10 ms·

How Trello is different

299 points by joshuacc 15y ago

king_magic 15y 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.
- dylanmcd 15y 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_magic 15y 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 15y ago
    Can I ask, was your girlfriend already an organized person?
    - dylanmcd 15y ago
      Nope, but she's trying to be one. She's like me, organization is something we both don't do naturally, but are trying to improve at.
- hello_moto 15y 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 15y 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_magic 15y 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 15y 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.
- whyleyc 15y ago
  "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- JoshTriplett 15y 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.
th0ma5 15y 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.
- tosh 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.
wulczer 15y 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 15y ago
  it's not bribe, it's ownership.
- RandallBrown 15y 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_moto 15y 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.
  - wulczer 15y 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.
mythz 15y 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 :)
- watty 15y 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_magic 15y 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.
    - gbog 15y ago
      Saying you like it adds close to nothing to the discussion.
      - king_magic 15y ago
        My original comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3433749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3433749 I definitely "added to the discussion".
      - fady 15y ago
        he gives his feedback and says that he would pay for it. the article talks about not charging for trello until you have a large user base. it seems like good feedback from a user, so i'm not sure that i agree with you.
    - whyleyc 15y ago
      "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
igorgue 15y ago
I'm sorry Joel, but Trello, is still bitch work... I still use pen and paper, and works great!
- prateekdayal 15y 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
  - spolsky 15y 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.
    - prateekdayal 15y ago
      I just tried it again and it does sync. Weird because many times it has not happen before. May be flaky internet?
      - dodger 15y ago
        We had a connection bug 3 weeks ago that could have caused changes to not sync. If you still have any windows that are not syncing, please email support@trello.com as soon as you can.
  - mhp 15y ago
    If you have two windows open, the changes DO sync between them. That's actually the whole point of Trello.
- watty 15y ago
  I haven't used Trello but I think it's geared towards a team rather than a single person with pen and paper.
DanielBMarkham 15y 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 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 15y 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.
  - tosh 15y 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.
j_s 15y 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 15y ago
How does Trello compare to Pivotal Tracker? Any experiences?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- keeptrying 15y 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".
arctangent 15y 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.
- chrislomax 15y 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 15y 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.
    - chrislomax 15y ago
      This may be a solution further down the road but our code at the minute changes literally daily and it would be counter productive to have to test every deployment against previous versions We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards a version 1, if you will. We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh the benefits. Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if they have everything needed installed etc etc. Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the customer. We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the customer more.
tosh 15y 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 https://www.blossom.io which has a feature set similar to trello but is aimed at people who deeply care about product development.
- vlokshin 15y 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?
  - tosh 15y 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
- nazar 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.
- thedufer 15y 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 15y 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 http://flow.io , a lean project management application based on kanban.
- lucisferre 15y 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?
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - raganwald 15y 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.
philipmorg 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
  It probably means "Once we have 100m users we'll flip it, retire and raise tulips on the private island".
j45 15y 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.
tamersalama 15y ago
What is the underlying stack? Is it Ruby/Rails or am I just dreaming? isitrails.com says it "might be"
- bobbygrace 15y ago
  From the article: "Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node."
CubicleNinjas 15y 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.
aristus 15y 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 15y 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.
- tomjen3 15y 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 15y 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.
    - spolsky 15y ago
      We wouldn't provide that kind of support, nor would be it be expected, for a free and easy-to-use product.
      - blake8086 15y ago
        I think you deeply underestimate the sense of entitlement people get about products they enter lots of text into.
nazar 15y 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.
alanmeaney 15y 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 15y ago
  There is also &!, which was featured on HN a while back: https://andbang.com/ https://andbang.com/
  - alanmeaney 15y ago
    They are similar but their pricing will prevent the kind of adoption rates Trello are looking for - 100 million+
    - michokest 15y ago
      There's also http://teambox.com http://teambox.com with freemium approach. The new beta has a kanban-style view, too.
- factorialboy 15y ago
  Review19 -- http://review19.com http://review19.com -- is in this space, but focuses entirely on co-location / distributed web, creative and software teams.
ds206 15y ago
Has anyone seen Teambox's beta? It looks very similar to Trello's UI. Who was first though?
- michokest 15y ago
  http://trello.com http://trello.com and http://teambox.com http://teambox.com (beta at http://beta.teambox.com http://beta.teambox.com) have a common ancestor: http://www.pivotaltracker.com http://www.pivotaltracker.com That was the first widely adopted kanban tool for developers that I know about
brador 15y 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.
- dodger 15y 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_backup.js https://github.com/lmatteis/node-trello/blob/master/example_...
- bobbygrace 15y ago
  Data export is at the top of the 'In Progress' list of the Trello Development board: https://trello.com/card/board/data-export/4d5ea62fd76aa1136000000c/4e9d8a91f482dd34ea18335a 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 15y 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 15y ago
  Take a look at Podio, it does far more than nested lists and scales up or down to fit your needs.
- reubenyeah 15y ago
  With JIRA, I find that entering tasks takes far too long, it's quite jarring to my workflow. When I notice bugs, I want to enter them as quick as possible and then continue with my day, I don't want to spend 5 minutes entering a bug, so this becomes a bit of a deal breaker to me.
deleted 15y ago
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joebadmo 15y 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 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html [edit: here's a fanastic, transcendent presentation by Christensen: http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595 http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e0...]
- ivanzhao 15y ago
  Just watched the talk, great stuff!
- josh33 15y ago
  That was transcendent. That's going in my bookmark bar as something I watch regularly. Thanks!
webwanderings 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.
reubenyeah 15y ago
I use Trello all day, every day, the simplicity of it is such a strong feature, it's hard to turn working with Trello into busy work where you're spending more time managing it than actually using it and this is a trap I fall into with a lot of solutions.
hogu 15y 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 15y 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.
factorialboy 15y ago
How Trello is not different - http://srirangan.net/2012-01-how-trello-is-not-different http://srirangan.net/2012-01-how-trello-is-not-different
- andrewem 15y 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 15y ago
I'm really interested in seeing how FogCreek monetizes on Trello in the future.
ThaddeusQuay2 15y 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 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 15y 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 15y 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.

299 points by joshuacc 15y 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.

dylanmcd 15y 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_magic 15y 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 15y ago
  Can I ask, was your girlfriend already an organized person?
  - dylanmcd 15y ago
    Nope, but she's trying to be one. She's like me, organization is something we both don't do naturally, but are trying to improve at.
hello_moto 15y 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 15y 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_magic 15y 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 15y 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.
whyleyc 15y ago
"Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
JoshTriplett 15y 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.

th0ma5 15y 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.

tosh 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

wulczer 15y 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 15y ago
it's not bribe, it's ownership.
RandallBrown 15y 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_moto 15y 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.
- wulczer 15y 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.

mythz 15y 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 :)

watty 15y 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_magic 15y 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.
  - gbog 15y ago
    Saying you like it adds close to nothing to the discussion.
    - king_magic 15y ago
      My original comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3433749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3433749 I definitely "added to the discussion".
    - fady 15y ago
      he gives his feedback and says that he would pay for it. the article talks about not charging for trello until you have a large user base. it seems like good feedback from a user, so i'm not sure that i agree with you.
  - whyleyc 15y ago
    "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading" From: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

igorgue 15y ago

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

prateekdayal 15y 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
- spolsky 15y 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.
  - prateekdayal 15y ago
    I just tried it again and it does sync. Weird because many times it has not happen before. May be flaky internet?
    - dodger 15y ago
      We had a connection bug 3 weeks ago that could have caused changes to not sync. If you still have any windows that are not syncing, please email support@trello.com as soon as you can.
- mhp 15y ago
  If you have two windows open, the changes DO sync between them. That's actually the whole point of Trello.
watty 15y ago
I haven't used Trello but I think it's geared towards a team rather than a single person with pen and paper.

DanielBMarkham 15y 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 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 15y 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.
- tosh 15y 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.

j_s 15y 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 15y ago

How does Trello compare to Pivotal Tracker? Any experiences?

deleted 15y ago
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keeptrying 15y 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".

arctangent 15y 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.

chrislomax 15y 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 15y 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.
  - chrislomax 15y ago
    This may be a solution further down the road but our code at the minute changes literally daily and it would be counter productive to have to test every deployment against previous versions We actually discussed this very point in work today, I still class our product, 2 years down the line, to be in beta. We are actively working towards a version 1, if you will. We could revisit at a later point and probably will but the time it would take to document all db changes and create a version every day would far outweigh the benefits. Distributing to other peoples data centers comes with it's own host of issues as well, we would have to charge for a maintenance contract for 1. We would need to bring on a customer service team to support people. At the minute, bug fixes can come straight to developers via our technical director as we can deploy straight away. We would need a team to asses what their setup is, if they have everything needed installed etc etc. Deployment to our own servers helps us and the customer a lot, we don't charge a lot for hosting, our uptime last year was over 99.97% and bug fixes and functionality are rolled out on a daily basis without interaction from the customer. We did a massive project recently that the customer ended up deployment on their own $5 hosting company, turned out the company didn't support what we needed and we ended up coding around the road blocks. Ended up costing the customer more.

tosh 15y 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 https://www.blossom.io which has a feature set similar to trello but is aimed at people who deeply care about product development.

vlokshin 15y 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?
- tosh 15y 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
nazar 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

thedufer 15y 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 15y 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 http://flow.io , a lean project management application based on kanban.

lucisferre 15y 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?
- deleted 15y ago
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- raganwald 15y 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.

philipmorg 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y ago
It probably means "Once we have 100m users we'll flip it, retire and raise tulips on the private island".

j45 15y 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.

tamersalama 15y ago

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

bobbygrace 15y ago
From the article: "Our developers bleed all over MongoDB, WebSockets, CoffeeScript and Node."

CubicleNinjas 15y 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.

aristus 15y 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 15y 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.
tomjen3 15y 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 15y 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.
  - spolsky 15y ago
    We wouldn't provide that kind of support, nor would be it be expected, for a free and easy-to-use product.
    - blake8086 15y ago
      I think you deeply underestimate the sense of entitlement people get about products they enter lots of text into.

nazar 15y 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.

alanmeaney 15y 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 15y ago
There is also &!, which was featured on HN a while back: https://andbang.com/ https://andbang.com/
- alanmeaney 15y ago
  They are similar but their pricing will prevent the kind of adoption rates Trello are looking for - 100 million+
  - michokest 15y ago
    There's also http://teambox.com http://teambox.com with freemium approach. The new beta has a kanban-style view, too.
factorialboy 15y ago
Review19 -- http://review19.com http://review19.com -- is in this space, but focuses entirely on co-location / distributed web, creative and software teams.

ds206 15y ago

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

michokest 15y ago
http://trello.com http://trello.com and http://teambox.com http://teambox.com (beta at http://beta.teambox.com http://beta.teambox.com) have a common ancestor: http://www.pivotaltracker.com http://www.pivotaltracker.com That was the first widely adopted kanban tool for developers that I know about

brador 15y 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.

dodger 15y 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_backup.js https://github.com/lmatteis/node-trello/blob/master/example_...
bobbygrace 15y ago
Data export is at the top of the 'In Progress' list of the Trello Development board: https://trello.com/card/board/data-export/4d5ea62fd76aa1136000000c/4e9d8a91f482dd34ea18335a 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 15y 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 15y ago
Take a look at Podio, it does far more than nested lists and scales up or down to fit your needs.
reubenyeah 15y ago
With JIRA, I find that entering tasks takes far too long, it's quite jarring to my workflow. When I notice bugs, I want to enter them as quick as possible and then continue with my day, I don't want to spend 5 minutes entering a bug, so this becomes a bit of a deal breaker to me.

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joebadmo 15y 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 http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html [edit: here's a fanastic, transcendent presentation by Christensen: http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595 http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e0...]

ivanzhao 15y ago
Just watched the talk, great stuff!
josh33 15y ago
That was transcendent. That's going in my bookmark bar as something I watch regularly. Thanks!

webwanderings 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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 15y 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.

reubenyeah 15y ago

I use Trello all day, every day, the simplicity of it is such a strong feature, it's hard to turn working with Trello into busy work where you're spending more time managing it than actually using it and this is a trap I fall into with a lot of solutions.

hogu 15y 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 15y 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.

factorialboy 15y ago

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

andrewem 15y 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 15y ago

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

ThaddeusQuay2 15y 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 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 15y 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 15y 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.