![]() We also added a feature called “observers,” which lets you add people to a board who might have permission to watch, vote, and comment, but who can’t add cards or move cards around. The kind of stuff that’s helpful when tens or thousands of people inside an organization are all using Trello every day. Big organizations have people coming and going all the time, so they might benefit from tools that make it easy to add people to Trello en-masse, and tools to make sure that when people leave the organization, they’re removed from any boards they should be removed from. The most obvious things were features around security (permissions, backups, etc). So then we tried to think of what kind of value-added stuff we could build and sell (for money) to organizations with lots of active users. ![]() How do you identify the users who get the most value out of Trello? We thought any medium-to-large organization with lots of different Trello boards and many active Trello users must qualify. (Don’t tell the IRS, because that’s basically all we’ve made off of Trello to date, and I don’t think we declared it.) Custom, Trello-color fortune cookies, with Trello fortunes inside. A fortune-cookie factory was so pleased with Trello they sent us a crate of tasty fortune cookies. They actually email us asking if there is some way they can pay us. What we really wanted to do was make a free product that helps millions of people, and then find some way to get paid by the 1% of those people who get the most value out of it. Some have commented that this business model might actually be just a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Some people have justifiably wondered if it really makes sense to pay a dozen people, nestled in fancy offices with free lunch and espresso, to develop software that we have to pay Amazon cash money to host, while not actually charging for said software. Not “free trial,” not “freemium,” but just plain old free. You may have noticed that Trello is free. So the obvious question I get all the time is, “How exactly are you supposed to make money with that?” We recently hit 1.5 million members, of whom about 1/3 perform some action every month, and our MongoDB database now contains more than 70 million cards on 3.7 million boards. Trello has been out for less than two years and it’s been growing like wildfire.
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