Trello celebrates One Million Users
trello.com
trello.com
I think this huge drop in my productivity is a testament to just how awesome Trello is.
My Nexus S is almost two years old and runs Jelly Bean (4.1).
Trello only reached 500,000 users in July of this year, that's some spectacular growth: http://blog.trello.com/trello-is-now-500000-strong/
Fog Creek Employees: can anyone comment on who had this original insight? Was it Joel himself or another employee?
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.
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.
What about women, did it work fine for them? :)
;-)
edit - smiley
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.
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.
This is Fog Creek's org: https://trello.com/fogcreek
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.
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.
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.
On mobile I have two different browsers signed into two different Trello accounts.
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.
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.
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).
Also, we hope that Trello can make an official statement about this soon, and we look forward to their data!
"1,000,000th sign up" != "First 1,000,000 Users"
Title should have been "1,000,000th sign up"
Care to tell us how you use it?
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.
Uservoice has a neat and somewhat complex setup: http://www.uservoice.com/blog/founders/trello-google-docs-pr...
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.
The biggest change since then is that Trello now runs on AWS, rather than colocated servers in NYC. But the software is the same.
"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!"
Congratulations and good luck on your way to 2 million users!
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 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 reasonably use it, would love to use it more, it's Wonderful. :)
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.
Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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)
EDIT: discussion -> description
I don't know how many instances, or what size.
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.
Instead of lists-in-lists it is based on a customizable grid (spreadsheet) with sticky notes.
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.
That's the power of making something that's fun to use.
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.
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.
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
Every company can fail tomorrow. Free or paid.
Too bad they don't provide that.
I wonder how many versions of FogBugz they will still release as hosted version before they only offer it hosted.
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.
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.
Specifically, check out https://trello.com/card/i-want-early-access-to-these-paid-fe....
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.
keep up the good work
the main hangup is the lack of a daily digest report. anyone have a solution?
The other alternative is to use the API, which is full read/write: trello.com/docs