How to build the next Trello and sell it for $425M or more (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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."

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.

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-...), 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.

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.

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

"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

> 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.

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

"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.

So, what startup ideas can we create from this?

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