A first-person account describing how Trello originated from a company culture that encouraged experimental side projects (called "Creek weeks"). The speaker recounts building products like Copilot during these innovation sprints — a screen-sharing tool marketed to customer service — and frames Trello as another product born from that same iterative, experiment-driven process.
What's the story of the birth of Trello? So we sort of had this because we started the company as just a place for developers to work, like a great place for developers. We had a culture of, hey, let's just try different things, right? And we would do what we called Creek weeks, you know, or like it's like Google's 20% time, except we would take time out and just try new things. Like, let's build a new product. So that actually works? Yeah, I mean, we had a bunch of things like if you. One summer we took a bunch of interns and built a screen sharing tool called Copilot. Yeah, and that was before log me in and go to my PC existed. And so that was actually serving a real need at that time. We didn't see it. We marketed it to customer service people. Instead of the way that log me in and go to my PC, sort of market it more to consumers. Yeah. And so I think that was like the right product, right time, but wrong marketing strategy. That was like another example of failure in some sense. I mean, we made decent money off of it, but it never became, as you know, Those other companies IPO'd and became giant successes. But we had this pattern of, hey, let's take some time off, build new things. And Trello was born out of that.
