Product-Led Growth: Trello's Path to Millions of Users

Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky spent 15 years building developer tools at Fog Creek Software. Then they created Trello - a product-led growth experiment that millions of people would use, including Google, Adobe, and the New York Times.

In this episode, Michael shares how product-led growth shaped every decision at Trello, from targeting 100 million free users with just 1% paying $100 a year, to designing a product so simple that users wrote their own blog posts promoting it for marketing, recruiting, and editorial workflows.

The freemium SaaS model was central to Trello's product-led growth strategy. Michael wanted 100 million people getting value from Trello, which required radical simplicity. Users started writing blog posts about how they used Trello for everything from applicant tracking to kitchen renovations. Trello never asked them to do it - the product spread through organic self-serve adoption.

🔑 Key Lessons

• 🚀 Product-led growth requires radical simplicity to reach mass adoption: Trello targeted 100 million users at 1% paid conversion, so the product had to be simple enough for anyone to use immediately, which meant resisting developer-specific feature requests from day one.
• 🎯 Product-led growth accelerates when users market for you: Trello's biggest growth driver was users writing blog posts about their own use cases - marketing, recruiting, editorial - each speaking to a specific audience without any prompting from the company.
• 🛠️ Side projects can outperform your main product: Fog Creek poured effort into City Desk, their first CMS product, but the bug tracker they built internally became FogBugz - the company's cash cow for 15 years.
• 📉 Most product experiments will fail, so run many: Fog Creek launched 13 products over 15 years. A job board for Indian programmers made 25 rupees. A $2,500 documentary series found no buyers. Only three products became significant.
• 🔄 Horizontal positioning is a freemium SaaS marketing problem: Trello could be used as a project manager, CRM, or applicant tracker, but having no category name made it hard to market. User-generated content solved this by showing specific use cases.
• 🏢 Self-fund before raising to retain control and validate traction: Fog Creek self-funded Trello for several years using product revenue before raising $10M+ in outside investment, which meant investors came inbound after traction was already proven.

Chapters

• Introduction
• Meet Michael Pryor
• Success quote: Keep it simple
• Trello overview and target customers
• Before Fog Creek: Working at Juno
• First product: City Desk CMS
• FogBugz becomes the cash cow
• Fog Creek's product philosophy
• Why Trello spun off from Fog Creek
• Where the idea for Trello came from
• Creek weeks and innovation culture
• Validating ideas at Fog Creek
• Product-led growth: marketing Trello beyond developers
• Positioning a horizontal product
• The branding and naming challenge
• How Omer uses Trello for podcasting
• Trello as a flexible process tool
• Fog Creek culture and values
• Revenue and team size today
• Why Michael became CEO of Trello
• What excites Michael most right now
• Lightning round

Resources

• Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/32
• Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email