How Trello is different

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html

by joshuacc • 15 years ago

299 130 15 years ago

th0ma5• 15 years ago

I think Joel makes great points in this article about horizontal software. If your product has wide uses, then how do you market it? It will seem generic, and people will ultimately have to adapt it to what they want to do. This is a challenge I've had with Edgy, my minimalistic diagram app for Android, is that experts will see it as an over simplification of a very powerful tool, and general users will not see the potential of just a little bit of that power.

tosh4• 15 years ago

It is also the main point that I am wondering about. It appears that trello especially resonates with software developers and iirc this is also why it was built in the beginning.

Why not embrace that fact and go with it to make it a great tool for software developers?

fish2000• 15 years ago

w/r/t horizontal -- I thought what Mr. Spolsky described was actually vertical adoption: where you and your putative organization use Trello throughout, from the execs to the trench programmers to the marketers to some segment of the public. isn't that vertical?

horizontal use, on the other hand, would be something like FogBugz: pitched to one or two organizational segments in the company silo and developed in a way that takes advantage of the knowledge gained by an in-depth understanding of those few segments.

maybe I just have my axes wrong; i'm not pedantic about it but that's what I always thought.

maybe I just have my axes

drumdance• 15 years ago

No, this is horizontal. At, say, an oil company, everyone from the engineers to HR the CEO uses Excel. Only the engineers make use of, say, geological analysis tools, with the occasional report going to executive management.

markkanof• 15 years ago

Usually the terms vertical and horizontal are used to refer to use among different industries, not describing use within a single company. Think of different industries (healthcare, banking, etc.) each as a silo filled with many different companies.

A vertical product would target just one silo. It doesn't matter that not everyone at each company in that silo would use the product, what is important is that the product is only meant to be used by companies in that silo. An example would be software to x-rays. This would be used by some people at the companies in the healthcare silo, but would be of no use to anyone in the banking silo. The product would be tailored to exactly the task that needs to be completed.

A horizontal product would target many or all of the silos. The product would have no specific focus, but would be intended to be generally useful. An example of this would be Excel. Almost all companies in every silo would have someone who uses Excel. They may also use it for vastly different purposes requiring the software to be somewhat generic and the end user to figure out how to use the software to complete the task at hand.

king_magic6• 15 years ago

Trello is one of those products I've come to love with an almost insane passion. You'll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. It has become indispensable for me.

Personally, I'd happily pay for it. I find it incredible easy to use and super user-friendly.

Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning. She claims it makes no sense :) - so I'm not entirely sure it's ready for all walks of life, at least not quite yet. I can't even convince her to let me show her around it. Oh well :)

edit: wow, seriously? downvotes? That's pretty harsh for a thoughtful comment about a useful piece of software that has helped me professionally and personally. Pretty lame, if you ask me.

dylanmcd2• 15 years ago

I agree with being at the point where I'd happily pay for it (I'd actually pay for a mobile and faster desktop version that sync, as it's a bit sluggish on my netbook). What Joel said about it being a list of lists (a very simple idea), is what I like so much about it. Currently I'm using it for standard simple use cases (keeping track of stuff I need to do), non-standard use cases (tracking my weightlifting progress, between each set), and collaboration (my landlord and I keep a list of things to do). Oddly enough, I don't use it for software at all (what I investigated it for in the first place).

I introduced my (non-technical) girlfriend to it, and after a short explanation of how I used it, she took to it immediately, and uses it daily to keep track of her to-do list.

king_magic6• 15 years ago

Yeah, it's kind of a mystery to me why my fiance doesn't like it. I suspect it has more to do with fearing the unknown when it comes to new software over actual usability concerns.

The way I see it, she really likes wedding planning, so I'm not going to rock the boat too much by pushing Trello, haha.

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

Can I ask, was your girlfriend already an organized person?

hello_moto3• 15 years ago

I find Trello to be confusing at first because there are too many elements in the screen. Not to mention the real-time update kind of steal away your focus to "hey.. something just got updated in my screen"

PS: No, I did not downvote you. Although, reading the praise with Steve Jobs-like phrases (a.k.a typical marketer style talk, exaggerating a tiny thing as if they were the gold) tend to irk me a bit toward most North Americans.

jakejake• 15 years ago

Wow, the whole of North America huh? I guess you must know a lot of people from the over 40 countries that make up the continent of North America in order to make generalizations about them.

king_magic6• 15 years ago

I suppose my comment did have somewhat of a "Steve Jobs-like quality" to them. Yes, I happened to get a bit excited about a product I like when I was writing about it on the internet. It's not the end of the world.

It sounds like you'd be surprised at how little I sound like a typical marketer if you met me in person.

ceol• 15 years ago

>Oddly enough, though, I tried to get my fiance to use it for wedding planning. She claims it makes no sense :)

I'm pretty tech-savvy and it was intimidating at first. There is a lot going on. The first thing I think when I see my Boards page is "Everything is nested." You have options inside of cards inside of boards inside of a board-box. Then click on a card and you have comments and votes and links and activities. Everything has its own 1px box-shadow which sections things in my head I don't think should be sectioned; for instance, comments inside of cards look like they should be clickable because of how every link has the same border and box-shadow. The description, however, has no such border but is the same size font as the "Edit this description" link, which makes that block have no focus.

It's a great service, though— kind of like a big to-do list. Considering they just released it a couple months ago, the UI is great even with those gripes. I just think it was trying to be a little too nondescript. (I'm probably going to catch some flack for this here, but...) I would have liked to see the boards look like cork boards and the cards look like cards pinned to them. It would have been easier to understand the workflow a bit better.

JoshTriplett• 15 years ago

Personally, I found Trello quite straightforward to use, but in my opinion that straightforwardness depends heavily on the hacker-like mindset of thinking of everything in terms of levels of abstraction. Other sensible mindsets and organizational techniques exist, but I don't think they would align as obviously with Trello. It might still work, but not necessarily in an instantly obvious way.

wulczer2• 15 years ago

Oh my, I can't believe my eyes:

  Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node.
  But at least they’re having fun. And in today’s tight job market,
  great programmers have a lot of sway on what they’re going to be working on.

So is the job market so bad you have to bribe engineers by letting them use tools they're apparently not proficient or efficient with, just so they'll come and work for you? I find it so insane it's not even funny anymore.

shipit• 15 years ago

it's not bribe, it's ownership.

RandallBrown• 15 years ago

No... The engineers at fog creek want to learn new things so they let them.

The job market is open enough right now that if people are ever unhappy, they can just go find a new job instead of dealing with their current one.

hello_moto3• 15 years ago

I think you'd have to view it from a different angle/point of view.

If the programmers chose some esoteric technology and not take ownership of the project then yeah, it's bad. But if the programmers decided to stick with it, live and breathe Node.js and do whatever it takes to fix all bugs (including fix the internal of Node.js when needed) and work overtime then by all means, why not?

I personally would not prefer to be in that situation as I have different priority but I become to accept other people preferred methods given that others agreed and willing to stick with it 110%.

PS: Beside, the choice wasn't too bad, it's not like they decided to use Lua or Smalltalk. They're using CoffeeScript/JavaScript (maybe), Node, WebSockets, Socket.io, etc. There are JavaScript programmers out there.

wulczer2• 15 years ago

I guess I'm looking from a startup founder perspective...

If you choose an unknown technology because you have solid reasons to believe it will bring a substantial advantage to the product, which will offset the loss in productivity, then sure. If you choose it just so that your team will be motivated and you willingly take the productivity hit for that, I find it difficult to understand.

It's not the technology choice, it's the reasons that seem weird to me. It's probably because of the runway length they have that they can venture into unknown territory for no reason other than trying things.

I'm reminded of Asana and Lunascript - a fun experiment you can afford when you have lots of money in the bank, but not something I'd see as practical.

thedufer2• 15 years ago

The first devs (already employees) chose the stack they wanted. While using something new definitely helps keep the work interesting, I can't imagine trying to do the same thing on an older stack. It would be slower and more painful at every turn; the few issues with bleeding-edge tools don't even begin to compare with the extra pain of, say, being stuck with VBScript and SQL.

mythz• 15 years ago

Trello is awesome, it's one of the few products that we use at work, but doesn't feel like work to use :)

I'm not a process guy, because I usually can't justify the time it takes to 'maintain the process' except with trello since it's effortless to use, it's almost always a win to jot thoughts down whenever something remember-worthy appears in your head :)

watty2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the info - can someone please explain why these comments are being downvoted? Is it because they could be fake or that people just dislike Joel's company?

king_magic6• 15 years ago

I have no idea. My comment is being downvoted. I just really like Trello. Look at my comment history on HN - I'm definitely not faking.

cdr2• 15 years ago

Joel definitely has anti-fans - I expect that's what's happening.

eggbrain• 15 years ago

I'd guess that people probably thought his comment was fake (not sure about any other comments, even his comment doesn't seem downvoted):

The OP's original comment contains entire praise for the product being described in the article, almost the point to marketing speak -- "it's one of the few products that we use at work, but doesn't feel like work to use".

It also contains multiple smile faces in the post, which make it feel disingenuous. Almost no comments on Hacker News contain smile faces, so mix this with the praise, and people could take it as a comment that seemed fake.

phillco• 15 years ago

Yup. Its ratio of power / effort is really, really high.

igorgue2• 15 years ago

I'm sorry Joel, but Trello, is still bitch work... I still use pen and paper, and works great!

prateekdayal2• 15 years ago

My biggest issue with Trello has been that if you have two windows open, the changes don't sync between them. Pivotal tracker does this extremely well making it a team collaboration tool

spolsky2• 15 years ago

If you have two windows open in Trello, the changes do sync between them. If you're not seeing that it's a bug, but that particular feature has been pretty solid since day one.

mhp• 15 years ago

If you have two windows open, the changes DO sync between them. That's actually the whole point of Trello.

watty2• 15 years ago

I haven't used Trello but I think it's geared towards a team rather than a single person with pen and paper.

dagw2• 15 years ago

I use Trello do manage my personal to do list at work and find that it works far better than pen and paper. I have no idea what it's geared towards but for me it works great as a single person tool.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

I picked up Trello a month ago, swombat recommended it to me, and I'm already a huge fan. Just keep it simple, Joel. The horizontal and simple part of this app -- along with it being totally web-based -- is what's made me a fan. I can use it on my own, with my clients, with the family, etc. This is the app I wanted to write two years ago but never got the magic to work. Kudos!

I just did that e-book on Scrum (shameless plug: http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/scrummaster/18803035), and I used Trello for all the task tracking. In fact, I plugged it in the book as the best online Agile/Scrum tool I've seen so far, even providing instructions on how to use it working remotely with Scrum or Agile. I'm using it to prioritize vacation spots for our family this year, my vitamin list, some tasks I'm farming out offshore, and another book project. I also have another website idea that I'm getting ready to load up.

Things I'd like to see? 1) Linked boards. Have the same column appear as the end of one board and the beginning of another. This could allow you to have several boards with different audiences but they would all work together. 2) downloadable data. I know you guys say you want to do this, but closed data is a deal-killer for me. 3) Make it work on my iPad. Seriously. Being able to update using finger gestures on a extremely portable device would be sweet.

If you guys haven't tried it, you should. I am not a big fan of online Agile-like tools, but this rocks. Just a simple list of stuff and customizable columns to move the items around. I think the Fog Creek guys are really on to something here.

alabut• 15 years ago

No offense, but your comment is a perfect example of how listening to customer feedback is more of an art than science. You ask Joel to keep the product simple in the first paragraph and then ask for some non-trivial features in the third. I'm having trouble visualizing both the linked boards idea and what problem it really solves.

The problem with simple products is that everyone has a different idea of what simple means and think their core feature set is what everyone else would want as well.

tosh4• 15 years ago

Further, if you have a horizontal product it gets even harder to decide what to add and what to change or to make a certain persona really happy.

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

Now that the API is 'done', data export will be coming soon.

https://trello.com/card/board/data-export/4d5ea62fd76aa11360...

j_s• 15 years ago

I would recommend linking 'try it' at the end of this; there is no link to the actual product in the summary at the end of article or the learn more/about footers!

Is this some type of SEO strategy avoiding too many links being penalized?

pace• 15 years ago

How does Trello compare to Pivotal Tracker? Any experiences?

keeptrying• 15 years ago

Pivotal can handle much more data and is much more geared towards to agile. I like it to handle my tech project management. Its brilliant for that.

I use Trello for "business project management" (marketing copy, emailing people, customer development todos) and pivotal for "technical project management".

arctangent2• 15 years ago

I've been itching to introduce Trello at work but this sentence made my heart sink:

> It’s 100% hosted; there will never be an "installed software" version of Trello.

We already use the installed version of FogBugz at work and I had hoped that Trello might some day be provided in this form too. Ideally, we'd have wanted FogBugz and Trello to work together in some way.

Unfortunately, using a hosted version of Trello is not an option due to insurmountable problems with the procurement and information governance processes within my company.

chrislomax2• 15 years ago

I'll be honest, if our customers were not as stubborn as they are about hosting their own software then I would never do anything else but host it myself either!

We host a lot of sites on our custom CMS and it makes life so much easier to role bug fixes and db updates when there is only 1 code base to update. Also you don't have issues where people are on older version and need to update through versions

We try push all our customers into this model with those exact reasons.

maaku• 15 years ago

It's a dangerous road when you value your own operations over customer needs. I'd say invest in the infrastructure needed to one-click deploy outside your data center as well.

chernevik• 15 years ago

Wouldn't it be relatively easy for them to provide a server hosted by a client, on a corporate internet?

They may think such cases don't support "get big fast". But they might be wrong about that. A lot of software (Excel) is first propagated through work usages, and workplace availability might provide important vectors to 100mm users.

Now, users on a client-dedicated server won't help scale their data operations. But they will help spread the word and introduce use cases. And provide a target for developers / consultants to build out applications.

Even if some corporate solution doesn't seem a priority, they might want to dedicate some time to serving a few such edge cases. Just to keep an eye on that niche and keep themselves somewhat adapted to the requirements.

derobert2• 15 years ago

It'd be easy to provide a server, sure, but the problem is maintaining it. It is much easier to maintain stuff that you control 100% because once you've given it to someone else to put on their network:

1) You have to get remote access to it. This probably means setting up a VPN. Probably some weird thing the client uses, which only works on Windows XP. And is unbearably slow, and is down at random times.

2) You have to coordinate upgrades with the local administration. Need to reboot to apply a Windows patch? Best make sure there will be someone available if it turns out you need to hit F1 in the BIOS to continue. IPMI/KVM-IP help with this, but add cost (and security concerns).

3) Hardware failure? You get to deal with the local admins (are they competent? Do they know the hardware you picked? Did they keep track of the spares you sent?—you did send spares, right?). Or worse, fly someone there.

4) "The page loads slow". Now you get to debug the client's internal network! —assuming you can even get to the box, over same broken internal network. So even better, you get to debug the client's internal network, over the phone with whoever their IT department can spare—and who definitely believes its not their problem.

5) Monitoring. Yeah. That's going to be difficult if you only have access to it at all with that Windows XP VPN client (which automatically times the connection out after 15 minutes, security and all ya' know). Hopefully the client can do it. Monitoring means more than just "is it up"; it also includes "how close to capacity are we", "are we seeing any weirdness that'd indicate problems", etc.

6) It's a single client on the box. So they will ask you at some point "oh, we're really busy this month, please don't upgrade it, we can't risk it breaking". And you'll be hard-pressed to say no, after all, they client will point out that just not deploying is less work for you.

6b) "except we found this one critical bug, we need a patch for it ASAP"

7) When you own the boxes, you can keep things consistent. Want to upgrade RAM on all your web servers? Go ahead. You'll have very few configuration differences. Want to upgrade the RAM on the box at the client? Yeah, you'll need to open a ticket with their IT department, they'll get back to you sometime.

8) A client that demands their own local box is also one that's likely to be paranoid in other ways—they'll want to know who (on your team) has accessed the box, when, and why; they'll bug you about it; they may want a say in who you can hire to administer it; etc. This may or may not be justified (e.g., it probably is for the DoD). But it'll surely be a pain.

9) Utilization of boxes you host is going to be higher—the client's box will need to be sized for peak times, but will be 99.9% idle off-hours. Also, the client boxes will probably be lower-capacity (to be cheaper). Fewer users per box = more boxes. More boxes = more administration. Especially when they're different.

nookiemonster• 15 years ago

I can only use trello for mumdane work tasks or personal work if there is no self hosted solution.

This decision is a mistake, Joel. I love trello, but i cannot trust a hosted solution with my plans for taking over a market. Please give us an installable version. anything else is amature hour or naive.

tosh4• 15 years ago

As a user of trello I fear 'being a general purpose data structure for everyone' is the wrong direction to go :(

# Target Audience?

When you look at who is using trello right now you will find mostly agile teams, startups, freelancers, engineers, designers who do software development.

IIRC this is also the reason it originally got built. The team wanted to scratch their own itch and I think they did a good job.

I like trello a lot. I dig Joel and joelonsoftware and am curious what the future holds. I hope it won't end up as a misunderstood tool by trying to be everything to everyone.

# Niche vs Horizontal

If you are interested in the trade offs related to going niche vs going horizontal I think 'Crossing the Chasm' and 'Inside the Tornado' are great books to read.

# Disclaimer

I'm working on https://www.blossom.io which has a feature set similar to trello but is aimed at people who deeply care about product development.

vlokshin• 15 years ago

Just dropped my email. Love what you're doing so far.

1) Who did your design for the public page / sign-on process? </br> 2) What's your long term goal with the product itself compared to where it stands now?

tosh4• 15 years ago

We did it ourselves but we should improve the onboarding process - e.g. we are generating temporary passwords at the moment which will be replaced with traditional activation links in the next iterations.

Long term vision of the product: be the best team coordination solution for product development.

Since I used the word 'best', here's the context:

* cross functional teams

* lean/agile methodology

* care about what they create

* care about their customer

* care about UX

Long term vision for us ourselves (company): serve the above as good as we can by providing tools that help people to focus on delivering value and getting great products out of the door :) which btw is really really exciting

nazar2• 15 years ago

I totally like your simplistic design, the one that inside the Macbook Air on the picture. Just signed up with my email, waiting for invitation now.

earle• 15 years ago

I'm still shocked these companies with online productivity tools dont provide this as a standalone enterprise app -- there's certainly plenty of customers who would pay for an internally hosted version of this that are unable to use a cloud based service.

creativeembassy• 15 years ago

I tried Trello a few weeks ago, and although I love its interface, I just can't find a use for it. I already use Omnifocus for keeping track of lists of things that I have to get done. I use Google Docs for spreadsheets, and SimpleNote w/ Notational Velocity for simple text documents. How is everyone else using Trello?

r00fus• 15 years ago

I used it for an open-ended project/event where soemtimes the tasks became mini-projects in their own right. That's it's power - you can make a task a checklist of sub-tasks very easily without "promoting" it or dealing with a tree interface.

Also the uploads and notes are very easy to absorb and view. Delegation also looks great... though I haven't had a need to use or see how it integrates with email.

I used it for trip planning, meeting planning and personal checklists. However since it's hosted and it's unclear what the data security is like, I don't use it for work related stuff.

Mostly, it's just very very easy to start using and easy on the eyes. I'm drawn to finding uses for it, though I keep wanting calendar/scheduling support (which would make it more of a full-on process/group ware)

Jach• 15 years ago

I tried Trello when it launched, I kind of stopped using it midway through last semester but I'll probably pick it up again for this coming semester. I've never been a Planner kind of guy so I'm not really the target market anyway, but it is a decent minimalist interface that makes the grunt work that is planning less annoying. I haven't tried collaborating with other people using it yet.

My main UX complaint is the fact that to do any real planning stuff that makes it better than a text file requires opening up the Menu of Everything for an item after creation time. There's a lot of whitespace next to the "Add" and "X" buttons when creating a new item, something as simple as offering a shortlist of the most commonly used labels or something would be nice.

thedufer2• 15 years ago

When you mouse-over a card, there's a circle with a triangle in it. From there you can easily add labels, people, or a due date.

aycangulez• 15 years ago

Joel claims that Trello can be used for kanban. This is not true because Trello doesn't support WIP (Work-In-Progress) limits without which you don't have kanban.

If you want to know your team's capacity, you have to limit the number of tasks they work on at the same time. Once you limit WIP, several interesting things will happen:

* A backlog of tasks will emerge.

* You will be able to measure how much time is spent on each task.

* Tasks will get finished faster.

The first two results are not very surprising because by introducing WIP limits, you have effectively eliminated multitasking, but how on earth, do tasks get finished faster?

Unlike computers with multiple processor cores, our brains have one or at best two cores. Without WIP limits, when there are too many tasks to work on, we spend more time on switching tasks than the tasks themselves.

Bottlenecks become visible. Since everyone is working on a limited number of tasks, some finish theirs on time, some get overloaded, and some cannot finish their work because they need input from those who are overloaded. Team members with free capacity can help those who are overloaded. Better yet, they can even come up with ideas on how to fix the newly discovered bottlenecks.

Disclaimer: I am the author of http://flow.io , a lean project management application based on kanban.

alinajaf• 15 years ago

I like trello specifically because I can create a list called 'Work in Progress (MAX 5 ITEMS)' and it will more or less do what you've described, without forcing process on you. Not sure how well this scales to big teams I'll admit.

lucisferre• 15 years ago

Saying kanban is a task board with WIP limits is a bit like saying Lean Startup is about releasing buggy first version MVPs. It's cargo culting at best. Kanban is about keeping focus, creating quality gates, pull vs. push and so much more than just WIP limits. You can always limit WIP manually. How hard is it to simply choose to limit the WIP on a board column?

raganwald• 15 years ago

Your comment doesn't respond to what he said. He said that without WIP limits, you don't have kanban, while you responded to a statement that kanban is only task boards plus WIP.

The two are not equivalent. It is as if I said that without polite discourse you don't have a productive debate, and someone else called me an idiot for claiming that good manners and threaded comments are all HN needs.

Automagic WIP limits may not be necessary for imlementing kanban, but that's a deign debate, not a what-is-kanban debate. You may have a good point about whether WIP limits are necessary for a good "implementing kanban" application.

city412• 15 years ago

I disagree. I think WIP really needs to be a built in concept of a kanban app. The thing about WIP is it points out bottle necks and problems in your process quickly and concisely. It's pretty common for teams to go over WIP, and do it willingly, to allow the red flag the system produces to point out to the rest of the team the problem.

If you have to mentally keep track of WIP, inside each team member's head, you lose pretty much all of that.

Terretta• 15 years ago

> Trello doesn't support WIP (Work-In-Progress) limits

To be fair, bulletin boards with index cards don't have WIP limits either.

It is unlikely a system light enough for frictionless kanban will have an accurate understanding of the work-width (units of work / units of time) of a given task. For example, in your tour, "58% complete" of "Custom CSS for homepage" is suspiciously precise.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

I have downvoted you, on principle, because you advocated a religious method of software development and that you preach some psycobable to make it seem right.

Software development needs to be flexible because each problem is unique and different from all the others in important aspects.

Kanban is a tool on a long, long, long list of tools which software developers should learn to use, modify adapt and improve to become better programmers. Trello is one item on that list. And yes, it can be used for Kanban, if the team wants to -- just like you could use an actual whiteboard.

philipmorg• 15 years ago

For me, Trello is a powerful alternative to the linear list. The linear list has it's place (grocery shopping, planning certain things, etc.) but I love the visual way that Trello groups lists of things.

When managing a project, having multiple buckets that contain lists, and being able to quickly scan the buckets is highly effective. With linear lists, I sometimes forget to check one of my lists, or the list gets stale, and things fall into the cracks. Because it spreads all my lists out on a single board, Trello (the HTML version, anyway) helps me avoid this.

I agree that linked boards would be a great enhancement.

Ygor• 15 years ago

"we think it’s much easier to figure out how to extract a small amount of money out of a large number of users than to extract a large amount of money out of a small number of users. Once you have 100 million users, it’s easy to figure out which of those users are getting the most value out of the product you built"

Hm. This sounds logical, but is it really true?

jackowayed• 15 years ago

I think they're claiming that it's true for Trello, not necessarily overall. Their other products are a testament to the fact that they're happy to go the other route (lots of money from few customers) with some products.

But since they think they've found a new form of "Data structure that anyone can find helpful", they'd rather try to get everyone using it than try to specialize it for a few verticals that might pay them a lot of money for a form of it that is optimized for their business.

vl• 15 years ago

It probably means "Once we have 100m users we'll flip it, retire and raise tulips on the private island".

j45• 15 years ago

After 10 years of building and scrapping my own web based project management tools, I discovered Fogbugz was sufficient for handling detailed information and dialogue back and forth. I typically do "1 issue/feature per case" and keep my life really simple that way. The customer indirectly has a complete record of the entire design/development/signoff process of each feature by email.

Trello though, I find myself using more and more just for my overall kanban/burn of what I need to be doing at any oen time -- something I've struggled to get setup (my own initiative) in Fogbugz. I wish I could pull in my FogBugz filters but I'm sure others are requesting such things.

Trello is a great shared to-do list, and dare I say maybe even more relevant to getting things done than Basecamp, for me.

aristus• 15 years ago

"The others don’t cost much to support."

BWAHAHHAHHAHHA. Ha. heh. whee! It's a good product but good luck on that part, Joel. Support costs for massive free products are probably more expensive than you imagine.

andrewl• 15 years ago

Joel is heavily involved in StackOverflow.com and the whole StackExchange universe, so it's likely he has a good handle on support costs for hosted products. Fog Creek also offers a hosted version of FogBugz (free, I think, to students and open source developers) so that's more experience in support costs and issues.

tomjen34• 15 years ago

Facebook is expensive to operate but I am willing to bet that that is because they host so many pictures (try to dig up the actually numbers -- it is crazy).

Joel will only host a relatively small amount of text -- which should be a lot less expensive.

polymatter• 15 years ago

"Support costs" refers to the costs of supporting users, not the cost of hosting content. This includes the cost of someone replying to the presumably tens of thousands of emails requesting support and trawling through it harvesting bug reports, feature requests, giving users fixes, telling users politely to press the right button if they want it to work etc.

nazar2• 15 years ago

Offtopic: I like how he ends his post "I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow." I didn't know the guy, and that line made a lot of sense to me.

alanmeaney2• 15 years ago

There is a race going on at the moment for the collaboration space. The likes of Asana.com & Do.com are attempting to solve similar problems. The rules look like this:

- make your product web based & free - get users, worry about revenue later - keep it horizontal as much as possible

Maybe this is all part of the new long term bottom up strategy for getting into Enterprises?

Get Enterprise users using your product, get them to bring it in the Enterprise door and further down the line find a way to monetize.

It will be interesting to see who comes out on top. I see a lot more innovation to come in this space.

ahelwer• 15 years ago

There is also &!, which was featured on HN a while back:

https://andbang.com/

alanmeaney2• 15 years ago

They are similar but their pricing will prevent the kind of adoption rates Trello are looking for - 100 million+

factorialboy2• 15 years ago

Review19 -- http://review19.com -- is in this space, but focuses entirely on co-location / distributed web, creative and software teams.

ds206• 15 years ago

Has anyone seen Teambox's beta? It looks very similar to Trello's UI. Who was first though?

michokest2• 15 years ago

http://trello.com and http://teambox.com (beta at http://beta.teambox.com) have a common ancestor: http://www.pivotaltracker.com

That was the first widely adopted kanban tool for developers that I know about

CubicleNinjas• 15 years ago

After using it for a month our entire studio has switched over to Trello as our main form of data organization. It replaces Basecamp for clients, plots our marketing calendar, and gives an overview of every deliverable's stage of completion.

Every single day people say out loud, "I'm so glad for Trello.". It is a remarkable product that our team is madly in love with.

brador• 15 years ago

Question: Backup.

What if they decide to shut down some day? You lose everything. Unlikely? yes. Possible? Also yes.

Offer a backup function, and I'm yours.

dodger2• 15 years ago

Soon! So soon! Also, there's a neat project called node-trello that uses the API, and one of their example scripts backs up all of the boards for an org: https://github.com/lmatteis/node-trello/blob/master/example_...

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

Data export is at the top of the 'In Progress' list of the Trello Development board: https://trello.com/card/board/data-export/4d5ea62fd76aa11360...

Now that the API is 'done', it shouldn't be long until this is up and running. More about data, privacy, etc. here: trello.com/privacy

Valien• 15 years ago

So question for the software devs here. I'm looking for a solution that I can use to track internal projects with non-technical AE's (advertising world). Right now we do everything via spreadsheet and email and it's horrendous. I've looked at JIRA but the cost is a huge factor. For issue tracking we are using JetBrains YouTrack and it's great but for overall project planning, etc I'm wondering if Trello might be a fit?

reinhardt• 15 years ago

Take a look at Podio, it does far more than nested lists and scales up or down to fit your needs.

joebadmo• 15 years ago

Joel talking about what people used Excel for seems very similar to Clay Christensen's concept of hiring products for specific jobs.[0] I wonder if this was a conscious thing on Joel's part or it's a case of convergent evolution.

[0] http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html [edit: here's a fanastic, transcendent presentation by Christensen: http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e0...]

ivanzhao• 15 years ago

Just watched the talk, great stuff!

josh33• 15 years ago

That was transcendent. That's going in my bookmark bar as something I watch regularly. Thanks!

tamersalama• 15 years ago

What is the underlying stack? Is it Ruby/Rails or am I just dreaming? isitrails.com says it "might be"

bobbygrace3• 15 years ago

From the article: "Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node."

webwanderings• 15 years ago

I started with the assumption that WorkFlowy is a To-Do list, but ended up using it as my Bookmarks Manager. So Trello seems like a similar concept, though there appears to be too much to maneuver around. I'd say it won't click with the average user so easily.

gruseom• 15 years ago

Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.

Joel is exaggerating for effect. Yes, many spreadsheets are static lists. But how far would a spreadsheet product get without formulas? As soon as you wanted to add prices to your grocery list, you'd be stuck.

His critique of Improv is interesting. (Steve Jobs adored Improv for years btw.) He's saying that by imposing more structure on the free-form grid, Improv lost the ad hoc users.

The free-form grid is the most important thing about spreadsheets. But interactivity (formulas/recalc) is part of that, even when you're not using it.

tptacek• 15 years ago

I thought the same thing as I read this. I understand the point Spolsky was making and wouldn't want to argue with it, but my dad used Excel formulas, every salesperson I've ever worked with used basic formulas, the marketing teams I worked with made basic formulas...

Also, surely one of the reasons so many people used it to make lists was that it was the tool Office shipped with that had gridlines (Word has them too, but they're clunky). If you bundle a spreadsheet along with the world's most popular word processor, it's no wonder it gets used for pedestrian tasks in addition to the ones Bricklin thought about.

This is a point Spolsky danced around in a much earlier blog post: 80% of users want just 20% of the features of a program, but they're not the same 20%.

xxqs• 15 years ago

this is the first site that I visited and it refuses to support Mozilla 3.6 browser, which is default on my ubuntu 10.10 notebook.

hanskuder• 15 years ago

Just signed up to give it a try, and after entering my email address and password I was presented with a button that took me straight to GMail. Of course I could have simply switched tabs, but this was an awesome little detail that made me smile.

hogu• 15 years ago

The biggest take away for me from trello is that a two dimensional view of data is extremely powerful. Personally, I love outlines even though Joel thinks they are dead ends for UIs. I think workflowy is awesome and my love of emacs org mode is why I created my own web version, yata.in(yet another task application). I think one large drawback of outlines is that you have a linear view of data, as you scroll up and down, it makes it hard to compare things that are scattered all over the outline. I think if one can bring the power of working with outline data vertically, as well as horizonatally, it would be really effective. I think I know how and I'll post it on hn when I'm done.

dangoor• 15 years ago

It sounds like the Trello API is coming along. Has anyone made an Alfred plugin or command line tool for adding cards? Quick keyboard-based capture of thoughts is important for keeping focused on what I'm doing.

factorialboy2• 15 years ago

How Trello is not different - http://srirangan.net/2012-01-how-trello-is-not-different

andrewem• 15 years ago

I read that link, which is apparently by the creator of Review19, on how similar it is to Trello. One thing from that list really surprised me: "Review19′s target audience — web, creative and software teams — are often distributed around the world. Offering an in-browser, video conferencing option is a critical feature for Review19."

Why does Review19 have to provide the in-browser video conferencing? Why can't people just use Skype or GMail's video chat? It seems like an enormously difficult-to-develop, bandwidth-intensive feature that people can already get elsewhere for free. I'm genuinely curious what critical benefit this integration provides for the users of Review19.

pohungc• 15 years ago

I'm really interested in seeing how FogCreek monetizes on Trello in the future.

ThaddeusQuay2• 15 years ago

How Trello is different? More like: How Trello is the same.

"You agree that You will not:

(a) upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

(j) intentionally or unintentionally violate any applicable local, state, national or international law, including, but not limited to, regulations promulgated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any rules of any national or other securities exchange, including without limitation, the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ, and any regulations having the force of law;

(l) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals. This may include, without limitation, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices."

https://trello.com/legal

So, basically, my associates and I can't use Trello to make our plans for world domination. Back to the index cards, guys.

SERIOUSLY: Content-restrictive ToS, which is now the norm, is killing the Internet, possibly with even greater efficacy than DMCA, SOPA, PIPA, and their ilk, combined, because it proactively chills speech. Congratulations on a nice product, but no matter how nice it is, or how much nicer it becomes, the ToS makes Trello unusable to me, as well as to many of the people who ignore the fine print, and who will therefore end up losing their accounts over trivialities.

"The business goal for Trello is to ultimately get to 100 million users. That means that our highest priority is removing any obstacles to adoption. Anything that people might use as a reason not to use Trello has to be found and eliminated."

gcv• 15 years ago

I use Emacs' org-mode to keep myself organized, and have generally disliked all other task list applications — they usually lack flexibility or require unhelpful and distracting self-adjustments to fit their worldview.

Trello feels like web-based org-mode. For simple use, it is almost as flexible, and it has groups and sharing built in. Nicely done.

tripzilch• 15 years ago

This looks really nice and I'd be eager to give it a real try for whatever I can up with ...

If only the UI wasn't so sluggish.

I tried both Opera and Firefox, so I guess it's just the fact that I'm on a relatively low-powered machine (netbook, 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM) but frankly I don't see it doing much that should be so slow. Now GMail can be similarly sluggish, but GMail doesn't require me to drag boxes around at 2-3 frames per second.

Even the highlight-on-mouseover effect has a delay before it happens, and there is no excuse for that since it should not take any time unless you're doing all sorts of things between mouseover and setting the highlight. Switching that around would already make the UI feel so much more responsive: Always indicate responsiveness feedback first before you make the user wait for anything else.

I can think of some things that might be causing this. Maybe there's zillions of JS events that are listened for and being triggered even when they don't effectively do anything in that particular app state.

Partially, it's because at some points the responsiveness feedback vs waiting for something being done is the wrong way around for providing a snappy UI feel.

And when I drag a card around, it gets CSS transform rotated, and a rather big drop shadow. All sorts of other UI elements have subtle shadows and glows and I bet they're all done in CSS. It definitely looks nice, no argument about that, but if you're going for a really simple but super-useful tool, you shouldn't be sacrificing usability for eyecandy.

Especially the card box dropshadow, if you're going to animate it, don't do it in CSS, use a semi-transparent PNG instead. Yes CSS3 is very nice, but you do realize that the browser is (inefficiently) recalculating the gaussian shadow blur every frame?

Maybe the easiest thing would be to have an option in the preferences to switch off the "special effects" so that everything is just plain CSS boxes with borders (that can increase in thickness on mouseover, instead of increasing their box-shadow blur radius ...), that don't need to slightly rotate when you drag them.

Or maybe you could consider what it means to build a really simple, powerful web application that is an absolute pleasure to use, and whether that really requires using the latest CPU-heavy special effects and animating them.

How Trello is different

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