CLOSED: AMA with Michael Pryor, Head of Trello, on November 6

[Michael Pryor]

UPDATE: That's a wrap on our first-ever AMA with Trello! Thanks to everyone for taking part and sharing.

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Hello, Atlassian Community! My name is Michael Pryor, and I’m the co-founder and head of Trello.

On Wednesday, November 6, I’ll be hosting a real-time “Ask Me Anything” session to answer all of your questions about Trello: the new integration for the Post-it app, Power-Ups, why we almost named it Planatee and anything else you can come up with.

Here's how it works:

Add your questions below any time before or during the AMA. Be sure to take a look at other community members' questions and up-vote those that you find interesting.

At 3PM PST on Wednesday, November 6, you can expect to see answers from me and my team rolling in. Watch the page and be ready to add follow-up questions and discuss further with other Community members. We'll wrap up the event at 4PM EST, but will be sure to answer any questions we didn't get to.

The more the merrier, so if you’d like to share this opportunity on Twitter or beyond, feel free to copy and paste this message:

If you love @Trello, you’ll love this “Ask Me Anything” session with co-founder, @michaelpryor, on November 6. More details here: http://bit.ly/amawithmhp #TrelloAMA

Cheers,

Michael

[Rohland]

Thanks for your continued investment in Trello. We 💙 the platform - Trello powers our business!

In context of Trello's ongoing investment in automation (Butler) and empowering the dev community to extend Trello through Power-Ups, what does the future look like for Trello on mobile devices? As things stand, Butler + Power Ups do not work in Trello's mobile apps. Is there a plan to address this?

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Rohland!

We have coverage on a few pups (internally that’s what we call Power-Ups :) on mobile already - calendar, custom fields, list limits, map and voting - and will add more of the first party pups in the short term. In fact we are looking at Butler now and which pieces (buttons?) we could bring over easily. (Building out rules might be harder for us - but then again the natural language format of Butler could make that even easier - hey siri, when a card appears in this list, add the high priority label). 

Long term we are looking at some projects we are working on Atlassian wide for our ecosystem - this is a very long term thing - but it would have a better setup for power up builders to build in a way that worked on both mobile and web.  This is a much bigger project.

We are so excited about all the opportunities for Butler though - so rest assured it is something we are looking at and will be working on at some point.

[Brittany Joiner]

Super excited for this, and really appreciate you doing this!

Adding a couple questions to get the party started... will likely add more in here as they come to mind!

1) How do YOU use Trello in your life? (Work or personal!)

2) What was the biggest challenge you experienced when you started Trello?

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Brittany!

Work: for 1 on 1 meetings, personal board for todos, board for my leadership group at Trello, board for PMs across the Atlassian products, and a million other boards I look at weekly. 

Personal: moved houses last year, current house projects (my house is really old so this board gets used a lot), just recently had vacation board for family trip to Australia

I think the biggest challenge when we started was trying to build a tool that was appealing and accessible to someone who wasn’t a software developer.  We used Trello to scratch our own itch - and that meant we’d run into problems and those problems internally were usually related to software development and they had known feature solutions (swimlanes! Gantt charts!) that don’t align with the broad market we wanted to appeal to. So not building features that we wanted for ourselves was difficult. Sometimes we still did that (markdown in the card description shouldn’t really be there - that should be a wysiwyg thing not magic incantations you have to type to get formatting - but software devs know markdown). Also our early user base was also mostly software developers because that was our previous customer base at Fog Creek Software - so when we would ship things like Stickers - the reaction was predictably thumbs down (“Who needs this silly stuff?!”) and we needed a way to get feedback from our average users (not necessarily the vocal technical people who were the early adopters).

[Brittany Joiner]

This is something fantastic to remember - i feel like it's very easy to get caught up in building what you want rather than what your market is looking for. Good points here! Thanks for sharing!

[Jodi LeBlanc]

This is wonderful news Michael, I will be on a plane at 3pm PST November 6th but will be sure to jump on this AMA thread after I land.  

Here are a couple of questions and a comment:

What Trello Power-ups are you currently using?

Can you share a few of your favourite productivity tips?

Heartbroken to read that real-life Taco passed away in 2017, but grateful you have kept Taco's spirit alive as spokes-husky. Taco makes Trello's brand relatable, fun and memorable. Impressed that Trello has stayed true to its brand over the years. Congrats on all you and your team have accomplished, making a difference in the lives of users every single day. #TrelloforLife

If you ever make it to Prince Edward Island, Canada one day, we would love to have you speak at a Trello PEI community event, please keep us in mind :)

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Jodi!

Pups I use: maps, package tracker, Butler - oh wait! Butler is no longer a Power-Up yay! 

You should also meet some of our other mascots like Chorizo (red cat), Fresco (white cat) and Sasquatch? (red monster).

[Jodi LeBlanc]

Thanks @Michael Pryor for sharing the Pups you use. I look forward to seeing more of Chorizo, Fresco and Sasquatch - a whole family of Trello spokes-mascots :)

[Jimmy Seddon]

Hi Michael!

We are relatively new to the Trello scene, but everyone is in love with the ease of use and the flexibility to use it for almost everything!

The one question I have from our Release Team, are there plans in place or power-ups we could take advantage of that would allow us to select multiple cards to move from one list to another without moving the entire list?

Thanks!

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Jimmy!  Multi-select is something we’ve played with internally. I wouldn’t be surprised if it shipped at some point but unfortunately I don’t have a timeline for that. 

I think there are some Chrome extensions that do it now though if you want to try that in the short term.

[Jimmy Seddon]

Thanks @Michael Pryor!  I wasn't aware that Chrome extensions were an option for extending the functionality of Trello, I'll definitely check that out!

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Jimmy Seddon : Chrome extensions work pretty great for Trello in my opinion. My favourite, despite its simplicity, is this one:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/Maintain-your-productivity-with-Kanban-WIP-for-Trello/ba-p/1201770

[Jimmy Seddon]

Wow! today I learned... Thanks @Andy - PTC Redundant!

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Ah, bliss! So great to hear. Love sharing knowledge! Nice one @Jimmy Seddon 

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

And for more education there's this old Trello Chrome Extensions list... it's a nice read!
https://blog.trello.com/big-list-of-trello-chrome-extensions

And of course there is always just going to the store and hitting TRELLO + more extensions!

BOOM 💥🤯

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/Trello?_category=extensions

[Jimmy Seddon]

As it turns out, with a little poking around, I'm actually able to accomplish exactly what I want as an end result with a few butler rules and board buttons. :D

[Iain Dooley]

@Michael Pryor further to my previous question I have another one!

I would love to buy Trello enterprise. The Business Class features don't really make sense for me, but what I would really love is domain control and Google SSO.

Is there any possibility that you would allow people to pay for Enterprise without having 20 seats? I would only need like 5 accounts but I'd happily pay the enterprise price for those features.

In general, I've always thought that you guys should just make those 2 things features of Business Class -- now that you have Butler you can differentiate between business and enterprise buy command usage but have domain control and SSO as standard features in Business class. Domain control is something that comes up pretty frequently in questions on the community (ie. people have a Business Class team, but lack enterprise controls, but they don't have enough people to buy Enterprise so even though they would happily pay more per person for those features, they can't because they have too few users).

Thanks again!

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Iain!

Re: SSO - next year you will be able to do what you want by purchasing Atlassian Access. It’s a separate product from Trello and would apply to all Atlassian Apps - roughly about $3/user. We are working on integration now. Trello Enterprise is designed for large companies so I think this change will actually solve exactly what you want (without making you buy a product that isn’t right for you).

[Iain Dooley]

@Michael Pryor that sounds absolutely perfect, can't wait to buy Atlassian Access, thanks!

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

When did you realise that Trello was being used expansively by teams to deliver hard core products and how did that impact your strategy as a software provider?

[Michael Pryor]

Honestly every day seems surprising to me in the myriad of use cases people use Trello for.  Hitting 50 million seems like a dream when I think back to what we were doing a few years ago.  My goal with Templates long term is to take those 50 million users (hopefully 100 million someday) and allow them to teach the rest of the world how they solved their problems using Trello.  Sharing publicly the tips and tricks of how people set up boards, and what problems they used them for would actually create a repository of solutions for all the world's work.

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

That is excellent Michael. I think Templates is going to dramatically change how Trello users are managing projects/business/lives. 🤩🌟👍💙

I'm expecting Trello will be the talk of the town at Summit! 

[Sylvia Klop]

Hi,

I'm a Trello user, fan and ambassador for a few years now. Little anecdote: an communication agency had a vacancy and asked, amongst other things, specifically for experience in Trello - how neat is that. Obviously I got the job ;-)
Well my questions/suggestion:

- I work with a lot of boards with a lot of people. My notifications panel is always full. Is there a way to filter certain activity. E.g. I'm not interested in the notifications about the fact somebody moved a card, or added me to one. I only want to see the notifications about comments, or only the ones where I am mentioned. 

- Maybe I'm asking about sensitive business info here, haha. But how is it possible to give so many functionality away for free (and without advertising bannering). My company with 100 people is working in Trello on different boards and projects, and still we don't feel the need to switch to a business account, because we got everything we need. But we wonder sometimes if this will be sustainable for the future.

- And one last technical question. Is there a way to add labels or people to a selection of cards at once? (I know about the keyboard shortcuts, they allready help).

Kind regards,
Sylvia

[Michael Pryor]

Thanks, Sylvia!

Notifications - our mobile apps do exactly this. You can switch between all, comments only or just things about you. 

Given how valuable Trello is to your company, I’d expect to be able to convert you to a Business Class customer at some point given a combination of new features but also potentially new limits. Ultimately we are building a business and our aim is to help groups like you become paid customers.   If you love Trello and it brings you value, there's nothing stopping you from becoming a paid customer tomorrow :)

Multi select - not yet.

[Paris Vollstedt]

Can't wait to see this feed! I have a couple questions. We are using Trello in real estate as a form of transaction management. 

1. Using the new Butler feature, are we able to customize to have Butler move a card from one board onto another board upon completion of all checklist items?

2. Is there a feature that allows you to add a due date to a check list? 

Also wondering-- will this be a twitter feed or posted here? How do you engage in responses on the 6th?! 

[Devon Henderson]

Sorry to jump in, but I figured you'd want an answer ASAP for #1 at least, which is that yes, it's possible! Here's the setup you'll want (with your info in there vs. template defaults):

[Erica Moss]

@Paris Vollstedt Hey, Paris! Michael will be posting answers here in this thread, starting at 3PM EST on November 6.

[staci.mcdonald]

Due dates for individual  items in check list would be AMAZING. 

[Michael Pryor]

Due date on a checklist you say? Not yet but - Stay tuned!

[jessbarnett]

@staci.mcdonald @Deepanshu Natani We're exploring improvements to checklists in Trello and may ship something like this. Please help us out with this survey: [Survey] Trello checklists - please share your thoughts for a chance to win $100 Amazon gift card!

[Deepanshu Natani]

@jessbarnettjust completed the survey. Glad that checklists are getting the much required improvement.

[Cody Stevens]

Being a person who has only used Trello for a couple small projects, I would love to know how you use Trello as well!

I would also like to know what are some of your most common projects to use it on? Like Brittany's, this can be work/personal.

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

1.b) And can you share a screen shot of your own personal favourite board you are working on right now...! (Whether individually or in a team).

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Away from self promotion - what other projects / best practices are among some of your favourite when it comes to use cases you've witnessed out in the great wide Trello world !??

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Some shameless self promotion going on here, but it's STILL a question....

Did you know that TWNKLS AR, Barkas and Space10 used Trello to collaborate on the Design & Development Tasks (including Bugs/Hot Fixes/Etc.) for delivering this multi award winning, #1 Retail Augmented Reality bad-boy...!?!?

[Michael Pryor]

This is super cool! Thanks for sharing!  Just yesterday I saw some people talking internally about something related to Ikea (not sure if it was this or something else) but I love seeing what people create by using our tools to collaborate.  It let's me cheat a little and think that "Trello did that!"

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Michael Pryor : it could very well be the same discussion... the same day you saw them talking I had had a call with Claire Cook about this project and its use of Trello! ☺🌟👍

It's great that you love seeing what people are creating - and we love sharing!

Knowledge is power, sharing knowledge is powerful!!

One of my favourite life motto's ! 

I do love the fact that Trello offers users to submit boards for inspiration. Really awesome:

https://trello.typeform.com/to/IT481Y

[Ben Thoma]

What's the least-expected way you've seen a user or organization use Trello?

[Michael Pryor]

We don’t look at the information that people put on their boards, so the only use cases we get to see are things people share with us or people that make them public.  

I do hope over the next year now that we’ve added Templates - that we will see many more use cases that people had been doing privately but we hadn’t seen.

https://trello.com/templates

[Ben Thoma]

Of course. Any of your favorites from those that have been shared or are public?

[Katrin Anger]

Congrats on 50 million users and a 37% revenue growth in FY2019! Atlassian seems to be on a really promising way!

This question is about Butler again, and the limitations that apply to free and personal accounts.

I know lots of people who are deeply disappointed about the quota situation with Butler. It's nice that you open up the tool to all users now to build workflows without having them to enable the Power-Up first. But what actions are you taking to make this really a win-win situation for both sides?

I understand the point that there needs to be a balance kept between performance and value. But for many of my fellow automation aspirants, it feels as if they are cash-cowed before they even know what this tool is capable of doing for them. And now there is disappointment building up ...

I know from people who were so excited about the possibilities they had, but because of the low quotas, their systems stopped working after half a month, and they felt as if they are locked in. There is not really a flexibility of topping up quotas, instead you have to upgrade to another plan, which is overshooting for most.

What are your ideas on solving this conflict situation? -- You say you are proud of now 50 millions users, but what do you do to keep them - and especially keep them satisfied?

[Michael Pryor]

Our ultimate goal is to build a valuable product and then alongside that a loyal paying customer base that gets the value from the product.  The levers/quotas/limits in the app are things we are constantly looking at and I agree that ultimately our goal with Butler is to make sure people can see and feel the full power of the tool at the point they decide to become a paid customer.  If people hit a limit before they get hooked on how awesome Butler is, then as you pointed out that could be a limit that’s too low. If people never hit the limit, that would likely be a limit that’s too high. We can and will adjust these things as time goes on but our experience in the past has always been that it’s much easier to relax triggers than it is to impose stricter triggers.

[Alexander Wärendh]

Hi! Congratulations to 50M users!

I have a crucial question. Trello is loved by many in Sweden. It is VERY popular within the public sector and government organizations. Well, unofficially it is. Because no government organization can actually use Trello - officially. It all has to do with the cloud act - forcing all businesses in America to share the data with American government if necessary. This is a BIG No No in Sweden.

If there was a clear solution to all this the user base would grow even bigger.

How can you respond to this major issue?

[Katrin Anger]

+1

This is obviously an issue for many European businesses. Trello has a great potential, but the issue with the cloud data is a sensitive one. I'd love if Trello would step up and find a solution for European sensitivities.

[Michael Pryor]

I think ultimately there are two ways to approach this: a server version of your product (we likely won’t ever do this) or data tenancy which would guarantee your data stays in Sweden.  We may pursue data tenancy for EU. It’s an overall Atlassian opportunity that we will be working on in the future.

I'd urge you to look at all the things we have already done as well - it's a really really long list (and was a ton of work by the team):

https://www.atlassian.com/trust/security

[Iain Dooley]

@Michael Pryor whoot! Congratulations on 50m users. I think when I first signed up you guys were at 17m :) I'm a firm believer in Trello as a platform for all sorts of business systems. To me, it is flexible and powerful enough to be the "WordPress of the BackOffice" and more than any other system in it's class is capable of replacing email as the "system that drives all other systems" in a business.

My questions are predictably commercial in nature since I run a business that specialises in automating workflows and creating custom business systems using Trello and Google Apps Script:

1) Atlassian has a "marketplace" for consultants or "Partners" who are specialists at configuring and automating Atlassian software -- it's pretty Jira focused at the moment. Any plans for something similar in Trello? Currently the closest thing Trello has is the integrations and power ups directory but that's not really the same as a service based/partner program and it's more like "apps" to be installed rather than bespoke solutions.

2) I created a "butler like" platform in Google Apps Script for doing bot automations similar to and beyond what Butler Bot used to do, called Trellinator:

http://www.trellinator.com/

Jira has a "Script Runner" that does something similar -- can you see any scope for creating a coding environment like this that was "all Trello" rather than having to be a hybrid of Google Apps Script and Trello via the API? I have noticed that the promulgation of Butler has created an increase in demand for Trello automation generally but Butler can't always cope with the curly scenarios people come up with, Trellinator is a good fit for those extension cases but I'd love for this to be more "core" to Trello rather than something sitting out to the side using the REST API.

3) I created a Google Sheets Add-on that let's you use Trello as a Gmail client called Benko Board:

http://www.benkoboard.com/

It also automatically unwatches any card you're added to (dramatically reducing total number of notifications) and puts a linked copy of every card you are added to in your personal Benko Board. My question here is in three parts:

 - One of my main motivations in Benko Board was the question "why isn't the Trello cards view just a Trello board where I can drag cards around?" To me the cards view has always been a weakness in Trello because you can't reprioritise things across boards. What's your opinion of that approach?

 - The second motivation was to make Trello notifications more useful: when I work with clients who use Trello already, the majority of the time they have disabled notifications altogether. People on the team just develop a total blind spot to email notifications and the number of notifications you receive when watching a card is so high that it's intolerable to most of the people I have dealt with. I know you guys have done tonnes of work on trying to improve notifications, but I think the single biggest improvement is just not watching cards you're added to by default. Coupled with a better cards view (and the fact that Benko Board adds a linked card for every comment so you can also drag your notifications around just like cards you're added to) this has produced a better experience among my clients. Would you ever consider making this step to dramatically reduce the total number of notifications sent native to Trello by removing the "watch everything you're added to automatically" feature? I know it's a pretty big change -- when you do that it means that people won't see comments unless they're mentioned by name which can be a jarring change if people are already used to it but from what I've seen Trello notifications largely go unheeded anyway. When people are only notified about being added to a card, mentioned by name in a comment and removed, they actually pay more attention to the notifications because they're fewer of them and they're more relevant.

- Finally, I found that by incorporating email into Trello, it meant that my clients adopted the system far more consistently; when I was trying to implement systems changes without including an email component, people would always default back to their inboxes. The pull was just too strong. Would you ever consider making email a native feature of Trello? Currently the Benko Board command interface is pretty arcane (text commands based loosely on HelpScout's email command style) and works only with Gmail, but it would be so killer I reckon if Trello could just connect directly to either Office365 or Gmail as a mail client, giving people one place for all internal and external communications (as a side-note I also have an extension called BenkoDesk which allows people to share a Benko Board so it replaces things like HelpScout and FreshDesk -- there is a lot of demand for using Trello as a helpdesk solution, and I think the ability to add in shared inboxes as well as native email could be a big one).

Thanks!

[Michael Pryor]

Partners - we do already work with existing atlassian partners and you’re right that their directory is mostly Jira focused but it’s not solely Jira focused. You should be able to be part of the Atlassian partner network and do Trello related things. 

My Cards as just another board: fantastic question - this has been debated internally a lot - and while I think it might work I also think it violates something that makes Trello so accessible to so many people. We don’t have a lot of abstractions that don’t map to real world things in Trello. The board is exactly like a real world board on your wall in the office. While everyone can update it from their own devices, everyone sees the exact same thing. And a card only exists in one place - much like a post it note would be in one physical place. In order to make My Cards into a board - the lists would need to be “virtual” and you’d break that physical map. The cards would be in two lists. The one from their board and the one on the special My Cards board. I think that’s perfectly fine for a developer like yourself to grok, but I think it makes the concept of Trello a bit more complicated and would raise the ramp of learning for new users. I do agree My Cards needs some love (or at least we need to solve the problem of “what do I have to follow up on?” better) but I am not sure that means we need a special board concept. (This is also why we don’t have mirrored cards or cards that live on multiple boards at the same time). I could be wrong though! Maybe this would be epic. Maybe you could write a pup to do it?

Native email: cool thoughts here. Also might be some opportunities for Business Class features in there. I’ll have to think more about this.

[Iain Dooley]

@Michael Pryor Thanks so much for the detailed response. A couple of responses in-line below:

Partners - we do already work with existing atlassian partners and you’re right that their directory is mostly Jira focused but it’s not solely Jira focused. You should be able to be part of the Atlassian partner network and do Trello related things. 

Are you able to point me in the right direction? I tried going to the Atlassian Partner page but couldn't get anywhere. I emailed the Trello team about getting into the Marketplace, but there wasn't an option for Trello. The closest I was able to get to being a partner (granted this was ~6 months ago) was getting my products listed on the integrations page:

https://trello.com/integrations/#/trellinator

https://trello.com/integrations/#/benkoboard

I do agree My Cards needs some love (or at least we need to solve the problem of “what do I have to follow up on?” better) but I am not sure that means we need a special board concept. (This is also why we don’t have mirrored cards or cards that live on multiple boards at the same time). I could be wrong though! Maybe this would be epic. Maybe you could write a pup to do it?

That's what Benko Board does! You can try it out for yourself by just installing it as a Google Sheets add-on (it's not verified by Google yet, you get a big ugly warning):

https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/benko_board_by_the_procedure_people/204068045444

Feel free to hit me up on iain@benkoboard.com if you'd like a tour. I don't think this would be possible with a power up because it's something you'd need to install on all boards (or maybe you could have a power up called "My Cards Board" that you could enable on one board and then have it bring in cards from across all boards? I must admit I haven't played with power ups at all, I work entirely with the API via Google Apps Script).

In terms of making this native to Trello, when you look at the way the My Cards view has evolved over the past 2 years you have made it look more "board-like" than it used to be with the cards being grouped into lists when viewed "by board". Then you can instead view them by due date which is just a different way of sorting them. I guess what I'm proposing is that you would simply have an "arbitrary sort" view which would allow me to create lists and move the cards around as I see fit --  it's really just a hybrid of the current "by board" view and the current "by date" view.

Native email: cool thoughts here. Also might be some opportunities for Business Class features in there. I’ll have to think more about this.

It would indeed be a rad Business Class feature. And it would make my life a hell of a lot easier: I don't really make that much money from Benko Board (I only charge $49/year) and it's pretty hacky. But in terms of proving the concept that email from Trello is super awesome it's been really effective: in particular people have been willing to put up with a janky text based command interface in order to use it! The shared inbox/BenkoDesk feature is really powerful too. There's tonnes of Community posts with people wanting to use Trello as a HelpDesk.

Again, you can try it out yourself if you want from the link above, and I'd be more than happy to give you a tour via Zoom just hit me up via email :)

Thanks again!

[Rohland]

@Michael Pryor @Iain Dooley RE: Email and Trello, check out SendBoard - it's a PowerUp we built (launched about 2 months ago) to tackle this exact problem.

SendBoard is a Trello Power-Up that connects an email address to a Trello board so that teams can receive emails, collaborate and reply — right from within Trello.

We use it power our help desks in Trello and bring team collaboration to shared mailboxes like support@, careers@ etc.

If you have any questions (or suggestions) about SendBoard, I'm more than happy to help!

[Derek Archer]

With the big news of Trello Templates being released, might we expect Trello Templated Cards soon too? So exciting!

[Devon Henderson]

:D https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-templates

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

What a GREAT Trello AMA.
Thank you kindly @Michael Pryor & @Erica Moss - this was so informative and very cool!

Time for my favourite Trello gif of all time.... #FriendOfTaco 💙👍😍

[Erica Moss]

@Andy - PTC Redundant Amazing gif. 💯

[Shaun Sheehan]

Hi! Has there been any thought to providing individual users the option to purchase power-up packs (e.g. in groups of three) so they can add even more great functionality to their boards? 

[Michael Pryor]

Do you mean like 3rd power Power-Ups? (i.e. like Unito/Harvest/Screenful come packaged together?)

I did think about that - haven't done anything to push it forward, but I do think it might be cool to offer a sort of bundle like that.  

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

My wife and I recently planned our trip to South Korea 🏁🍜 using Trello (and we're still going strong with weekly updates...) and it is amazing! We can't wait for 2020 to roll round...

She turned to me the other night and said "Why did I not know about this sooner? 🤯 I'm so glad you showed me how to use it! 😎"

She's just one of many people in my personal network who I help in getting working with Trello in these magical ways.

Are you aware of this sort of "under the radar" status of Trello and what is the strategy to give it a big boost...? 100M users and beyond!? 😁🙌

[Michael Pryor]

This is exactly our strategy.  The whole premise with Trello is that its like Post-Its on a whiteboard and we think pretty much anyone can understand that quickly and get started.  It’s just enough structure to help you build out a process (codename for the project was Trellis which is a structure for plants to grow on).

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Michael Pryor Great stuff. 😎👏

I think once more and more people get over the "oh, it's just a to-do list" and start to understand the power and impact Trello has, it'll gain massive momentum!

We've submitted talks for summit purely based on Trello and Rotterdam Community has a Trello event in the pipeline. Exciting!

[Gilles Prevotal]

Thank you for taking steps to meet some clients !

I work as a consultant, and prescribe solutions using Trello as a core platform to enable benefits for businesses.

Since you introduced gradually, but more and more since the Atlassian acquisition, paid items - the meerest beeing IMHO the downsize of Butler Quotas - can you guarantee that using Trello will be usable as a free platform forever ?

[Michael Pryor]

Our model has been like other software apps to give people a taste of the value that Trello offers and then convert them to paid customers in the future.  You can do this by a time limit (30 day trial), demo (Ie no usage until you pay), or freemium with limits (our current approach). It seems unlikely (but not impossible) that we’d switch from say freemium to a 30 day trial as our large user base is a strategic advantage.  That being said, we are building a business and our goal is to make sure that people that get a lot of value out of Trello become paid customers. I would expect us to continue to evolve how that happens over time just like we’ve been doing from the very beginning. Did you know that early on in say 2012 the only paid product was the “Super Admin Power Pack” (real name) and I think it cost $25 per month for the entire company (regardless of your company size).

[Gilles Prevotal]

I can understand the whole of your kind response, but core Trello is too versatile to be stained by paying for it, and it doesn't fit with his personality.

For sure, i am not the head of Fog Creek nor Atlassian ! But think a second about this business model  : The only fees should be drained by pups devs, and Atlassian should in return tax a portion of this fees ! Since Business class and all the more Teams don't address the most sensible perceived threat which is localization of the servers, 

Since i am so so emotive :

1) Trello had already transformed the way SO MUCH people work every day, and it is because of you Michael, THANK YOU !

2) Back to 2012 because you talk about it, the first time i met Trello slick and visual interface made me feel like i was in a LSD trip. Since the very first seconds, I could feel ease of use and intelligence sweating from what i saw. I will never forget this moment. It was the first time i thought Basecamp had to have worries about being top of the class.

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

@Derek Archer

I'm not @Michael Pryor - but I am a nerdy Trello enthusiast, and therefore love to bring your attention to this blog announcement... 😁👍

https://blog.trello.com/trello-card-templates?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=trello-oct2019-newsletter2

[Andy - PTC Redundant]

Wow! Great to hear @steven4320555 ! Check out our websites for loads more info about our activities in Enterprise Digital Transformation. :oD
https://twnkls.nl/en/home/ 
https://www.ptc.com/

[steven4320555]

IKEA Place looks cool, on my to-try list :) I am interested in AR/VR/MX recently, and used Trello to take notes while I am exploring. 

To follow up this question, for Michael or anyone who might know:

By pasting the link to trello card comment box, it is possible to preview/watch youtube right inside Trello cards, including 360 VR video, without any powerup. 

Is there a way to view 360 pictures right inside a Trello card? 

[Michael Pryor]

Honestly I don't know the answer!  Great question.

[Stan Dalenc]

are the Jira Cloud "Next-Gen" projects a modified version of Trello?

[Michael Pryor]

Nope.