what anyone was supposed to
be working on. Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they
were doing, and half the time, my reaction was “why the hell are you working
on THAT?” So one of the teams started working on finding better ways to keep
track of who was working on what. It had to be super simple and friction-free
so that everyone would use it, but it had to be powerful, too.

>...led us to the idea that became Trello. Pretty soon we had four programmers
and two summer interns working on it. We started dogfooding the product when
it was only 700 lines of code, and even in that super-simple form, we found it
incredibly useful.

So basically they built it to scratch their own itch, not as some disruptive
masterplan.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/09/13/announcing-
trello/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/09/13/announcing-trello/)

~~~
jeremiep
I have a hard time believing anyone promising you success, instead of going on
to get it themselves. Its exactly like selling Agile; mostly people who can
barely build working products in the first place, but will happily teach you
how to run your projects. Its "one weird trick" all over again with different
demographics.

I firmly believe you need to dogfood your own product in order to fully
understand its potential. How can you solve a problem you don't understand and
what better way to understand a problem than to experience it first hand?

A product can be shiny and "awesome" all it wants; if it doesn't solve an
actual problem, or isn't convenient enough to solve the problem, it just wont
last.

~~~
tim333
He seems to be giving his strategy a go with his trello rip off like startup
clever.do

Dunno how well - 470 views in 3 months on the demo vid
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEL06gDIBw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKEL06gDIBw)

------
dollaholla
Trello will never hold a candle to Jira for users with complex needs. Trello
is deliberately simple while Jira is deliberately complex. Also the
screenshots comparing a Sprint board to a Kanban board is like comparing
apples and oranges.

~~~
some-guy
I work in enterprise, and our use case for JIRA is so utterly complex to meet
all of the requirements / standards that I cannot even imagine how a migration
to Trello would work.

I see this acquisition as both a) a smaller alternative to JIRA that is much
easier to use (but fundamentally different) and b) a way to prevent Trello
from growing into something bigger, more complex, and become a big competitor
to Atlassian.

I use Trello with my fiancé to organize our wedding planning, house chores,
and projects, but I cannot even imagine how awful it would be for my work's
use case.

~~~
kennethh
It is also a good marketing channel for Jira. If someone uses Trello and need
something more complex the easy way is a board in Jira, perhaps make something
which converts your board or 2 way sync. Marketing departments like Trello but
would never use Jira. But after using Trello for a while they might be more
comfortable using something more complex.

------
kelvin0
As a Software Developer, working with Jira is just a pain for me. I just don't
like much about it, the less time I spend using it the happier I am. There
dozens of views of the same information, but just different enough to get me
lost. I have to admit, I did not buckle down to 'tame' the beast. It feels
like hiking a steep hill on a rainy day.

Trello, on the other hand I introduced to some colleagues, and the simplicity
and ease of use is very satisfying. Feels like surfing on the perfect wave.

~~~
bsder
> As a Software Developer, working with Jira is just a pain for me.

Said every software developer ever about every bug tracking/ticketing system
ever.

> Trello, on the other hand I introduced to some colleagues, and the
> simplicity and ease of use is very satisfying.

Said about every new bug tracking/ticketing system ever. Until you need to do
X, and we need to track Y, and Z needs to sign off before ...

The real problem is that most developers write shitty bug reports. The reason
for all those annoying fields in the bug reporting system is that most
developers won't include them without it.

There is a fine line between having a bug reporting system which is just
sufficiently annoying enough to the end users to give just enough information
to the people fixing the bugs.

~~~
IanCal
> Said every software developer ever about every bug tracking/ticketing system
> ever.

Trello is not a pain for me to use. It would be for others, with different
needs, but it's perfect for me.

> Until you need to do X, and we need to track Y, and Z needs to sign off
> before ...

For many people these don't necessarily get in the way. I've been using trello
for a few years on some projects from start to launch, and a winding down of
development. It doesn't get in my way, and the lack of features hasn't caused
problems.

Sure, we could have gone with Jira just in case things got massively more
complicated, but we were easily able to deal with the odd edge case by talking
to each other, assigning cards or putting notes on them.

------
kriro
Well there's also no mention of the following and general goodwill Joel has
accumulated over the years (mostly by being awesome, honest and also working
hard on other products). Pretty sure he/his company could indeed build the
next Trello by building a simpler X of something. People without that
channel...that's going to be a tiny bit harder.

~~~
notahacker
Yeah, step one to building the next Trello is _be Joel Spolsky, or possibly
37Signals; failing that, be [otherwise] exceptionally good at marketing and
generating goodwill_. Because the reality is that "it's simpler to use, more
general and has less bloat than the market leader" is not a unique selling
point, it's something pretty much every new entrant into a market achieves by
default. So you have to do a lot more than that for your KISS general
productivity/collaboration app to stand out, particularly if starting from the
significantly disadvantaged starting point of not being Joel Spolsky

------
dsmithatx
The picture comparison of boards is a joke. Why would you show the Trello
board view compared to a list of tickets in a sprint? The author must not know
how to use Jira and create a Kanban board.

I actually prefer Trello over Jira but, I have to use Jira at work. Still I
couldn't take this article seriously after seeing that picture comparison.

~~~
tptacek
I feel like this comment literally makes the author's case for him.

~~~
currywurst
Not really .. The boards are a very basic feature in Jira. It's like not
knowing that there are drawing tools in PowerPoint :)

~~~
tptacek
That's the whole Innovator's Dilemma argument: simplistic, minimal versions of
the value propositions of larger products, produced by upstarts, have an
uncanny way of stealing the entire market from incumbents. The key thing you
said was "I actually prefer Trello over Jira".

The reason that happens is that the incumbent --- along with their most vocal
customers! --- is blinded to what 80% of the market wants by the demands of
the high-end 20% of the market. Yes, Trello hasn't duplicated the entire Jira
product. But it might not need to to capture 80% of the revenue of the market.

~~~
dsmithatx
Yes I prefer the simple Trello over Jira but, only for my own personal
projects. Trello is completely useless where I work and, is in no way,
disruptive to the Enterprise.

My point was that, if you can't figure out where a Kanban board is in Jira you
should probably stick to Waterfall development. The author either didn't spend
a few minutes looking at Jira or has no clue what the real difference between
the two products are.

I highly doubt Trello would have replaced Jira at the pace the article
suggests. Either Trello would become overly complex or Jira would adapt and
become simpler and add even more needed features. I don't believe Atlassian
bought Trello out of fear that Trello would innovate them out of market. That
dilema just doesn't apply here IMO.

~~~
foobarian
We experimented with Trello at our company before we bought into Jira, and the
attempt fell flat on its face because of Trello simplicity. It's hard to
describe the difference, but in a nutshell Jira was better at supporting
collaboration, capturing knowledge, and supporting subtly different workflows
that different teams required.

Based on that, it's kind of a neat move by Atlassian. Now they have an instant
base of potential new Jira users. As these Trello customers grow and find out
that their needs can no longer be met, now there is a clear upgrade path.

Presumably they will build some migration tools to make the upgrade
seamless/convert the database of tickets. Or they could even build in cross-
product integration so you can embed links to Jira tickets in Trello cards, or
vice versa.

------
polysaturate
This article was well written and surprisingly did give a plausible reason why
Trello grew and was later acquired.

~~~
ProAm
Trello grew because it was very KISS. The features were so-so but everyone
could use it easily. Atlassian just purchased the bottom segment of the
project market, the segment that would never use JIRA in a million years
because of it's complexity.

~~~
omouse
Yep, they're consolidating the market and becoming a bigger monopoly. At
almost every company, and especially the large ones, JIRA is the "tool" that
is used.

I keep wondering whatever happened to all the other tools out there because
everyone in corporate life has consolidated on this big complex tool. Maybe
all other project and task management tools were too open/open source? Didn't
_feel_ enterprise-y enough for managers?

~~~
keithnz
youtrack is alive and well.

------
paulplug
Obviously I wouldn't look at this as a recipe for success, but the author does
provide some pretty interesting insights. I do think that it is easy to look
back at sparse events like acquisitions and try see patterns, whereas in fact
there is a fair amount of luck, timing and personal connections involved in
the acquisition game.

~~~
curun1r
> I wouldn't look at this as a recipe for success

I think it is a recipe for success, but that doesn't mean it's easy. You can't
just find a successful product that's overly complex and remove a bunch of
features and succeed. You need to spend time understanding the market and the
customers, figure out the sweet spot to aim for and then what features are
actually necessary for that sweet spot and then ruthlessly say no to
everything else. Many products have multiple sweet spots in the market and an
up-market product can obscure the fact that there's another, more down-market
product opportunity. Identifying that opportunity and then executing well is a
pretty sure recipe for success, but it's really hard to do.

The people who should take heed of this advice are those who are less creative
and visionary but are disciplined and skilled enough to build a quality
product. There will always be product opportunities for people who can see
5-10 years out and either predict the future or lead people to their vision of
the future. But that's not most people and there's no shame in admitting that.
For those of us not in that visionary group, the strategy presented here is a
pretty good alternative.

------
dasil003
This article is making the obvious comparison, but it falls down on the
slightest inspection because Trello and JIRA aren't really even in the same
space. Yes, Trello can substitute for JIRA if your needs are simple, and yes
JIRA has boards to meet different kinds of planning workflows, but the actual
overlap of usages is pretty small.

What made Trello successful is that it is an incredibly simple SPA that never
wavered in its vision. The minute Trello designers try to go down the road of
meeting the needs of a ticketing system then the magic and broad utility of
Trello will be poisoned.

There's probably some truth to the claim that Trello was eating some of the
low-end of JIRA's market, but it would never credibly kill Atlassian, at least
not without branching out into a lot of other products first.

The acquisition makes a lot more sense to me in the portfolio building aspect,
Trello can satisfy a very wide array of business needs that go well beyond
traditional dev tools. I put it more in the category of Dropbox Paper—simple,
modern, real-time-collaboration-based, mobile-friendly tools with a very
strong essential vision leading to extremely broad utility.

------
giarc
For anyone interested in reading more about this, Clayton Christensen covers
this area in The Innovators Dilemma.

[https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-
Chan...](https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-Change-
Business/dp/0062060244/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1485379404&sr=8-2&keywords=innovators+dilemma)

------
yokisan
With SaaS, there's almost always room for better. Better to the value of $435m
plus? Depends. But enough potential returns to make it worth the effort if
you're able and willing.

Another thing Trello had going for it was a decent brand. It didn't (and
doesn't) feel project management-y.

 _Ooh, nice colors. Aww, taco the mascot. And look, not 100 bells and
whistles_. This initial conditioning is super-valuable. I had the exact same
feeling moving from Google docs to Quip (mentioned in the article).

Choosing to add more feeling instead of more features has benefits.

------
potch
What if we all did this and got hundreds of millions of dollars! Think of the
inflation! ;)

------
kennyma
So much BS in this article but let's start with these 3: 1) "Products based on
disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and more
convenient to use." How many more benefits can he put in that sentence? He's
basically saying disruptive tech is typically cheaper or better. 2) "Make
something the mainstream market doesn’t want now, but will want later." Trying
to predict the future is just betting on luck. 3) That random functionality vs
time graph. What is 200 Functionality?

Bonus: "If you want to get ideas for your $400 million startup, subscribe to
my newsletter."

~~~
tptacek
Since this article is basically a straightforward blog-sized recap of Clayton
Christensen's _Innovator's Dilemma_, which is one of the more important
business books in technology, it seems unlikely to me that the whole piece is
"BS".

------
RockyMcNuts
not sure if the takeaway is

\- no way to improve a software product without increasing cost and complexity

\- no way to protect your franchise with e.g., a lower cost entry-level
product, market segmentation, a simplified freemium, etc.

\- so the incumbent always has to buy up upstarts that threaten it

(which anyway you can't do once the market prices in that the upstart is going
to kill you)

overall the blog post seems a bit cargo cult-y ... if there are lazy
incumbents with overpriced, bloated products, yeah, you're doing God's work by
disrupting them. But it's sometimes harder than it looks. Don't spend your
$425m just yet.

------
mvindahl
The article makes some excellent points. However I'm not sure I understand how
acquiring Trello would save JIRA.

First off, I'm not sure that JIRA is in need of saving. IMHO it has grown to
become a very bloated product which very few people really know how to use. If
I were to pick a tool for project management, I wouldn't consider JIRA for one
second. On the other hand, they have a fine game going in the enterprise
segment. Enterprises value a bloated feature set because they pay up big money
and because Bob in purchasing needs something semi-substantial to justify the
high cost. Besides, Bob won't be using the product anyway.

Trello, on the other hand, would be favored by different types of customers.
Small projects, small companies. It offers low pricing, has a small sales
department and a large customer base.

According to Joel Spolsky, in his "Camels and Rubber Duckies" blog post
([https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-
rubber-...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-
duckies/)), there is usually no middle road. There is rarely a segment for a
mid-range product with half the feature set of the enterprise product and a
far higher price than the simple product.

Which begs the question: What does Atlassian hope to achieve?

1) create some unified product which will cater to both the garage startup and
to Bob in purchasing? Good luck with that

2) turn off Trello? That's what Darth Vader would have done but there is a
certain amount of negative publicity to using the death star ray

3) Make Trello rot, either by

3a) stopping funding of Trello and let it become slowly obsolete

3b) sprinkling with bloated features, such as JIRA integration or what have we

Probably 3b).

Anyway, move Trello too much off its current trajectory and boom, some new
startup will pop up, offer an "Import Data from Trello" feature and do things
right. Trello is pretty simple by design, and the APIs are open. There is
really no customer lock-in. I think Atlassian is smart enough to know this.

------
onion2k
No matter how good your JIRA-alternative is, persuading people to manage a
project in a different way is _exceptionally_ hard, and has very little to do
with your tech. Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like
to deviate from known methodologies. My startup was in this space (managing
projects, with a focus on requirements and change), and we failed because we
underestimated how hard it would be to get customers to even _try_ a different
approach.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Project Management is seen as a science, and people don't like to deviate
> from known methodologies.

It's treated more as a set of religious rituals justified by received wisdom
(which, to be fair, gives even less flexibility for change than if it were
viewed as a science, in which case practices would be based on systematically
gathered evidence and change in response to new evidence, rather than changing
mostly when people indoctrinated in a different tradition come to power in an
organization.)

~~~
onion2k
Actually yes, that does seem to be a more appropriate analogy. A lot of the
time people follow a system without testing whether or not it's working.

------
keithnz
It wouldn't of killed Jira, I've tried using trello as a replacement for Jira,
it was sort of okish, but was kind of awkward. Then moved to Youtrack, and
never looked back really, seemed to have a nice blend of trello and Jira

------
randomosass
"I’m sure many of Altlassian’s employees don’t understand this decision.
Because it makes no sense for them. In their minds, Trello is a shitty product
compared to Jira."

everyone inside thats not a manager thinks jira is shit too

------
gavinh
> Atlassian bought Trello for $425 million. Because Trello was on trajectory
> to kill Atlassian.

Please write complete sentences. Some people in the tech community seem to
think that sentence fragments can replace clear, simple sentences.

~~~
grzm
As this is a comment on a grammar point of the submission article, directed at
the author itself, it would likely be better as a comment on the article,
which Medium supports.

------
janlukacs
I don't think the author used Jira. Stopped reading at "Trello created a
cheaper, simpler, and smaller version of Jira."

~~~
tbirrell
I use Jira. Trello is a cheaper, simpler, and smaller version of Jira.

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Sounds like you're using jira wrong.

I suppose you can encode anything onto index cards. This doesn't mean it's
usable.

~~~
curun1r
> Sounds like you're using jira wrong.

So are 90% of Jira's users. That's the point.

~~~
dollaholla
Jira used correctly will triumph over Trello used correctly any day of the
week. But for the lazy with simple needs, sure use Trello.

~~~
dgfgfdagasdfgfa
Hmm, I can definitely see that. JIRA can be the slowest, awkward, non-
intuitive piece of crap web app out there.

~~~
LargeWu
Sounds like you've never used Target Process

------
AznHisoka
"Its product had less features. It was simple. And it was fucking cheap. It
was disruptive!"

I feel this is the wrong way to describe Trello's success. i can build an app
with a blank white space and charge $0 for it - that has less features and is
very simple but it aint gonna sell for a million dollars.

------
thyselius
So, what startup ideas can we create from this?

~~~
freehunter
Same as always: take a complicated, expensive product, strip it down to an
MVP, put it online for free with a SaaS price tag for premium features, and
market it like hell.

------
elchief
so is Spolsky still blogging, or is he too busy counting his money?

