Feed Info - Joel on Software

Trello has been out for less than two years and it’s been growing like wildfire. 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.

So the obvious question I get all the time is, “How exactly are you supposed to make money with that?”

You may have noticed that Trello is free. Not “free trial,” not “freemium,” but just plain old free. 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. Some have commented that this business model might actually be just a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

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. The 1% are delighted to pay. They actually email us asking if there is some way they can pay us. A fortune-cookie factory was so pleased with Trello they sent us a crate of tasty fortune cookies. Custom, Trello-color fortune cookies, with Trello fortunes inside. (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.)

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. 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. Besides cookie dough.

The most obvious things were features around security (permissions, backups, etc). 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 kind of stuff that’s helpful when tens or thousands of people inside an organization are all using Trello every day.

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. This is meant to give professional landscapers, developers, web designers, consultants, and fortune-cookie factories a way to let their paying customers peek in on the progress of their project without messing it up. It’s a classic example of a feature that is only useful when you’re in that class of Trello users who get the most value out of it, so paying should be a no-brainer.

We bundled these features up and called them Trello Business Class. It's available today for $25 a month (per organization), or $200/year if you’d like to pay in advance. Of course, Trello itself is, and will remain, free, but starting today, we hope to actually make a little bit of walking-around money, too.

In the future we'll continue to add free features to Trello (there is a lot of exciting stuff in the hopper)—anything that is a common feature, useful to anyone, will be free. We’ll also continue to develop new Business Class features that help large organizations manage Trello, and we may come up with other things to sell to people who are getting a lot of value out of Trello. In the meantime, we sure appreciate the cookies!

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The fastest growing industry in the US right now, even during this time of slow economic growth, is probably the patent troll protection racket industry. Lawsuits surrounding software patents have more than tripled since 1999.

It’s a great business model.

Step one: buy a software patent. There are millions of them, and they’re all quite vague and impossible to understand.

Step two: FedEx a carefully crafted letter to a few thousand small software companies, iPhone app developers, and Internet startups. This is where it gets a tiny bit tricky, because the recipients of the letter need to think that it’s a threat to sue if they don’t pay up, but in court, the letter has to look like an invitation to license some exciting new technology. In other words it has to be just on this side of extortion.

Step three: wait patiently while a few thousand small software companies call their lawyers, and learn that it’s probably better just to pay off the troll, because even beginning to fight the thing using the legal system is going to cost a million dollars.

Step four: Profit!

What does this sound like? Yes, it’s a textbook case of a protection racket. It is organized crime, plain and simple. It is an abuse of the legal system, an abuse of the patent system, and a moral affront.

In the face of organized crime, civilized people don’t pay up. When you pay up, you’re funding the criminals, which makes you complicit in their next attacks. I know, you’re just trying to write a little app for the iPhone with in-app purchases, and you didn’t ask for this fight to be yours, but if you pay the trolls, giving them money and comfort to go after the next round of indie developers, you’re not just being “pragmatic,” you have actually gone over to the dark side. Sorry. Life is a bit hard sometimes, and sometimes you have to step up and fight fights that you never signed up for.

Civilized people don’t pay up. They band together, and fight, and eliminate the problem. The EFF is launching a major initiative to reform the patent system. At Stack Exchange, we’re trying to help with Ask Patents, which will hopefully block a few bad patents before they get issued.

The Application Developers Alliance (of which I am currently serving as the chairman of the board) is also getting involved with a series of Developer Patent Summits, a nationwide tour of 15 cities, which will kick off a long term program to band together to fight patent trolls. Come to the summit in your city—I’ll be at the San Francisco event on April 9th—and find out what you can do to help.

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The team at Fog Creek is releasing a major new version of Kiln today. Kiln is a distributed version control system.

One of the biggest new features is Kiln Harmony, which lets you operate on Kiln repositories using either Git or Mercurial. So you can push changes to a Kiln repo using Git and then pull them using Mercurial. This means that you never have to decide whether you want to use Git or Mercurial. Religious war: averted.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself!

For those of you that have been living under a rock, the single biggest change in developers’ lives in the last decade (besides Stack Overflow, natch) is Distributed Version Control. DVCS is such an important improvement over the previous generation of centralized version control (Subversion, CVS, etc.) that it’s a required upgrade, even though it’s honestly a bit harder to use.

The popular DVCS options are Git and Mercurial. Both are open source. They are very, very similar in capabilities and operation; in fact, they are so similar that Kiln Harmony hides all the differences, so you can use any Git or Mercurial tool to work with any Kiln repository.

If Git and Mercurial are open source, why are people making money selling them?

The short answer is that the open source tools are kind of raw. They're dune buggies. Powerful, yes, and sufficient for a college project, but as it turns out, people buy Cadillacs, not dune buggies, to drive around in, because they like to have windshield wipers, 14-way power adjustable seats, and a way to start the engine from twenty feet away. Just in case you live in a Hollywood movie and the ignition has been hooked up to a bomb.

Fog Creek (and others, notably GitHub) are making money selling version control by providing a whole bunch of features that make the overall code management experience easier and more useful. For example, we both provide professional, secure hosting, a web management and administration interface, and somebody you can call for help.

Where we differ is that Kiln is more focused on the corporate market, while GitHub was designed for open source projects. I think of Kiln as the corporate Lincoln Town Car, while GitHub is kind of a VW Minibus. Both are eminently better choices than using raw Git.

So, specifically, Kiln gives you corporate things like:

• code reviews
• access control and permissions
• fast code search
• a news feed to follow code you care about

GitHub gives you things that match the sociology of open source projects:

• public home pages
• a social network, with profiles
• fork and pull workflow

Since internal corporate projects have a very different sociology than open source projects, Kiln is very different than GitHub. On internal projects, almost all code that is developed is eventually used, although it needs to be reviewed, so Kiln kind of assumes that everything you do is most likely going to end up in the main code base, and we have a slick code review system.

On open source projects, contributions can come from volunteers all over the Internet, many of whom are happy to fork the code for their own needs. So GitHub provides a social network, emphasizes the ease of forking someone else's code (something you're unlikely to do in a closed corporate environment), and has a thing called a pull request that matches the way people tend to collaborate on open source projects without advance coordination.

ANYWAY, back to the new version of Kiln.

When Tyler and Ben built Kiln 1.0, they built it on Mercurial. Why? Well, Mercurial had pretty much all the same concepts as Git, but Git was historically unfriendly to Windows which is used by many of our corporate clients. We also thought that the Mercurial command line (hg) was a bit closer to Subversion (svn) which a lot of programmers were already used to.

So, long story short, we decided Mercurial was about 1% better than Git and that's the way we went. We didn't want to start a holy war, and we liked Git, but we just had a feeling that all else being equal, Mercurial was marginally better than Git.

We still think that, but in the years since Kiln first shipped, GitHub has taken the world by storm, creating an ecosystem around Git that more than makes up for its minor failings. Today Git is without a doubt more popular. So we knew we needed to add Git to Kiln.

We could have done it the lazy way: support both kinds of repositories and make you choose which one to use. Maybe add some nice conversion tools.

But we are not lazy. We decided to do it the awesome way.

We decided that the awesome way would be to make Kiln fully bilingual. It stores every repo in both formats. It automatically converts everything back and forth, always. The translation is 1:1, reversible, and round-trippable. Whatever you do to a Kiln repository using Git will be immediately visible to Mercurial users and vice versa.

Every user of every Kiln repo can choose either Mercurial or Git, and everything always works.

You can push in Git, and pull in Mercurial. Or vice versa. Or both.

A team that uses Mercurial internally (and barely understands Git) can push their code to GitHub and interact with the GitHub community.

If your team likes Git but you prefer Mercurial yourself, you can use a different version control system than everybody else on your team and, honestly, they don't even have to know.

If your team is using Mercurial today but you want to switch to Git, you can move over -- one person at a time. If Joe in Accounting refuses to move, it doesn't matter. He can keep using Mercurial.

Everything maps. Everything round-trips.

There are some other big improvements in the version of Kiln available today. Super-fast code search. SSH and IP-whitelisting for security. Project READMEs. A bunch of other improvements throughout the interface that will be a huge upgrade for anyone already using Kiln. If you’re interested, you can start a free trial online.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Imagine, for a moment, that you came upon a bread factory for the first time. At first it just looks like a jumble of incomprehensible machinery with a few people buzzing around. As your eyes adjust you start to see little piles of things that you do understand. Buckets of sesame seeds. Big vats of dough. Little balls of dough. Baked loaves of bread.

Those things are inventory. Inventory tends to pile up between machines. Next to the machine where sesame seeds are applied to hamburger buns, there’s a big vat of...sesame seeds. At the very end of the assembly line, there are boxes and boxes of bread, waiting for trucks to drive them off to customers.

Keeping inventory costs money. Suppose your bakery has six 50-ton silos to store flour. Whenever they empty out, you fill them up. That means on the average day you have 150 metric tons of wheat flour in stock. At today’s prices, you’ve tied up $73,000. Forever.

Inventory may have other costs too, like spoilage. Flour lasts for months, but the minute bread comes out of the oven it starts dropping in value; after 24 hours it’s nearly worthless.

Why keep inventory at all? Because there are costs associated with running out of things, too. If sesame seeds take two days to order, and you run out of sesame seeds, you are out of the hamburger bun business for two days. Inventory provides a buffer that prevents any part of the process from stalling. There are modern algorithms to optimize how much buffer you need at every point (read up on Toyota’s lean production system and the Theory of Constraints to get started).

Why do I care about any of this? The software production process has several major “inventory” accumulation points, itself. Stuff accumulates at those points and ends up wasting a lot of time and money.

“What? How is software like a factory?” you ask.

Think of product ideas as the raw material. Depending on your process, product ideas may go through several assembly line points before they are delivered as finished features to the customer:

1. A decision-making process (should we implement this feature?)
2. A design process (specs, whiteboards, mockups, etc)
3. An implementation process (writing code)
4. A testing process (finding bugs)
5. A debugging process (fixing bugs)
6. A deployment process (sending code to customers, putting it on web server, etc)

(PS No, this is not “waterfall.” No it isn’t. Is not. Shut up.)

In between each of these stages, inventory can pile up. For example, when a programmer finishes implementing their code (stage 3) they give it to a tester to check (stage 4). At any given time, there is a certain amount of code waiting to be tested. That code is inventory.

The “cost” of code inventory is huge. It might add up to six or twelve months of work that is stuck in the assembly line and not yet in customers’ hands. This could be the difference between having a cutting-edge product (iPhone) or constantly playing catchup (Windows Phone). It’s nearly impossible to get people to buy Windows Phones, even if the iPhone is only six months better. A lot of markets have network effects, and being first has winner-take-all implications. So getting rid of inventory in the development process can make or break a product.

Let’s go over the three places most inventory accumulates.

Feature backlogs. Every product attracts new feature ideas, and you can’t implement ideas as fast as you can think them up, so you write them down, and this list is called the feature backlog. A lot of the ideas on the backlog are bad ideas, and you merely wrote them down to avoid hurting the feelings of the people who thought them up. Backlogs make everyone feel good.

The trouble is that 90% of the things in the feature backlog will never get implemented, ever. So every minute you spent writing down, designing, thinking about, or discussing features that are never going to get implemented is just time wasted. When I hear about product teams that regularly have “backlog grooming” sessions, in which they carefully waste a tiny amount of time and mental energy every day or every week thinking about every single feature which will never be implemented, I want to poke my eyes out.

• Suggestion: Do not allow more than a month or two of work to get into the feature backlog list. Once the backlog is full, do not allow new items to be added unless you remove an item. Do not spend any time speccing, designing, or talking about backlog items: the backlog, in fact, should be seen as a list of things you are not allowed to talk about or work on.

The bug database is obviously a great thing to have. Bug reports should be complete, accurate, and actionable. But I have noticed that in many real-world companies, the desire never to miss any bug report leads to bug bankrupcy, where you wake up one day and discover that there are 3000 open bugs in the database, some of which are so old they may not apply any more, some of which can never be reproduced, and most of which are not even worth fixing because they’re so tiny. When you look closely you realize that months or years of work has gone into preparing those bug reports, and you ask yourself, how could we have 3000 bugs in the database while our product is delightful and customers love it and use it every day? At some point you realize that you’ve put too much work into the bug database and not quite enough work into the product.

• Suggestion: use a triage system to decide if a bug is even worth recording.
• Do not allow more than two weeks (in fix time) of bugs to get into the bug database.
• If you have more than that, stop and fix bugs until you feel like you’re fixing stupid bugs. Then close as “won’t fix” everything left in the bug database. Don’t worry, the severe bugs will come back.

Undeployed features. There are still a lot of teams doing quarterly or annual releases, usually because their deployment process is expensive. Operating systems, or anything where software has to be installed by every user, is usually batched up.

This is one of the most expensive forms of inventory: unshipped feature inventory. It could be earning you money, but it’s sitting on the shipping dock of your factory, while the guy down the street already has a product that does that exact same thing.

Sometimes, perniciously, you don’t even feel the pain, because everyone on your team has been dogfooding the new version for months. I’m sure everyone at Microsoft has been happily using Windows 8 for a year now, so they don’t really feel, on a day to day basis, the pain of OEMs trying to sell Windows 7 in a Mac OS X Lion world.

• Suggestion: Don’t let completed features pile up in ways that don’t make you money. Work on your deployment process so that you can get customers features in months rather than years. If you’re already shipping monthly, figure out how to ship weekly. Keep pushing the bar on more and more frequent deployment of smaller and smaller changes.

So, where am I going with this? We’ve had all three kinds of inventory at Fog Creek: crazy long backlogs, overambitious bug databases, and features which got stuck for a year waiting for the next release to go out. All of these snuck up on us. I realized that we needed a system to constrain inventory so it doesn’t build up. 

My original idea was to make a product called Five Things. It was going to be a project manager where everybody was allowed to have five things assigned to them: two things they were actively doing, one thing that was “up next”, and a couple more that they were planning. That exact design idea didn’t go anywhere (but if you want to build it, go for it), but it did evolve into Trello.

Trello works great for a reasonable amount of inventory, but it intentionally starts to get klunky if you have too many cards in one list. And that’s exactly the point: it makes inventory visible so that you know when it’s starting to pile up. (Click on the image at the right to see the Trello team’s own development board).

Every day you look at your Trello board and see that there are seventeen completed features that are totally ready to ship but which haven’t shipped for some reason, and you go find the bottleneck and eliminate it.

Every time somebody suggests a crazy feature idea, you look at the Feature Backlog and realize it’s just too long, so you don’t waste any time documenting or designing that crazy idea.

And hopefully, you’ll spend less effort working on things that never see the light of day. “Backlog grooming.” Sheeeesh.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

The folks over at UserVoice are using Trello quite extensively throughout their development process.

Founder Richard White describes it all in detail.

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My friend Noam Wasserman at Harvard Business School has spent years researching startups. His work is great, because he actually does real, quantitative research on the kinds of things that everybody has opinions about. Should you raise more money or maintain more control? Should you have a cofounder? Should your friends and relatives be cofounders? When and if should a founder be replaced by a “professional” manager? There are certainly a lot of blog posts about this stuff but not a lot of data... until now. Wasserman has finally put it all together in a great book called The Founder’s Dilemmas, which I highly recommend if you’re starting a company.

(By the way, Wasserman will also be speaking at the Business of Software conference this fall in Boston.)

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

“The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young ‘incubator twerps’ strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too.”

From The Management Team, my guest post on Fred Wilson’s blog.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.