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Joel Spolsky Made Copilot Paid and Trello Free. He Got Both Wrong and Right.

By Joel Spolsky · Product & Building · 1 min read

The dot-com crash produced an enormously influential blog post: 'The End of Free.' Spolsky followed it for Copilot — charged $5 — and killed the viral loop. For Trello, he flipped the model. 100 million free users, 1% pay $100/year.

Key Points

Copilot charged $5 per use — it killed the viral loop. Should have been free with enterprise upsell.
Trello: 100 million free users, 1% pay $100/year = $100 million business worth a billion
The 1% who get the most value will pay anything — like Deutsche Bank making billions off Excel

We want 100 million people to use Trello. 1% pay us $100 a year. That's a $100 million business. We're done.

The End of Free

Spolsky: After the dot-com crash, there was this enormously influential blog post called 'The End of Free.' It said — I would rather have 400 customers that pay me $10 a month so I can eat, than 400,000 customers who don't pay me anything.

We were like — yeah, we're always going to charge. So we had this product called Copilot — remote tech support, take over your mom's computer and fix things. We charged $5. What we should have done is made it free and sold the advanced version to professional tech support departments for a million dollars. But we killed the viral loop by charging.

We charged $5 and killed the viral loop. Should have been free with enterprise upsell.

The Trello Model

Spolsky: When we launched Trello, we said — we want 100 million people to eventually use Trello. 1% that get the most value pay us $100 a year. That's a $100 million business. Worth a billion. We're done.

It also has to be viral — you invite people to boards, collaborate on boards. We put a lot of work into that. The flip side is 99% get it for free.

100 million users, 1% pay $100/year = $100 million business. Done.

The 1% Will Pay Anything

Spolsky: When you focus on the 1% that find it most useful, they will pay you. They will pay for added features. They will pay you anything because they're making money off it.

I was reminded of when I worked on the Microsoft Excel team. We visited Deutsche Bank. They said — we like to laugh because Excel enabled the whole derivatives business. They sit there making models that allow them to make literally billions of dollars a day. And Excel was lucky if it scraped up a billion a year. Those folks would pay anything for Excel.

Deutsche Bank makes billions a day off Excel. Excel makes a billion a year. Those folks would pay anything.