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mhp

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cofounder fog creek ceo trello board member stack exchange

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I'm sorry it's confusing. It's trying to say that SAML SSO is provided via Atlassian Access - but you don't need to buy Enterprise to buy Atlassian Access - it's a totally separate product (and does not require Enterprise). We are in transition right now (formerly SSO was provided by Enterprise) and so our final pricing page isn't quite where it needs to be.

It's the other way around. You only need to buy Atlassian Access to get the SSO + enforced 2FA for your Trello (and also any other Atlassian product) users.

Trello Enterprise (optionally) would secure your content (i.e. attachment restrictions, power-up restrictions, token restrictions, audit logs, team management).

There is always more engineering work. The questions is does the app need to add new vocabulary type features to get there, or is the work focused on making the API more flexible for 3rd parties, or the signup process less onerous, or making exports take half the time they normally take. There's definitely a balance but they have to be seen as worthwhile and valuable goals instead of adding new words to the object model or new pages to the site. Typical product creation can sometimes be "can I make this thing possible?" instead of "should I make this thing possible or accept that this is not the job of this application". Of course you can make your app do anything you could possibly want... what should it do?

The part that bothers me the most about this is that our app has all of the certifications and controls that they would need - they just don't know that. Soc2/3, ISOs, Fedramp, etc (trello.com/security). But as you point out, you have to get it approved and that requires navigating a lot of internal roadblocks.

Thanks for taking the time to say that. One of the most rewarding experiences of my role has been accepting thanks like yours, online and in person, on behalf of the team that actually built the product. We owe all of our success to your recommendations and referrals.

Hi! Co-founder Trello here. Agree that “behind” is maybe weird here and probably not intentional but then again the whole Trello team is now part of Atlassian. Every day we are part of the group of people that are building the future products and features. Even without us, I think today’s launch shows Atlassian is heavily invested in “unleashing the potential of EVERY team” (emphasis mine) and their design and understanding of how to do that is evolving. If you love the Trello UX then my guess is you are going to be pleasantly surprised about where we go in the future.

The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up.

Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this interview.

"During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t ruin Trello." http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel...

(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

omg, I'm going to have a boss! I'll be working at Atlassian. Lots of stuff to still do in the future to reach our (and my) goals. And now we're going to have a lot more fuel for our engines to get there.

Thank you for the kind words.

I promise you Atlassian understands why Trello is so successful. You described Trello's core strength perfectly - and this one of the reasons they are committed to keeping it as a standalone service.

(disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Trello)

Our vision is that it gives a group of people a shared perspective. It puts you on the same page. That could be your fiancé and your mother-in-law planning your wedding or it could be your HR team trying to structure your employee onboarding process.

It's not a project management tool anymore than it is a bug tracker or a crm or an applicant tracking system. People use Trello for all of those things but at its core, it is just a list of lists.

The power comes from understanding how that metaphor can help provide structure to some process that you have. (Trello comes from "trellis" - a structure to help plants grow).

Check out trello.com/inspiration for some examples. It's a bit like explaining to someone what a spreadsheet is before they have seen one and why they would use one. Once you grok it, it's very powerful.

Trello, Inc 12 years ago

Did you use it with other people? While it can work on an individual level (i.e. where you are just making boards for yourself), that isn't really what it was designed for. I wouldn't put it in the same group of tools as personal productivity software. While you can use it for yourself, it really shines when you have a group of people trying to collaborate and share information.

It's especially useful for viewers (i.e. not people writing things in Trello, but people watching others update info and tracking the progress of something).

Fog Creek employees keep on making Fog Creek awesome, and yes, they have a stake in Trello Inc. (Some of the longstanding employees now even have a stake in both Stack Exchange AND Trello).

I don't agree with what you wrote at the end. It's not a "mistake" to bootstrap and have a much higher probability of success with a lower possible return. I know that's probably not what you meant, because you wrote earlier that we could have been "more successful", but it also ignores what would have been a much higher risk and loss of ownership in your assumption.

Joel and I are naturally conservative in nature and having succeeded at Fog Creek with what we set out to do (building a successful company where devs wanted to work) allowed us to swing for the fences with Trello and Stack Exchange. The risk is much higher. The reward is bigger, but we own a lot less of those VC funded companies.

I know that for some people, this is an issue. The problem is the cost of switching to another name. For a ten year old product, the cost is IMMENSE. It can definitely be done, but it's a hard problem.

Naming is also really hard. We spent TONS of time picking out the name Trello and just narrowly avoided naming it something really stupid by serendipity. (The code name was Trellis, but all the domains were taken and we insisted on having a dotcom url).

We are planning new features for those products, but we've already been selling those things for over a year: https://trello.com/business-class https://trello.com/enterprise

We also have no plans to make an in-house solution. While the tide has not 100% turned, in most places at big companies like Amazon and Microsoft, they can already use SaaS solutions (you sign a big contract, but even if your app is on AWS, msft employees can use it). For the companies that cannot, the added complexity to development and support is likely not worth it (for us).

I'm pretty sure the 355 regs prevent you from doing something like that (not that you couldn't just do it anyway, but that you might get caught if you are trying to do something shady).

In our case, we didn't want to give up ownership in Fog Creek (which is profitable) and the investors were happier with a separate entity.

Sometimes you need a detailed vertical app - like a bug tracker, or an applicant tracking system or a CRM. But a lot of times, you don't. You just need something simple because your needs aren't that complex. And using something you are familiar with is easier than trying to learn something new.

Trello is the always going to be a horizontal app. And sometimes people will need to move to something else to solve their problems. If you are using Trello as an ATS and you start getting 50 applications a day, you are going to go nuts. You need to switch to Jobvite or Greenhopper. If you have a team of 100 devs trying to track your bugs, you want to use FogBugz or Jira or Pivotal.

Joel used a metaphor that I like: The verticals are like stones on a beach and Trello is the sand that fills in all the space between.

In the future I think you'll see the Trello product evolving to support those other verticals and adding value (i.e. quick overview) in the way Trello does best.