I'm Michael Pryor, Co-founder of Trello. AMA!

[michaelpryor]

@FrancoG32

What would you recommend to a startup like ours? focus on better UX/UI to make it easier, launch more features than the competitor, make it simple, focus on one thing and do it great, integrate with other software, focus on mobile…there’re so many things to do that it becomes really hard to prioritize, especially with a small team. I know it’s hard to give feedback from outside but any ideas would be appreciated.

Early on, my recommendation would be to find the people that you think are a great target market for you and honestly - just build what they want. I think for vertical solutions like this, that’s the simplest cycle. Just be careful that you continue to find new customers that fit that bill (vs. just continuing to rely on the one to guide you).

[michaelpryor]

@raviramani

Could you share some ideas on how to find out what the true pain points are from customers?

Similar to Five Whys you can just keep asking the same question to customers to get to the root of what is going on…

Customer: “We need this export feature so I can send this report in Excel?”
Me: “Why?”
Customer: “My boss wants this report emailed to him on Friday and he only uses Excel”
Me: “Why does he need the report?”
Customer: “He wants to see how many tickets we’ve answered.”
Me: “What does that tell him, or in what cases would he be surprised or worried? Too few tickets? Too many?”
…etc.

[Krish (Krish Subramanian)]

Thanks so much, Michael! Your humility shines through these responses. Thanks also for sharing a pricing decision that arose from following a leading company like Slack and that eventually backfired. Such a great lesson there on understanding one’s own context.

“None of it is easy,” you’ve written. And I agree. What really helps is founders like you and Joel, taking the time to share their unique journeys with admirable openness.

[rajaraman (Rajaraman Santhanam)]

@michaelpryor

@rajaraman

You’ve said somewhere how the humanity of software is what differentiates products in today’s low-barrier-to-entry SaaS world, where each product has dozens, if not hundreds, of alternatives. So when it comes to product strategy, how, in your opinion, should a product north star be approached by a founding team that is just getting started.

Oh, and on that note, I’d also love for you to tell us all a bit about ‘Aardvark’d,’ the documentary you made and retailed on how modern software gets built.

You can actually watch that documentary here: Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks - YouTube (I don’t know if it aged that well lol or if I’d call that “modern” anymore).

If you are just getting started - I suspect most teams will be building something to scratch an itch in some way. They will have some opinion about how their product should work (and likely work differently than what is out there already). If you spend time thinking about that story, and work hard to put it into words, you can get something like this: Trello’s Product Lead on the Unique Ramp to a 10-Person Product Org | First Round Review

In our case, we spent a bunch of time calling those things making something “Trello-y” before we realized that was super vague and totally not helpful to new people joining the team that didn’t understand all those tradeoffs or decisions that we made.

Thanks, Michael! I like that. Translating those founding opinions and insights as a way to scale product thinking across teams. And I’ll check out that documentary. :))