Trello, the collaborative task-management software, has topped 7 million users, with 120,000 new users joining the platform every week. Trello co-founder Michael Pryor confirmed to TechCrunch that the service has 1.7 million monthly active users, with Trello users in every country in the world (save for Myanmar, Nauru and Tuvalu).
“Eighty percent of sign-ups come from word of mouth,” said Pryor. “We’re always updating the product — we had a huge update to the iOS app yesterday and we had LifeHacker write about us recently — but that only makes up a small fraction of our new users. The more we grow, the more people find out about us from their friends.”
Trello launched back in 2011 on the Disrupt Battlefield stage, and has raised a total of $10 million.
Trello differentiates from other task-management software in that it focuses on a new media type. Meant to be the whiteboard of the digital world, Trello’s platform focuses on the life cycle of a certain project, from start to finish, giving the user a bird’s eye view of the way that a team builds something out of nothing.
“This new, generic, one-size-fits-all media type doesn’t have a name, but we’d like it to be Trello,” said Pryor. “The biggest challenge is helping people understand all the ways they can use it.”
Pryor says that he sees a wide variety of projects on Trello. While some folks use it for corporate project management, other Trello projects include wedding planning, Christmas gift lists for children, or family vacations.
“It’s a lot like the spreadsheet, before we knew about it,” said Pryor. “Once you realize how it works, you discover you can use it in a million different ways.”
Of course, Trello isn’t alone in the world of collaborative task management. Asana, BaseCamp and newcomer Slack are vying for the valuable space.
Slack, in particular, is clocking 365,000 daily active users and has raised a total of $180 million. But Pryor sees Trello as a good companion to Slack, and admits that the Trello team uses it as an integration. In fact, Trello is the No. 2 integration with Slack behind Google products.
Trello is a free product across the board, but both consumer and enterprise customers can upgrade to a premium package, offering extra features.
“Our goal was always to build a horizontal business, where we could have a lot of people using the product and a small percentage paying a small fee to get added benefits, and that’s the path we’re on now,” said Pryor.
You can check out Trello here.
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