The Idea: In 2011, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor were running Fog Creek Software when they noticed something: teams everywhere were sticking Post-it notes on walls to track projects. They built a digital version - a simple drag-and-drop board where you could move cards between columns. The MVP was intentionally basic: just a to-do list limited to five items. They called it Trello, a play on "trellis," and launched it at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield. The goal? Build a product for 100 million people. This was the beginning of Trello.

The Execution:

• 2011: Launched at TechCrunch Disrupt with a radically simple product - just boards, lists, and cards. No complex features, no enterprise pricing. Just drag and drop.
• 2013: Introduced Business Class at a flat $200/year per company. It backfired - some companies paid as little as 4 cents per user per year. They were bleeding money.
• 2014: Spun out of Fog Creek as a standalone company, raised $10.3M Series A from Spark Capital and Index Ventures. Hit 4.75 million users.
• 2016: Switched to per-seat SaaS pricing ($10/user/month). User base exploded to 19 million. Competitors started copying the Kanban board - Asana's co-founder admitted they saw Trello as "a feature, not a product".
• 2017: Atlassian acquired Trello for $425 million - $360M cash, $65M in stock. Total raised? Just $10.3M. That's a 41x return for investors.
• 2019: Hit 50 million users under Atlassian's ownership.

The lesson? Trello proved that "horizontal" products - tools useful to anyone, not just a specific industry - can win massive markets if you nail simplicity.