[kriro]

Well there's also no mention of the following and general goodwill Joel has accumulated over the years (mostly by being awesome, honest and also working hard on other products). Pretty sure he/his company could indeed build the next Trello by building a simpler X of something. People without that channel...that's going to be a tiny bit harder.

[notahacker]

Yeah, step one to building the next Trello is be Joel Spolsky, or possibly 37Signals; failing that, be [otherwise] exceptionally good at marketing and generating goodwill. Because the reality is that "it's simpler to use, more general and has less bloat than the market leader" is not a unique selling point, it's something pretty much every new entrant into a market achieves by default. So you have to do a lot more than that for your KISS general productivity/collaboration app to stand out, particularly if starting from the significantly disadvantaged starting point of not being Joel Spolsky