The compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because normies were paying top dollar to be able to w

The compelling idea was supposed to be CityDesk. This was pre-Wordpress, when everyone was building a CMS because normies were paying top dollar to be able to write on the web. Joel described it in a post as "the future belongs to people who can make JavaScript sing", which was slightly ahead of time. As many developers did at the time (and still do), they built their own tools, and eventually realized their bugtracker was decent enough to sell to Joel's blog readers. FogBugz sales quickly outstripped CityDesk, so they pivoted to selling Dev tools. From there onwards, they were a bit all over the place. They still managed to score StackOverflow and Trello, though...