
Trello is now half million strong - Brajeshwar
http://blog.trello.com/trello-is-now-500000-strong/
======
DanielBMarkham
I love Trello and am a huge fan. I'm finding that I don't use it as much as I
thought I would, though.

The missing feature for me is the ability to share a column between boards.
This would let me work with other people. Work is hierarchical. I make big
decisions and then those big decisions get split up and consumed by other
folks. I can't have everybody controlling boards at every level. So when I
drop "clean room" to my "Stuff my son is handling" column, I don't care or
know how he breaks that up and does it. All I care about is that once he's
broken up that work and completed all of it that he passes the card to my
"done" column. I create and track the task at a high level. He does the same
at a lower level. My big task breaks up into a bunch of small tasks for him.
The same kind of scenario plays out in lots of things: refurbishing a house,
planning for a summer vacation, tending to landscaping around the house, and
so on.

Everything can't be flat. There has to be some kind of hierarchical structure.
Having one column appear in multiple boards would allow that to happen. Might
be some other solutions. Don't know. You could get into some kind of parent-
child thing, but that's butt-ugly. I think just letting one column exist on
multiple boards would solve the problem without creating a complexity problem.

That's the one thing preventing me from active use. If they could fix that,
and somehow figure out the hosting/privacy issues many companies have, it'd be
a perfect app. Keep up the awesome work, guys!

~~~
larrys
"If they could fix that"

The question also is how long will they continue to fix and offer a service
which has no revenue? And who is to say the service won't get acquired (in
addition to just being outright cancelled). Saying "always be free" doesn't
create a legal obligation given a change of circumstances.

(I have a workflow which depends greatly on free Thunderbird and the (paid
version) of the quicktext pro extension. I was pretty upset to even see
stories that TB was not going to be maintained as well going forward.)

~~~
mhp
"Saying "always be free" doesn't create a legal obligation given a change of
circumstances."

Neither does charging. Most SAAS products charge on a monthly basis, so the
most any vendor owes you is 30 days of usage. Even so, they could always just
shut down today and refund you your money.

Not to toot our own horn, but Fog Creek has been around for 12 years, we've
been profitable every year along with having dozens of employees. There's
little chance that we're about to disappear (or get acquired). We've invested
a lot into Trello, and we're not going to change our minds on a whim.

We realize people are running their businesses and adapting their workflows
around Trello, and we're encouraging that. Our plan is to give you even more
security and more reasons to integrate our product into your business in the
future.

So while I can see some merit in arguing that "saying always be free" is just
a promise, it's backed by a company that's over a decade old. I don't see any
evidence to suggest the scenarios you are describing.

~~~
frossie
Just a plea - remember that there is a tier between "freeloaders" and
"companies willing to pay $$" - it's what you would call the "supporter"
level. This is the level that dropbox, for example, lacks - some ability to
give, say, $3 a month not in order to get premium features, but to feel good,
and support a product you like.

I use Trello every day for a whole bunch of things and it really does make my
life easier. It would make me happy to give Trello a bit of money for services
that I already use for free.

[Edit to comment below: I don't think it is such a strange suggestion - it's
the NPR model: everybody gets to listen to the radio station for free, some
get to feel good about supporting it in exchange for something nominal like a
bumper sticker. Sure there is a difference between accepting money and never
having to deal with money, but I assume Trello has some plan to accept money
eventually for something]

~~~
ArbitraryLimits
> it's the NPR model

So for one week every six months, you'd go to your Trello projects and instead
of being able to use them normally, you could use them for five minutes at a
time before you had to listen to a 10 minute plea for money that wouldn't stop
even if you donated right away?

~~~
jaylevitt
Sure, if I got a designer tote bag.

------
qeorge
We implemented Trello, along with daily working/billing about a month ago, and
I don't think we'll ever go back. Working on one project per day instead of
trying to do 100 things at once cut my stress in half and doubled my
productivity.

Trello makes it easy to see what's getting done by whom, and who is available
to work on the next item coming down the pipe. Client work gets done faster,
and we have more time for internal projects. We have one board for invoices,
one for leads, and one for projects. Its a great system.

So, we owe a huge thanks to the folks at Fog Creek, and I can't understand why
we can't pay them. But also to Ryan Carson and Thomas Ptacek, for their strong
recommendations of Trello[1] and daily billing[2], respectively.

[1] [http://ryancarson.com/post/24884883426/how-i-
manage-40-peopl...](http://ryancarson.com/post/24884883426/how-i-
manage-40-people-remotely) [2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802>

~~~
fgd
Could you elaborate on how you've implemented "billing"?

I have some ideas how to implement time tracking for billing purposes but
haven't got around to it yet.

------
bonaldi
I think Trello is fantastic. It's a game-changer for development and project
management, even if you use it solo. My only problem is I can't use it at work
due to our privacy and regulatory requirements.

Fog Creek: A version we can host ourselves, please! We would pay fogbugz-
levels if not more.

~~~
mhp
I know it's not what you want to hear, but we have no plans to make a self-
hosted version.

~~~
bonaldi
Yes, I should have said I've seen that in your FAQs. I understand it, of
course, but it's a great pity -- the demand is relatively high, judging by the
numbers of forum posts looking for "trello alternatives" out there.

It wouldn't even have to be updated anything like as frequently as real
Trello, or at all. A stable snapshot, with security updates if you found
egregious holes, would be more than enough.

~~~
tedunangst
It's very hard to sell a product only to "understanding" customers, because I
doubt they would agree on what "as frequently" means. Or how much self-
assembly is required to put the whole thing together if there's no installer.
People will say they just want a zip of .js files and they'll be happy to get
it running, but when they get that zip file they get very angry, not happy.
I've seen it happen too often.

"When you said it had some rough edges, I thought you meant ..."

------
lubos
The title is misleading. Signups are not really what matters. I wonder how
many users actually log in at least once a week.

I have Trello account and tried to use it when it launched but eventually I
reverted back to my good old pad and pen once again.

~~~
swdunlop
Our engineering team logs into it daily, and some of us stay logged in
throughout the day, checking off lists and hashing out ideas in the cards
before importing them into engineering docs. It's a great way to manage
features and organize tasks, even if we don't fit into a classic "Agile"
cycle.

Trello has been a big hit with my wife who is a writer. She uses it to
organize scenes, chapters and various snippets before integrating them into
her draft. I've tried introducing various storyboarding applications to her
with very high resistance -- Trello was the only thing that really "took" with
her.

If you just want to jot down notes and don't need to organize them, Trello's
probably just a bit too rich an interface. Once you've got more balls in the
air and jugglers in the mix, Trello becomes a lot more interesting.

------
AndrewO
I love Trello. I've been using it to plan my wedding. At first my fiancee was
worried that it would add too much overhead. (She was never overly concerned
that it was spectacularly nerdy to be using a software project planning
suite—and that's a sign I found a keeper.) It's really shined with the guest
selection/invitation process.

We created a couple of lists to group and sort guests into Definite, Good to
Have, and Maybe lists and used labels to relations to whoever wanted them,
which really helped with the friends and extended family that the other didn't
know. We used checkboxes to track addresses that we were waiting on, who's
save-the-dates have gone out, etc. I've used the API to total up people for
the headcount (since cards we often for "Jack & Jill Smith"). If we were doing
assigned seating, we'd probably make lists for each table and move the cards
around. Thankfully, we decided to go for heavy hors d'oeuvres.

The thing's versatile: very few things feel like they're driven by the project
planning domain (e.g. voting for cards). I'd love to see some kind of ability
to embed scripts and save some checklists as templates that I could apply to
cards with one or two clicks, but the API access suites my needs right now
(and I know some people are using Greasemonkey scripts).

------
bane
I really love Trello, I think I could use it in so many facets of my
life...but the nonstatements on its future (is it going to be monetized? is it
even going to be around in six months? etc.) make me hesitant to really commit
to it.

~~~
gecko
It's going to be around in six months, things that are currently free are
going to remain that way, and we're not adding ads; I'll let you draw an
inference on the monetization. I actually thought the Trello team had made
that clear, but I'll bug them to see if there's a way we can make it even more
so.

 _Edit_ : <https://trello.com/privacy> states the above clearly, near the
bottom. I agree that slapping that under the "Privacy" page probably doesn't
make sense.

(I work for Fog Creek; go through my comment history.)

~~~
bane
Thanks for the response. This makes me _much_ more interested to start
investing time in moving various workflow tracking processes to Trello.

------
pgambling
I started playing with Trello a week ago. It's beautiful and I see huge
potential using it for my daily todo list. One thing I really want is a dead
simple way to add new items to an "Inbox" list, which I sort later. (Thinking
GTD)

An Android home screen widget and maybe a Chrome extension for this would
rock. This is how I currently use Remember The Milk on my phone because you
can specify a default list for all new items.

Is something like this in the works? If not, looks like I should be able to
cobble something together using the Trello API.

~~~
binxbolling
I've been wrestling with this, too. Right now my GTD Inbox list is just empty,
because if I'm going into Trello, I might as well put the item where it
belongs (whether Next Actions, Waiting On, etc). I guess I'm looking for my
Inbox to be populated with stuff that arrived outside of Trello.

I might be wrong on this because I'm relatively new to Trello and GTD, but I
also didn't see a way to tag cards, which seems really useful.

~~~
Robin_Message
You can adopt a convention (like #tag) and then search/filter cards with that
tag pretty easily. It's not built in tagging support, but I'm not sure if GTD
actually requires more than that.

------
nmridul
The problem with closed source and hosted options like Trello (even if free)
is that couple of years later the company could close down the product. You
have seen it with Google and Google is even larger and more reputed than
Fogcreek. And the reason you always hear is that they want to focus on core
areas.

You will now be left with an XML dump of you data (if the provider even gives
you access to your data) and the burden to code a half decent alternative for
you to use the data.

That is why I would normally prefer services that has their code open sourced
like teambox. It gives you the comfort that if you can get hold of your data,
you could run with it from the very next day since you have all the tools
already with you. <https://github.com/teambox/teambox>

~~~
fdr
That's pretty neat. I use Trello quite a bit but have some of these these
reservations, so I just gave Teambox a look.

My initial impression is that it does way too much. There are a plethora of
options and I just don't know what to do or what things are good for. Trello
has more or less the right things in the right places and presents the right
information. The learning curve is low and the usefulness high.

There are some things it does that I hypothetically like: for example, I think
finding a way to cram ephemeral (not taking a burdensome place in the UI) but
archived (for completeness) IRC-style conversations into Trello would be quite
useful: sometimes the "activity" field is too heavy. I dislike the monolithic
nature of Campfire rooms as well, so I think organizing chats around Trello
cards is an intriguing concept.

All in all, I don't have a super complex and well-enriched bug database
(that's elsewhere, and not really Trello's strength) in Trello, so if I had to
move off, I'd take an afternoon or two or two and do it, although the upheaval
to my planning would be annoying. The usability gains trump my leeriness of
lock-in, but as a result I will probably never use particularly exotic
features of Trello and constantly be looking for an open source replacement,
even though I'm totally willing to fork over some dough for a hosted service.

My ideal would be if Trello.com made money hosting an open source Trello-the-
project.

------
marquis
We just tried this out for hiring and it worked amazingly, we could all see at
a glance who the obvious candidates were and kept a nice collection of votes
for us so we didn't have to send out an annoying email every day.

------
loceng
If Trello implemented what DanielBMarkham said
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219109>) and what pgambling said
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4219092>) then I would start using
immediately for my day-to-day task management, and people I hire would be
using it then too.

------
devindotcom
I've been pumped about this since I first saw them at Disrupt. I wasn't able
to get TC signed up, but maybe I can get MSNBC...

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mey
I use Trello on a semi-regular basis, for what may be a unique thing. Use it
on a monitor for a D&D initiative board. It's great for shared viewing, shared
editing of sequence. It's scale-able for display on external monitors, and
easily color coded.

Not it's intended use, but it's been a great improvement over a small
whiteboard and magnets.

------
danielweber
Read the whole thing without being told what Trello was. I have no idea. It
could be a porn-site for all I could tell.

------
K2h
I use Trello on the side for project planning and was looking just the other
day for a way to pay fog creek for Trello

(1) just so I can say I've paid them and have some minor commitment to
maintaining my data and account

(2) and because I think it is a great product that I'm happy to part with a
few bucks as a way of saying thank you.

~~~
mhp
We'd rather have you tell your friends and colleagues about the product than
send us any money at this point. If you get one other person to use it, that
would be vastly more valuable to us than a few bucks.

------
samspot
This looks like a tool I love called AgileZen Has anyone who has used both got
an opinion?

~~~
giulianob
Trello is more general purpose whereas agile zen really focuses on software
development. You can use Trello for development as well but it doesn't provide
fields for determining which build something was fixed in etc... You're sort
of expected to do that yourself with more columns or commenting. They do have
an API so you could have your build system manage cards as well.

I personally like it for the fact that it is so light weight though but for
larger groups it may not be flexible enough.

~~~
base698
AgileZen did all this and some of their initial customers were law firms--
hardly software dev only.

Trello has an iOS app that is really it's biggest strength. I still like the
full color cards for AgileZen over Trello, but they are both very similar.

------
tastive
Thanks for the great product, guys.

I use Trello to keep track of my work tasks, personal tasks, and game dev
tasks. It's heavenly.

------
eragnew
congrats! i've been meaning to try this out

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didip
Just signed up to trello not too long ago.

It's hard for me to differentiate it from PT. is there any killer features
that stands out? It looks as cluttered as PT.

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rshlo
What languages is Trello based upon?

~~~
jjg
There's a lengthy write up here - <http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-trello-tech-
stack/>

