The Exchanges

Q term during a pandemic, but, but having a viral app is so critical, right? It's not the only path to success. I, when I discovered Trello, if you look at that Sastra post, it was virally. I don't know if it, how much is viral today, but what have you learned about viral growth in productivity apps and cloud apps? And has it changed over time how viral exposure works?

A I don't think it's much different than it was, you know, 10 years ago. I think like any kind of collaboration app that you have is subject to Like the weakest link, I'll say, you know, it's like in order for it to succeed, everyone has to buy into it or it's not going to work. So if it's just becoming this system of record where every Friday you log into it to post your status update so that your boss can read it because it's their tool, right? You know, like, it's like they're, they're like, I require that you put your, you know, weekly updates in here. Then it's not, Yes, you might be using it. You might count as a monthly active user, but you're not really adopting the tool into your workflow. So people had to be able to see how they can use it themselves in order to really, um, kind of be able to propagate within an organization, right? So you have like, Hey, this, this team uses it. It can spread virally to these other teams within the organization. You know, people can take it from work to home. They can use it for things at home, and then they go to a new job because they got fired and they bring it over there. Um, that's been the nice thing about Trello is I think it's a tool that you can kind of can stay with you throughout your life because you can kind of see how you can use it for stuff in, in your home life. You can use it for stuff at work. You could leave that co…

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's much different than it was, you know, 10 years ago.”

Q to some extent, standalone apps are dying because now we all, you know, most enterprises have over a thousand cloud apps deployed, right? Most departments have over a hundred and that's a secret of Slack, right? Is you can run your apps inside of Slack. So where are, are the majority of Trello folks still logging into trello.com to, to manage projects or how has that changed over the years?

A Um, I think probably the majority. Yeah. I think you still end up with like a, a kind of land. You know, in the app itself, but like, for example, Microsoft teams has a design where you can add tabs into teams. So you can have like your chat window in, in the channel. So you're in a channel and then you have your chat and then you can add a tab. That's the Trello board, for example. Um, so it brings it right into teams. Um, you know, Slack has much more of a messaging interface. So you kind of like the, your app kind of exists within the, Timeline. So it's kind of like posting updates or, you know, it's, it's sort of within the feed of, of messages. Um, so people definitely have that kind of interaction too, where they're coming from their messaging app, which I think is probably the bedrock of that distributed communication, the distributed way of working, right? Like is, is the tools that are at that communication layer, like teams and Slack and zoom. Um, and then on top of that becomes You know, next you get your work management tools like JIRA and Trello and, and the others, and then you kind of have other tools like your, um, collaboration tools, or you're talking about documentation and those sorts of things, or like, um, brainstorming tools, like I think you've seen a lot of people, you know, picking up things like Mural and Miro, um, tools like that, where you're kind o…

AI assessment note: “I think probably the majority. Yeah. I think you still end up with like a, a kind of land”

Q right. Going up market. Cause it takes a while to start doing some of that stuff. Right. And we think of the old days of, uh, Of a cool developer-focused project management Kanban tool now selling to the federal government. It's a lot of change, but we're eight years into Trello, right? 10 years? How many years are we into Trello, and where is it going in the next decade?

A Yeah. I mean, I think from the Genesis of the idea, we're probably coming in on a decade. Um, and I think that's a, it's been a great time for us to sort of step back and think like, how do we evolve this product for the next 10 years? And what do we want to do to change it? And I think within that backdrop, you have to understand what are the things that people love about this product? Why did they decide to use it in the first place? Um, what's gotten us to that fifty million number, which At this point is a really old number, but you know, because big companies, but yeah, public companies, there's some schedule to when you can say these numbers, but it's, it's a lot higher than that now. Yeah. Um, you know, you have to take the essence, the product principles that made you succeed the brand and you can change it and evolve it. Um, and I think that's for a lot of products. The general journey is they talk to their customers, their customers tell them about more problems and they create features to create, um, sort of geography of their application that solves more problems for those people. And essentially you build a product that is more powerful. It's more customizable. It does more things, but it also becomes heavier, right? In the, in the sense of what is the affordance that I use this product for? So, you know, I think like There's a lot of productivity apps. There's a l…

AI assessment note: “from the Genesis of the idea, we're probably coming in on a decade.”

Q is stunning to me. So how do you, how are you, what have you learned there? What are you thinking about that for Trello for 30 years or other products? How, how long, how long should we go as founders? Should we go forever? Should we be building software when we're a hundred? Should we stick for, are you still, are you still excited about building Trello as a product?

A Yeah. As long as there's, I would say you keep going as long as there's cool problems to solve. And I think that there's, uh, I see a lot of opportunity over the last year, a lot like we were just, I mean, that was the whole podcast, right? We were talking about how people's behavior changes. What's like the future going to bring. And there's so many more people coming into these, these, these tools in these markets. Like you, you, you remember, you know, years ago where the sophistication of like an average person, like we used to call, I think we'd say like you, Tech techies or something like that, right? We have this term where. You know, and it's like, everyone's a techie now, right? Like, it's just like technology is just so pervasive. So the software did eat the world. Right. And it's like, it's just everywhere. So it's a different question now. It's sort of a more of a question of how much time and energy is this person going to spend in order to figure out your tool? Um, and then what are the, the benefits that they get? So I think, um, I think, you know, back to your question about like, can the brand last for, For, for decades. And it's like, yeah, of course. Right. Like that's the connection with the customer is what's inherent in the brand, not necessarily the tool itself and something that jobs that you solve for people today might be completely different jobs that…

AI assessment note: “you keep going as long as there's cool problems to solve.”

Q software was crazy. What we saw at Shopify was broke, broke the mold by Zoom, right? But is it, if the future is pulled forward five years, is it a new normal where growth returned to normalcy after this? I mean, have we stepped into 2025 and now we should have normal or are we still seeing acceleration? Do you have a sense of the boost is over from COVID?

A I don't, I don't, I mean, I think it's too early to tell, because I don't know, um, there's probably a cohort of people that are just working like this because they're forced to, and when they can go back to working the other way with the old tools that they have, they will, right? Um, and there's probably a cohort that is new, and I definitely think there was, because it was a moment in time, I do think that there was a, You know, kind of front loading, right? Like you pushed a whole bunch of people very quickly into, um, like, you know, April didn't, wasn't 73% over the previous April. So it was sort of like, you know, it was definitely higher, but it was, um, March was like this huge surge. Uh, and then, but the growth it's, you know, it's kind of like if you took, COVID out of the picture, you've definitely stepped up higher, and it's, I don't know if the growth rates are faster now, right? Because the question is, and we got, we were talking a little bit about this before, but it's like, how many people are starting businesses now?

AI assessment note: “I think it's too early to tell, because I don't know”

Q You could be like. Is that part of managing bigger accounts and integrating broader with the Atlassian suite? Are those the drivers?

A It's, it's kind of, we're thinking about the jobs to be done and what people do. So one thing that we've been experimenting a lot with lately, because we're all working distributed has been, you know, everyone's on zoom, you're using your communication tools, you're in slack. But one thing we've been trying to do is use asynchronous video a lot more. So things like loom or just recording zooms and then distributing to people so that they can consume them at a different time. Right. And you realize if you're ever in a zoom and there's like 20 people, but like one person's talking the whole time. It's like, you probably could have just recorded that and then put the link in Slack or, you know, distributed some other way. So that acing video, I think is a really cool, um, new opportunity for distributed working. Right. It's like, it's, um, Somewhere between that real-time communication and Slack. And I think you even see this with Slack. They're adding, um, what do they call it? Stories. It's kind of like TikTok and Slack, right? So they're, they're adding this. And we've had this debate internally of like whether, you know, is that, is, is async video like Loom, is that a product or is that just a feature that every app is going to kind of have?

AI assessment note: “It's, it's kind of, we're thinking about the jobs to be done”