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She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More
Well-known software developer Joel Spolsky has built popular Q&A network Stack Exchange, and launched FogBugz, a project management system for software teams. Next up on the docket is Trello, a team workflow platform and list manager that is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Spolsky says that the hardest things about running and managing a company is tracking what people are working on. He created Trello to mitigate this challenge. Trello is the team work system that anyone, in any industry, can use.
The web-based application is designed to be the centralized place where all collaborative team work can be assigned an tracked. The startup says that other project management systems are developer focused, too complex and don’t appeal to a broader community. Trello has been built for any type of workflow, from being a business-focused tool to even acting as personal list-management application.
Trello centralizes around one “board”, where users in a group can create to-do lists, create and assign tasks to co-workers who can then update when a task is complete. For each project you can create a card, which includes communications, activity, attachments, updates and more. You can drag and drop members into these cards, and then drag cards into lists.
Like other workflow applications, the platform is visual. And the app works in realtime, updating on any browser without a refresh, making communication efficient. Trello also has features for businesses built right in such as permissions and organizations. And for now, Trello will be completely free for users. Trello comes in an iOS app, and a web app.
Q&A
Judges: John Ham (Ustream), Hilary Mason (Bit.ly), Kevin Rose (Milk), George Zachary (Charles River Ventures)
KR: I love this as a project management software. It looks great. You could charge a few bucks per seat.
A: It is free, but when we have huge numbers of people using this a freemium model may make sense.
GZ: This an awesome product demo. I am an investor in Yammer, I like what you are taping into. Where do you go for revenue?
A: We have all ideas, similar to what kevin is suggesting. Our first goal is to get it as ubiquitous with as little friction.
HM: It looks like this is taking better parts of agile programmer technology.
A: This is the big picture for what people are working on.
HM: IS there an API? What is this built on?
A: There will be an API soon. It’s built on Mongo, backbone.
JH: There’s an opportunity to nail it. Where are you going to drive adoption? Silicon Valley? VCs?
A: I’m not sure. Our goal is to make it a horizontal app. We have a chance to shout about the fact that this is a horizontal category.
Presentation:
customer-friendly enterprise. Once we'll do the text warpower. Is it like the guys? Now that logo says one thing but the name says another but I'm going to go by that t-shirt and say: please welcome to the stage from Trello, Joel Spolsky.
Thank you. I'm Joel Spolsky. I'm the co-founder of software also stock exchange which I'm also the CEO and our Trello, we're launching it today, if you're with a laptop in your audience and you want to follow along, that's the URL: go to /trello. As a CEO of two companies kind of, I have found that the hardest thing is keeping track of what everybody's working on and if you ever had to coordinate teams working on multiple projects at the same time, others knowing where everyone is up to, is the hardest thing.
Whose doing what? Whose assigned to what. That's why we built Trello. So this is Trello. It's a bunch of lists. Each list has in it multiple cards. And each of those cards is a little project that somebody might be working on. In the top right hand corner, you have the members of this board to this little picture there for everybody that is participating in this board, and this particular board is a company called Artist Exploitation ink, and what they do is find bands, like young recording artists, garage artists on You Tube, audition them, and if they like them, they give them sort of a professional makeover, and exploitative recording contract.
So, when it finds a new band. It's real easy. You just go and click and add a new card thing in there. It's very easy. On the back of each card, click on sedate the lemur there. On the back of each card you've got room for all kinds of extra junk. So you can attach files, you can have conversations and in this case we've uploaded a YouTube video or link to a YouTube video, the band.
And there's also voting going on there on the back of the card, so it's a way of indicating which teams, which projects you support and so what we're going to do is we're going to take the top ranked bands that we found on YouTube and we're going to move them move them over to the audition column, which is sort of an indication that these guys are ready for an audition.
So, Justin, why don't you take over the top three over there? There you go. And then you can assign people to them, so for example, we're going to assign lean out to my little brother. We're going to assign Trello's Canadian girlfriend in Canada and then Justin can do the sedate the limer. I really like the sedate the limer band so why don't you, drag those up to the top so that everything has an order you can drag left to right, up, and down.
Those of you that are following along have noticed that this stuff is all being synchronized live over the internet to other web browsers, so that if we bring up another browser here. You can see the same thing and any changes that you make in that browser will instantly show up in every other browser that is open on that board, anywhere on the Internet.
Allright. So Justin has auditioned. He's decided that they are awesome and he's going to send that band over to the makeover department which consists of Michael and when Michael's ready to work on it, he'll just attach his picture to that as sort of a signal to us that he's working on that band. He's done a little mock up of what they should look like and he's going to attach a file of what that band should look like.
Oops, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sorry we are getting slow internet action here. Alright, let's do it in Safari. And he's gonna upload a picture of the band which then uploads and gets attached. There it is. Okay, so that's his artist's impression of the makeover we want to do. And the makeover department is done.
They send it over by dragging that card into the review process. I'm in charge of the reviews so he's going to assign a little picture of me that and what I want to do about this dance? Now I got 3 changes that I want to make before I'm going to sign a recording contract with this band. So Justin's going to add a checklist there of the three things I want to do.
Number one I feel like they are kind of boring looking. I want them to be more glam. So put that on the checklist. Number two, I want to somehow take find a way of taking advantage of the whole teenage girl attraction to were wolves and vampires because I feel like we can exploit that. Number three?
Anyone, anyone? Yes, more Cowbell. Correct. Having given a checklist of three things that I want to change about the band. I'm gonna take that card. We're gonna drop it back on the makeover department. The makeover team consists of Michael. He is going to go in there and attach his picture of the more glam version of the band.
That's uploaded and I like that, challenging Gene Simmons. Terrific. In terms of capitalizing done the whole Twilight thing. We're just gonna change the name of the band. We're not cynical at all. And the Cowbell we can add in post production. So that gets dragged over back into the review process and I review it and when it's all ready it goes into the final recording column where we're ready to record it, we're gonna attach John to that, he's our audio engineer and he's gonna work on that.
Now, everything you see here is completely configurable, so you can add, remove, and re-arrange lists at will. So if we start to have a problem discovering that the band here, the lead singer's voice is changing, we can make a column for that. We're going to have to wait a few months for that to shake out, out that over there, yes, and sort of leave him in puberty for a couple of months.
Great. Let me show you a couple of other example boards. I have a little bit of time just to show you some other examples of how you might use Trello. Are they're any VC's in the audience, anyone, anyone? No, they don't come to this kind of conference? This is a typical VC deal flow, so, we get ideas from Disrupt like commonator and stuff.
They come in on the left. They get reviewed by associates, and then they get reviewed by partners, and then they go to a full partner meeting, and then you either invest in them or you don't, typical example of how a team of six or seven people at a small VC firm might be keeping track of what start ups everybody is working on and where they're up to in the process this.
We've got another board here some where possibly, yes this administration project. This is assistant the real board, Kyle and George, who run system administration for Stack Exchange keeping track of stuff they want to work on so that we can watch it all. And that's basically it. This runs on and any form factor, we have a iPhone version.
We have this gigantic four screen plasma, that's the iPhone version. We have this gigantic four screen plasma monitor that we have built up on the wall at the stat exchange office that we use to keep track of projects that people are working on. And it all is sort of optimized for whatever screen size that it's not.
It's launching today and it's free.
That's Trello from Folk Creek Software.
I would have loved to have been in the meeting where you came up with all the names.
The everything bagels, that was funny.
That was my favorite. All right, Kevin, what.
You know, I love this. I think it's awesome. I like really light weight project management software. I think that this could work well in a small group of you know, even for our engineers that we have at Milk where you'd have, you know, a list of bugs that are open, a list of stuff that needs to be designed, UX stuff, coding stuff and then just have assigned people to each of those tasks.
I'd be really careful in just not adding a whole lot of, it seems like, there's a lot of features and a lot of stuff going on in some of those details pages. I think you are doing the right thing actually getting out there in the hands of real users to go find out what they actually want once real people start using it.
Ya.
But it looks great, this is something you could potentially charge a couple bucks a month, per seat, or whatever it may be for companies, and make some money as well. There's no reason why it can be completely free.
Part of the idea is that it is free actually even though we could probably charge for it? I think there'll be interesting things that we discover, when we have huge numbers of people using this? That might be slightly different business models other then just the free models, so may be just like a premium type thing.
And we are trying to make it the kind of thing that anybody would use to organize any kind of simple project. Not kind of like a heavy weight detail oriented Microsoft project.
Ya, I was almost thinking like, you know when you have work spaces in Photoshop, it's like for different user types, you know, software design kind of get a certain set of tools and functionality and layout than something that's planning for bands or whatever it may be. That's kind of it.
A good idea, ya.
George?
Joel, this is an awesome product demo.
Thanks.
I was really impressed. The initial pedestrian Yammer. So I really like a lot of what you are tapping into. A lot of Yammer's customers are down in the SMB space. In fact, all their early customers where we moved very quickly to enterprise which is where the revenue was. Where do you go for revenue?
Well, we were thinking plush toys, little birds like millions and millions of plush toys.
Can I get a plush toy?
Actually, the truth is that one of the things that I am a convert to is that, you know, one of my companies is funded by square and they like to talk about don't create any friction on the way to getting big. And then figure out later you can hard code a business model. And sohave all kinds of ideas and a lot of them are some of the things that Kevin was sort of suggesting there which is saying, you've got this as a basic model but somebody could build on top of that, a Lean Inventory System that taps into SAP and costs a million dollars.
So knowing our first goal is really to get it as ubiquitous as possible with little friction as possible? And then figure out what revenue opportunities develop in a world where there are a million people probably use something like this.
Great, I'm impressed. Hillary?
Ya, I mean we're still using sticky notes on a wall at think that something we definitely use but it looks like you're sort of, and you'll figure me for thinking like a programmer here, taking some of the better parts of the Agile programming methodology and applying them to anything.
Ya, we're really trying very hard to avoid this becoming just another programmer's tool. Whenever I've seen people, I mean, we have a product called fog bugs, which is bug tracking obviously and whenever I've seen the people with all the sticky notes on the boards there's always one sticky note that says fix bugs for version three and that's really the idea here This is sort of the meta big picture like, what are the three things that everyone's working on?
Not the eight million little details that you need to keep track off?
So does it have a API?
It will be and obviously the 2.0 will have gobs and gobs of interesting API's and plug in architectures and all that kind of stuff. Right now, it's just a sort of stand alone basically.
And out of curiosity what is it built on.
No, mostly back bone a lot of other, Mongo, all the cool things that all the cool kids use.
Chong.
I think there is a great opportunity to nail it. I have seen a few, you know, similar products that totally nail it. I'm curious in terms of driving adoption. Where will you initially focus? Are you gonna focus like Silicon Valley? Start ups to use it? Or VCs of just curious, where were you guys?
I'm not really sure we sort of made a deliberate decision with our first product ten years ago that we should optimize it for the software development process and that made it an awesome software development tool that's FogBugz. For this one I think our goal is really to try make it a much more horizontal thing.
I think we have the attention now, that we didn't have 10 years ago as a company, that we actually do have a chance to sort of shout about, this is a horizontal tool. You have word processors for when the words are next to each other, you have spreadsheets for when they're on a grid, and you have this, for when you have a list of lists that you want to share with people.
So we think this is almost a horizontal category. If I were an investor, and I were to ask an entrepeneur, what category are you going to go after, and what's your go-to-market strategy? And the entrepeneur said "We're going to be super horizontal. This is like Excel." I would laugh at them. But, that's my answer and I'm sticking to it, so feel free to laugh at me.
Anyone?
I won't laugh at you.
And they did. Twenty seconds, anyone? Final questions or comments? Big round of applause then for Trello. OK. We come to the last, but by no means least,
Fog Creek Software, a small privately held New York software company, was founded in 2000 by Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor. The company sells a project management system, FogBugz, and remote assistance software, Fog Creek Copilot. The company also hosts a programmer job board and a software business conference.
Spolsky is well known for his software development website Joel On Software.
