I have, in the past 3 months, been forced to work in a location where the only internet access is on machines with IE8 on them (and no ability to install Chrome Frame). The loss of Trello has absolutely FUCKING sucked. I'm sorry for the profanity, but it is an abysmally awful process to have to STOP using Trello and go back to emailing spreadsheets back and forth or shudder MS Project.
I think this huge drop in my productivity is a testament to just how awesome Trello is.
Less than 2 years ago, I bought a "cutting edge" Android smartpone, called the Samsung Infuse. Almost two years later, Samsung has yet to release a single update to Gingerbread (from Froyo) over the cell network. A few months ago, they were nice enough to put out a buggy Gingerbreak update to the device, but it was hosted on their website, required me to install software on my computer just to load it, and it then failed (repeatedly) to install on my phone. The Trello app won't work on Froyo, so, no, thanks to the fact that Samsung doesn't give a shit about its customers, I don't have Trello on my phone. I just want to add that the Samsung Infuse, at the time of purchase, was a top of the line phone in the store. Same (subsidized) price as an iPhone. Within 6 months of purchase, it was completely abandoned by Samsung. HTC will be getting my business for the next purchase.
HTC Thunderbolt here ... but the same problem. I bought what was supposed to be the next big thing, but next time I'll wait and buy what is the big thing.
No Cyanogenmod for that device? I had a Fascinate which I believe is Verizon's version of original Samsung S, went to Gingerbread and Jelly Bean well ahead of Verizon's OTA updates.
Samsung is frequently referred to as "the only android carrier that makes any money". One wonders whether such Apple-sque upgrade forcing has contributed to their financial success.
Apple doesn't 'force' upgrades anything like what every Android vendor does. The iPhone 4 is now 2.5 years old and still happily runs iOS6 - I can't find anyone with a 2.5 year old android phone that's running current software that hasn't modded it.
also, its not fun to use. i do have one suggestion for the trello team: please make the mobile app faster. the UI, in terms of moving cards to different lists is really hard to use and lags a lot. i suggest finding a better solution for that feature, instead of trying to replicate the desktop experience. i rarely use the mobile app for this reason.
Well yeah, but if you've got an iPhone, chances are you have a cell connection. If he can't access the internet, even over the cell network, I'd be curious to know what kind of environment he's working in.
You nailed it brother. I'm not a government employee, but for the time being, I'm forced to work in their facility. I do have my own Macbook here which I use for all my scripting/data analysis/etc, but I have to leave the building to get to WiFi. It is infuriating that these idiots have been fooled into thinking that they are more secure by using IE8 over.... anything else.
"The government" doesn't mean that. My wife works for the DOI and their entire bureau uses Chrome and their government email and other services are managed through Google Apps, her cubical contains a typical locked-down Windows PC and a Red Hat workstation, the workstation runs Chrome and FF which are only as behind the curve as far as the stable releases are. I knew some guys who worked for NOAA as contractors who said they were pretty modernized as an agency too (running modern web servers on Python, vs the gigantic legacy J2EE apps I maintained during my stint as a government contractor).
The agencies you mentioned are less than a hundredth the size of the agencies in the US Gov which are using IE8. The smaller agencies have the luck of getting to be forward thinking. The rest are crushed down by bureaucratic inertia and Microsoft development cultures (with some of the J2EE thrown in too). The IE8 stuff is mainly because they have built so many shitty .NET apps that won't work properly without IE.
Fair enough, there are plenty of organizations both inside and outside the government that have sane technology standards that contradict my cheap generalizations.
These sort of product celebrations (with users providing feedback on what the product means to them) are fantastic. As a user it's great to be able to see what a product means to others too and how they're using it. We had a similar page for a website we run and reading user feedback is so much fun, companies should do this sort of thing more often.
I wonder how much, it at all, has Trello's success impacted sales of 37 Signals' Basecamp. We cancelled our Basecamp account and switched to Trello after we realized Trello was ideal for our project management needs.
I'm impressed Trello has managed to succeed in what many had written off as overcrowded space. I think the key to its success is the insight that Joel Spolsky explains in his post here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html - that successful apps often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes them suitable for many purposes. (For Trello, that's a "list of lists".)
Fog Creek Employees: can anyone comment on who had this original insight? Was it Joel himself or another employee?
I'm impressed Trello has managed to succeed in what many had written off as overcrowded space. I think the key to its success is the insight that Joel Spolsky explains in his post here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html - that successful apps often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes them suitable for many purposes. (For Trello, that's a "list of lists".)
I don't think the data structure was the innovation for Trello. There were lots of products out there that had the columns-of-cards structure. Was (and is) a feature of many agile project management products - following the cards-on-the-wall structure used offline by agile folk.
What Trello did - which was brilliant - was sell that as a solution to everybody. Not just the project management folk in dev companies, not just for dev folk, but for folk planning/organising anything. It's spotting that that data structure is generic.
that successful apps often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes them suitable for many purposes
And I'd argue that that is also a major reason when apps fail: they force people to change their existing ways of thinking and aren't able to "recruit" enough users/customers.
Frankly I wasn't that big on trello and still have major issues with it. For example, when juggling multiple boards, I still don't really know where to begin my workflow. I still don't really know how to see casually what all has been going on across my boards...a lot like a facebook feed. These are critical features that keep me from really engaging with it.
Try connecting to Trello through Hojoki.com , it provides a chronological stream-like interface that might be more to your liking. You can filter by Project etc.
That announcement page was buggy for men on Ubuntu Chrome. The page loaded and I saw the text letter but the smaller "title" card was overlayed on top of the letter but was mirrored left to right so you couldn't read it. Looks good on OSX chrome though!
My biggest problem with Trello is that they don't support multiple identities. I use it for work and have also created a personal account. What I would expect is a nice dropdown to switch identities (eg like you get with Google or Github). The mobile apps also only have one identity.
A work around is in theory to keep logging out and back in again as the different users, but this is extremely tedious and in my case completely impractical as I don't know my passwords (stored in a password manager).
On one of Joel's posts it was clear he used Trello for work and for personal activity, but didn't state how that was achieved.
I've created multiple boards. Right now I'm at three: one for my personal life, one for my public work life (i.e. shared with colleagues), and one for my private work life that has my own to-dos, lists, etc. Then you use the board dropdown similar to what you wanted for users.
Those are all personal, although your last one includes work information. My work has a separate identity from me, has a separate email address, and has confidential information that needs to be bounded by that work. Intermingling it with boards associated with my personal identity is wrong, and in violation of several work NDAs with partners.
It should also be the case that my work can disable/cancel my work account and be confident of no further work related access by me.
You'll just see our public boards, but we also have boards that are visible only to org members. Granting or restricting access to all of them is as simple as adding or removing a user. You can create and be a member of as many orgs as you want.
But that's not the issue. The problem is the inability to switch between identities without logging out and back in. Which is significantly harder on iOS than the desktop.
Not really a surprise. I'm having the same problem with a pile of services. The only thing I'm using that lets me switch easily is Gmail.
There was a post on here a month or so ago about a guy who lost his personal drop box because they do a bad job of understanding people have multiple personas.
Huh? That still means giving a personal account access to the org. (We use an org.) And also means that notifications etc would go to a personal email account, not a work one.
We use Google accounts for work and Trello. That means that disabling the Google account is sufficient to prevent logging in to Trello, which is a good thing.
It also means that none of us can practically use Trello for personal stuff.
If you're running a modern OS you can use multiple desktops. why not use a desktop switch - with another browser running your personal account. you could switch back and forth with a key command and maintain the separation. Or if you have the power, run a VM and do it in that.
Ha! It's funny since I literally just finally signed up this past week.
I saw it when it first came out and was blown away but didn't have time to fit it into my routine until recently. Really wonderful elegant software, I've gotten a few other people to convert to it too just in the past couple days.
I have boards for misc tasks, various engineering tasks, shopping, development, sales pipelines etc. It's fantastic.
I don't feel comfortable providing that number, but I can talk a bit about how the Trello team would answer it.
The concept of "active" isn't really a cut-and-dried thing. Do you count people who merely look at Trello, or do they have to do something? If they have to do something, then what is "something"? If I do one "something," is that enough, or do I have to do a couple? What if someone does that on my behalf (i.e., assigning me to or removing me from a board or card)? Are they active, am I active, or both?
It turns out the Trello team several different concepts of "active" they chart, but two they pay a lot of attention to are the number of users who have been active on Trello in the last 28 days (i.e., your pip has gone green), and the number of users who have performed at least four actions in the last 28 days (e.g., create a card, move a card, join a board, etc.). The awesome thing is that those numbers, while obviously less than the total member count, are nothing to sneeze at, and have been moving in proportion to the total member count throughout the time they've been measured. In other words, we have roughly twice as many active users today, by the above metrics, as we did at 500,000.
Sorry for the fuzziness, but I hope that at least gives you enough information to know it's not an empty statistic.
what's wrong with providing that number? I think number of sign-ups is pretty much useless metric. even dead MySpace keeps increasing their sign-ups. It doesn't mean they are doing well.
To be honest, I would be really really interested how many active users Trello has. It would be great service to startup community to see what is conversion rate out there for bigger services like Trello.
Evernote is very public with their numbers, for example they claim 1/3 of total sign-ups being active users (users who logged into service in last month).
I work on Kiln, not Trello, and I don't feel comfortable ripping numbers off their dashboard and posting them onto HN. Simple as that. For all I know, they plan on announcing those numbers themselves soon, and I don't want to get in their way.
Yes, I was trying to say that developing Trello is still really fun, even as it's getting bigger - we are starting to see some minor scaling challenges, but it's still a great time.
But we do use Trello to manage Trello, with a public dev board (https://trello.com/dev) and also internal boards to track things that are not yet public or that are too granular to expose externally.
And there are a bunch of good articles about how people are using Trello; searching for 'How I use Trello' turns up a lot of ideas. That being said, it's not going to fit everybody every time.
Took a look at the dev board as a way to "demo" the service without signing up. It seems... overly complicated? Maybe I really do just need to sign up.
"I manage my relationship with my girlfriend using Trello. I stack potential gifts for her in one list, briefs on arguments we have in another, etc. My friends share the board and help me resolve the arguments in real time. I use the labels to convey my emotions at a certain point in time for a specific card. I really love her. Fingers crossed she doesn't find out!"
I started using Trello about 2.5 months ago and its really impacted the way I do almost everything for the better. It has made organizing a plan of action for my to-do's and side projects so much easier that I feel like a blow through my tasks now.
Congratulations and good luck on your way to 2 million users!
Interesting tool. This is something I normally do in a notebook (or a text file) so it wasn't like I was out looking for anything to replace that, but if this can add
value to that process I'm all for it.
One of the things I don't have in my home grown process but wish I did was a way to surface important but not urgent things periodically. Sort of along the memoize theme you need to keep the important things in your head even if you're not currently working on them, and having them surface periodically would assist that. I've had stuff get
pushed so far down in the stack that it basically submerges
until it becomes an urgent issue.
I'm curious if an app like this could have gotten traction if it wasn't put out by a shop like Fog Creek. In other words, if some guy built this in his basement, would anybody have noticed, no matter how great?
I imagine fame would give you an initial boost, but it would be only temporary without a really good product. The growth curve might look similar to a non-famous developer, but just start at an earlier point on the curve.
I really like trello. Something about it feels so natural. I like it a heap better than jira + agile plugin. I do like pivitol tracker too, but trello can do more.
At my last place we used Trello from the day it came out (and had used fogbugz for years). At my current place we use jira + agile. I do prefer Trello for high level stuff, but I think jira does a good job of handling both high level and low level tracking in the same app. Their agile stuff seems to be getting better too.
I'm glad to see Trello is going so well. It's a great product and a great example of not having to build something that covers every possible use case.
I've looked at Trello several times, and it's always seemed like a great app to work with... but I never got around to actually using it.
So, open question time: How do all you HN'ers use Trello? What kind of things do you manage with it? Bonus for telling us what you used before, and how Trello makes it easier. Super-duper bonus for anything to do with running software projects, and running businesses.
I used Mingle before in a very large project. It was good enough, but soon I moved to a smaller project (4-7 people at any one time) and switching to Trello has proved to be a real asset.
We create cards (story cards, basically) for each user experience and move them to different columns (Backlog, In Progress, Done) and then archive columns at the end of each Iteration.
We also have Known Issues columns and we maintain a large amount of our discussions about implementation on cards.
Also as the developer on the project, I find it useful to put the individual tasks of each user experience on the corresponding cards, which I can split into lists (such as 'API Tasks' and 'UI Tasks').
It's very flexible, and I've found it to work very well with the way I intuitively do things.
I also use it on a small side project that I do with a colleague of mine. We love it.
Everyone with whom I work on Trello loves it and we avidly follow its development.
Before Trello, I used a simple text wiki named ZuluPad. Now I use five Trello lists:
1. Customers
2. Follow Up (contacted potential customers)
3. To Do (uncontacted potential customers, features, bug fixes, business tasks)
4. Done 2013-01-06~ (tasks completed this week, nice to look over at the beginning of each week)
5. Wishlist (everything that isn't a priority)
I use checklists to keep track of development tasks and testing. I write comments when I interact with a customer. Trello is awesome. I just wish it could make Google Calendar entries for cards that have due dates.
We lay our project's stories into sprints using Trello. Previously, we had used physical cards. However, while all of our developers are located out of one office, we have stakeholders beyond the US that never felt fully-involved with physical cards. Trello enhances their feeling of control and visibility into the project. And, for those times where somebody works from home, the impact is zero.
We also track story progress (analysis, development, testing, business approval, etc.) on a second board. Previously, we had used a spreadsheet. Trello's support for quickly copying/moving cards and notifying board members of changes are powerful.
For our stories, each card description is structured as "[story number] [story points] [story summary]". Would it be nice if Trello "natively" supported these attributes? Sure, but it doesn't hinder our use.
In my mind, a great sign of Trello's awesomeness is that our use of it has grown organically. While waiting for others in the company to take Rally/Mingle/etc. through the discussion, evaluation, install, etc. process, I just started a board on Trello one day and watched it work for us. :)
So, open question time: How do all you HN'ers use Trello? What kind of things do you manage with it? Bonus for telling us what you used before, and how Trello makes it easier. Super-duper bonus for anything to do with running software projects, and running businesses.
Things I've been using it for:
* Tracking people through recruitment process
* Tracking people through usability testing screening / testing / followup process
* User stories / hypothesis through dev process
* Pretty much everything the company is doing (we have multiple backlogs like Learning, Marketing, Product Ideas, Potential clients, etc. that feed into a separate single kanban-style board that covers the next four or five weeks worth of work)
* Used it for open and closed card sorts for UX/IA work.
* Organising conferences
The thing I like about Trello is that it's pretty much process agnostic. There's very little there that's not related to organising the cards. Which works well for me since what I use by default is cards - or post-it notes - stuck to the wall.
I've previously played with pivitol, mingle, basecamp, etc. They were mostly trying to do too much for me and felt like I was trying to mangle my process to fit the tool. Trello lets me fit the tool to my process.
The places where I use Trello are where I've not got enough wall space for physical cards (e.g. there are about 200 odd cards on the company backlog board), when I'm working with people in multiple locations, and when I'm doing stuff when I'm on the road.
I still have a physical board. When we're in the office for extended periods we pretty much ignore Trello for the "real" board. If we're in/out we keep the physical/trello boards synced. If we're on the road we just use trello and sync on return.
Does anyone know how many servers it runs on? I'd like to see a physical tech stack description (is it already out there somewhere? If so, my Google-fu failed me)
This looks like a great service that i didn't know about before. Definitely going to be getting one more user. I wish we could use something like this at work.
Since most of this is rather new to me, are there any other great organizational/ basic life services out there? I would be curious to see what other people are using.
I've just started using it but now that it has 1M users I'm a little apprehensive for the usual reasons: no easy way to export or access offline, and no idea of whether there are any monetization plans on the horizon. It could be another way to get lost in the cloud.
I don't know what I can say to ease your worries about monetization. Its definitely something we're working on. That said, Fog Creek is an established company with steady cash flow, so we're not just going to disappear.
One thing I think people don't appreciate is that Trello isn't really competing with Basecamp/Jira/FogBugz. Those tools are all really well designed for fine-grained project development. Trello is beautifully designed for a much higher-level view of a project. It would be entirely sane to keep track of the general status of your project, while still keeping track of its minutia in something like Basecamp. That's exactly what the Kiln team does: a single card may stand in for all of Kiln HyperSync, even though dozens of FogBugz cases, with due dates and escalation states, may sit behind it. This isn't a failing of either tool; just an acknowledgment they fit into different niches.
That's the post that convinced me to sign up for Trello! I was looking for it to post it, heh. I've been using it for... I guess about 6 months or so... maybe longer, in any case I seem to have the Blue Starfish of being in the first 500 000 users.
If you need more vertical stuff then check out Breeze (http://letsbreeze.com), it's Basecamp and Trello mashup. Plus it adds calendar, time tracking, budgeting and reporting.
We launched BoardTrail, a very cool time tracking app for Trello board, it monitors the duration of cards in the Doing list.
Check it out - http://www.boardtrail.com
Pricing is based on the value it's providing. It is not a horizontal tool but deeply vertical. We are not competing with price and also not directly with Basecamp or Trello.
If you're looking for an alternative to Trello take a look at http://www.kanbanpad.com we've been working on it for quite a while and it fits a niche that many like.
Trello is one of those things that I would have said nobody needed, until the first time I touched it and realized the pure joy of moving cards around lists.
That's the power of making something that's fun to use.
Charging for premium features - Sure. But the basic version will remain free according to the Trello Guide.
Free... for how long?
Trello is free forever. We may add pay-only features in the future, but everything that's free today will be free tomorrow and forever. Also, we'll not make a for-pay feature that forces you to compromise on privacy, security, or portability. Those are built-in. [...] Trello is free.
Forever is such a strong word... What if Fogcreek goes bust one day? I would actually prefer companies to charge money for such services, it gives greater confidence in them in the long run. Even a measly $10/year per user is a great business model if you have 1M users.
While Fog Creek doesn't announce features and services prior to shipping, we do keep a fairly public account of what we're working on at http://trello.com/dev. Note the cards labeled "Trello Power-ups" in green.
Tho, I think if they just asked me to pay what I think it's worth to me, I would pay something. Right away. I'd click the button and pay something, then probably do it again in a couple months.
They should call it, "give Trello a hug", and then I can just hug it with some money whenever it makes me feel happy.
Too sappy? I don't care. I honestly feel like I've found the solution I've always dreamed of with Trello and I could not believe it was free from the day I signed up until now.
It's an amazing service but the more I use it the more I become reliant on it. As it stands I don't have any justifiable expectation that they will continue to provide the service to me which makes me nervous.
I use it for a lot of smaller projects but am sometimes uncomfortable using it for larger, longer term ones due to the lack of any sort of contractual relationship.
It's not that I really think they're going to stop providing it at a moments notice - those guys have a great track record - but paying for it (or having the option to) would provide that extra layer of reassurance that I can expect a given level of service.
I love Trello, but cannot commit to using it more for business until I have an expectation of service, which comes from paying for it. They're awesome, but they owe me nothing, and that's just too risky.
You know, I've had a fair number of services that I'm paying for just vanish out from under me, too (e.g., eWorld, iTools, Grove.io, the original Siri). Sometimes the wind-down is longer, sometime it isn't. And, conversely, some things I don't pay for have been around for a very, very long time (Freenode, Gmail, my old Fidonet BBS, etc.). Maybe paid sticks around longer on average, but I think paid-v.-free is a bad litmus test.
I think there's a much better one: how easy it is to take your data and go home. With Trello, the answer is "exceedingly easy." On any board, just go to "Options" -> "Share, Print, Export..." and dump the entire board to JSON. From there, it should be easy to move your data onto Remember the Milk, Pinterest, org-mode, or whatever's appropriate for you. You can even automate grabbing that JSON on a daily basis via the API, if you're so inclined.
So while I understand your argument, your actual risk here is very, very low.
As another Creeker pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the Trello team has some stuff coming out in the future that you may find appealing, if you would feel better contractually paying for stuff. But in terms of risk, I think that it can be very low, today, whether you pay or not.
On the other hand, you have a better argument when the service goes down temporarily. They're more likely to respond quickly if they have paying customers.
That may be fair. In this particular case, I can tell you we respond to Trello outages the same we'd respond to FogBugz or Kiln outages, so your concern should be minimal.
http://status.fogcreek.com/2012/10/diesel-bucket-brigade-mai...
I came in to work and was shocked that Trello was offline since I use it as my todo list in work. Then I read the stories as to why and was again shocked when it was only offline for a day or so. Fog Creek are awesome.
We were only offline for a few hours. Self-imposed (and turned out it wasn't necessary but in the fog of war at that moment, was the decision we made).
Nice, even better than I thought, after I saw the news I don't think I checked again that day, didn't seem likely to me that in all that chaos that Trello would be a priority. Happy to be proved wrong of course.
Good points. I've been pushing Trello for our team internally and almost everyone who's had a chance to use it so far loves it. We've even started using it with clients for QA and most clients really like it. Only one client hates it, but they are one of those rare poison-clients we really want to fire. Maybe Trello could even be a great way to qualify new clients :P
I hadn't even noticed the export features and now that I've taken I look a lot of my concerns seem much less important. Thanks!
Still trying to figure out how to effectively use the "due date" feature though. When a card's checklist is complete it still shows as past due. Not a dealbreaker at all though, we'll figure out how to make it work.
I think there is little risk of Trello being discontinued/FogCreek going out of business. They do a lot of hiring and have had a pretty vocal customer segment pleading for them to charge for it. I don't really understand why they haven't tho I'm sure Joel Spolsky has a plan.
Disclaimer: I wish he was charging--I have a similar project I've been working on over nights and weekends. It is very hard to compete with free and difficult to position/market a product you have created to appeal to everyone. That being said--I love working on my project so it'll be around for a long time... Link: http://www.thetaboard.com
This argument sounds reasonable. I wonder if it is true though. Businesses that are paid for their services can vanish as well. The question is, if the probability is really lower for paid services compared to free services.
i love trello.. i use it for everything and really love what fogcreek has done with it. i do have one suggestion: please make you mobile app faster. the UI, in terms of moving cards to different list is really hard to use and lags a lot. i suggest finding a better solution for that feature, instead of trying to replicate the desktop experience. i rarely use the mobile app for this reason.
Sorry you feel this way, pswenson. Are you still experiencing the slowness on Sprint.ly? Please email me at justin@sprint.ly and I'm happy to help as I can.
I think this huge drop in my productivity is a testament to just how awesome Trello is.