Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best on the internet for a couple of years).<p>From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably played a major role ushering it in). With products like CityDesk, FogBugz, and Copilot failing or seemingly meandering, it didn't really seem like much would come of it. But they kept at it and look at them now. I guess good software <i>does</i> take ten years (give or take) [1].<p>Of course it didn't hurt that Joel is one of the best bloggers who ever done it, and I'm sure at least Stack Overflow benefited tremendously from being seeded with Joel's captive audience, but they have still executed the hell out of it and continue to do so, and obviously continue to spawn awesome stuff on the side.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html</a>
I <i>love</i> Trello. We use it as our editorial workflow board at Mashable (meaning it is where stories live from assignment (or sometimes conception) to the various editing/publishing phases. We use it to visually see what is publishing next, to see embargos or scheduled posts for different areas and more importantly, to see what everyone else is working on.<p>To me, that's the hallmark of a good tool: when it can be used in an industry it really wasn't designed for (publishing workflow) as if it was built for that purpose.<p>Props to Joel and to Trello!
I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me.<p>The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of controlled local hosting is moot. That would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.
Co-founder of Trello Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about today's news. Worth reading if you're interested in the thinking behind the deal: <a href="http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello-raises-10m-series-a-funding-from-index-ventures-and-spark-capital" rel="nofollow">http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello-raises-10m-se...</a>
Great to see Trello, Fog Creek and Joel doing well.<p>Joel/Fog Creek are one of the few entities in the startup ecosystem that I read about and think to myself, I want to be a CEO like Joel and build a company like Fog Creek.<p>A lot of startups claim they want to "change the world." And I think Joel can actually claim to have done that thanks to his influential blog and the humane company culture he's setup at Fog Creek. And this is without even counting stack exchange.
So Trello is not currently profitably? "Fog Creek is profitable and could afford to fund Trello development to profitability." Given its growth rate and presumably low sales / marketing expenses, it would seem to be easy for them to be profitable.<p>What is their revenue? There's 4.5 million 'members' though less than 25% have used it in the last 28 days, from what the chart shows <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html</a><p>Is it just that very few of these people are paying currently? I do see they are adding a business class tier now.
That's great!<p>Trello is one of those apps that you can dismiss too fast because you think it doesn't do enough, but which to come back to because everything else is too complex. I've been using it extensively, and it has almost gone viral around me. As in, every time someone needs to manage a project, I hear "Hey, what was this simple project management software you told me you're using for everything you do?", and there comes a new Trello user.<p>I even remember using it for managing my own time when I was working for a large Japanese company that was using excel spreadsheets to manage projects, so I could have a clear interface and use a quick and dirty piece of JS I wrote to generate the sacrosanct Daily Reports I was asked to provide.
It's incredible how such a simple idea could become so big.<p>I'm sat here trying to think up some grand scheme that's going to make me my millions. Its a great lesson that really all I need is a simple idea. The key is in the execution. Take that simple idea and develop (and market) it to perfection.
Does anyone know how this type of spin out works? I would imagine FogCreek has an ownership stake in the company for "seed funding" Trello with resources.
FogBugz users: Did you know you can drag FogBugz cases into Trello cards? Spolsky shared the secret...<p><a href="https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792</a>
We would use Trello if they added two things:<p>1) simple way to delete a card, list, or board (not this archive nonsense)<p>2) multiple lists in a column
I've been using Trello daily for over a year now to keep track of projects and tasks at work, and it has been great. While I sometimes freak out that Trello alone holds my work to-do list (instead of nice, safe paper and pen), I have yet to experience any significant downtime or lost data.<p>Good luck to them!
It's really great to see good things coming Trello's way with all of this. Those guys have worked ridiculously hard at it.<p>I distinctly remember them keeping Trello running through a disaster and keeping all of it's users informed. Great job, guys!
Trello's simplicity and ease of use almost makes you feel like you're using pen and paper and that's truly powerful and why so many people can learn how to use it with so little onboarding.<p>Trello has a good balance of blending to your workflow and having your workflow blend to it.<p>I was even able to find a clever way to use trello to manage all of my personal reading:
<a href="http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management/" rel="nofollow">http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management/</a>
Congratulations to Trello. I user Trello for almost everything, from planning what to buy/not-to-buy, travel planning, to choosing a school for my daughter.
Great news, congratulations. I'm interested to hear what people think about it's chance of survival now. As part of Fog Creek they started monetising Trello and had a chance of building a long-term business. Now with the investment there is greater risk they will end up acquired and shut down. On all the Trello threads here people have always been very worried about that scenario.
Congrats on the funding from a happy gold member. I use it to manage (and not forget) all the many small things I need to do or to keep track of ideas for the future. One of the biggest features is that is does not mandate a workflow because it's just boards with lists with cards. I use it in ways partly inspired by Kanban, Getting Things Done, and the typical calendar.
> Fog Creek, which was founded in 2000 and is owned by employees<p>What happens to the Fog Creek employees? Do they have a stake in the new companies?
> In 2010, the company spun off Stack Exchange Inc.<p>This is not what actually happened. As far as I remember, Stack Overflow had nothing to do with Fog Creek per se, except for Joel begin a founder of both. Stack Exchange Inc. grew from Stack Overflow Internet Services LLC which Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky were founders of. Fog Creek did not make Stack Overflow.
After trying so many tools, pivotal tracker, asana, google docs, Trello was so refreshing and easy to use I immediately became an evangelist. I think a key feature is you can share it with non-techincal folks and it makes sense to at least some degree right away. Yay Trello, happy you will be around for a long time to come!
One of the biggest things I loved about Joel and the entire Fog Creek / SO history is that it always felt like a company. A real business with real people. Not a cartoon and not a sweatshop. I hope with this news Trello continues down that path.
Amazing to see the journey of a a blogger & company I have admired for the past 15 years. His blog was one of those inspirations for me to want to start building my own business. Big fan of Trello here. Many congratulations.
Wow that's pretty cool. Didn't realize Trello wasn't already it's own thing.<p>What do you all use Trello for? I've tried a number of different task management systems, including Trello, but I haven't yet found a use case for Trello feels 100% perfect. Curious to hear how others are using it!
Love how Trello is customizable to everything I want. Easy to integrate with other services, utilize their card feature and generally make task management easier. Very happy for the Trello and Fog Creek team. Look forward to seeing how it evolves on its own these coming years!
disclaimer: There's absolutely no real thought about how I'd implement this as I'm saying it.<p>I like trello <i>a lot</i>. I'm practically obsessed with it.<p>It works really well for my small teams and my personal life.<p>A couple people have said it doesn't scale well to larger teams (with necessary ymmv disclaimers).<p>I wonder if that's because of how inherently formless and simple it is (which I think is its strength). It's a very general metaphor that narrows to lots of specific use cases easily. It'd be interesting if there were more optional constraints you could add to boards/cards/etc to formalize a specific workflow. I'm just shooting from the hip here, not sure what that would look like.
Anyone else seeing lots of parallels in functionality between Trello and Google Keep (keep.google.com). I have been using keep a lot since google got rid of their google.com/ig homepage. Not finding a overwhelming reason to migrate to Trello.
I love Trello. I have used it for several years now at work and for personal projects.<p>One thing I would like to know is what the hell is Yammer? Microsoft bought them out for 1.2 billion and I've never heard of it.
Trello is such a fantastic tool, I use it every single day. It has stood the test of time for me, unlike Evernote, Clipboard and many others. This is fantastic news, kudos to the Trello team.