Trello, a versatile, easy to use, tool for collaboration, sold to Atlassian for $425 Million, rather than becoming the next $1 Billion+ SAAS application.
Hiten Shah explains Why Trello Failed to Build a $1 Billion+ Business in medium.com.
Researching your customer base and understanding who your customers are early on, will allow your company to know what to implement into your product and where to take it next.
Shah says “Instead of focusing on building a wide product for everyone, Trello should have dug deeper into its use cases in the beginning to figure out why people were signing up, what they were using the product for, and what people found so valuable that they’d be willing to pay to use Trello.
If you have a broad product with a lot of applications, dive into all of the different use cases first:
- Is there a competitor that’s able to do this — or is already doing it today?
- What’s the revenue potential for people using this use case?
By doing research around your customer base and your competitor’s customers, you can segment out the use cases with the highest lifetime value.”
Don’t build a single feature, like the kanban board, that the competition can simply copy. Make sure your software integrates into everyone else’s products so much that copying it would be pointless.
User Experience Design 