12 ms·

From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups.

166 points by joshuacc 15y ago

ilamont 15y ago
It's a good talk, but I disagree with the advice "you don’t have time to go out there and talk with the customers, get feedback." Not every company builds products that they might need internally, and even among those that do, their use of it may not match the usage patterns of ideal customers.
- baltcode 15y ago
  I'd love to use bitbucket instead of github (since they allow free privste repos), but they need to have an online editor. I think they should just run through more of the feature requests.
- latch 15y ago
  "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford Mr Ford's reasons for not talking to customers though is a lot better than "you don't have time"
  - jonpaul 15y ago
    I do love that quote and I find that it's true that customers don't know what they want. But what that quote tells us is that the customer's problem is speed. That is the value of talking to customers, not asking them what they want, but learning what their problem really is.
    - ljf 15y ago
      Exactly - customers and users think in terms of features that they want. Our job is to look through the features and pull out requirements, then prioritise those requirements and work with a great team (or alone) to turn them back into the features that bring the most value. So feature: I want a faster horse Requirement: Get places faster, and without stopping for rest periods New feature/tool: <profit>
    - latch 15y ago
      I totally disagree with this. What the quote means to me, is that the customer's imagination (for lack of a better world) is so limited, that their problems are sandbox by the context of their understanding. Something that doesn't shit all over their yard might actually be more important than speed, but they wouldn't even begin to think of asking that because it's not a possibility in their world. What do you want in the next Blackberry? "real touch" and "real browser" were pretty far outside the box when the iPod touch launched..people weren't asking for it because they didn't know they wanted it (or that it was possible).
      - atldev 15y ago
        I think jonpaul is exactly right with his response to the famous Ford quote. Perhaps the customer's imagination is limited, but they know the pain points well. If you're listening carefully, you could figure out the solution. Unfortunately, too many companies use this quote as an excuse to think they're smarter than the customer and develop in a vacuum. RIM did this. I was a Blackberry to iPhone convert, and I bet a company that was willing to listen to me could eventually figure it out. I would have asked for a browser that actually worked, a larger screen, and thin enough to fit in my pocket (rather than the ridiculous belt clip I had to wear). I had no idea we were capable of the iPhone when it came out, but sounds like my checklist doesn't it?
    - nirvdrum 15y ago
      Sometimes customers don't know what they want. Many times they do. It's rather arrogant to believe otherwise. Most of us aren't creating cars. Some of us think we are and we spit out Segways (should've heard all the dummies that wanted faster legs!). But most tech startups are providing incremental, not disruptive, improvements. And flat out ignoring feedback from people that are going to buy your product and doing so because "they don't know what they really want" is an odd approach to me. What really kills me about all this is your customer almost certainly understand the competitive landscape, problem space, and industry better than you do. Maybe every other entry failed because they tried to read between the lines rather than delivering what people want. That's not to say your product should be built as an amalgamation of every feature request thrown your way. Balance is key. But thinking you know better than your customer might not be a great strategy.
  - kingofspain 15y ago
    A car is a faster horse.
  - shabda 15y ago
    Mr. Ford might not have actually said that. http://www.foolproof.co.uk/three-old-chestnuts-cracked/ http://www.foolproof.co.uk/three-old-chestnuts-cracked/ http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-If-Id-asked-my-customers-what-they-wanted-theyd-have-said-a-faster-horse http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-...
  - NEPatriot 15y ago
    Customers know their problems - not necessarily the solutions required to solve their problems. They may have a solution in mind for their problems. It is the job of the founder is boil down problems to their core and find solutions. edit: grammar
    - iand 15y ago
      Also important for founders not to leave the customer with the impression that the customer's solution will be the one implemented
  - VuongN 15y ago
    This actually reminds me of a Simpson episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F) where Homer designed a car according to his own needs. It didn't go well :P
  - SkyMarshal 15y ago
    Yes, if you're trying to create something new, like a car or an iPad, then both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are right - most people don't know what they want until you build it and show it to them. And to succeed you need people with some mix of vision, taste, and demanding standards making something they want to use for it to succeed. If it passes their test, it will most likely pass the test for the general public as well.
- farkas 15y ago
  Yep - I don't think that I said that particularly eloquently. And it was related to a point (that I can't remember) that had been brought up earlier in the conference. But my overarching belief about product design: - build stuff you are passionate about because you use it - listen to customers, but don't do what they say The reason that products all start to look the same is that customer's only experience of 'better' is a competitors product. That's why you have Audi's advertising about their safety record, and Volkswagon's advertising about their performance features. A great read on this topic is Youngme Moon's book different: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme-Moon/dp/0307460851 http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...
  - marklittlewood 15y ago
    Young Me's book is definitely worth a read. I am really sad that we are not able to share that video at her own request. I did take some notes and grab some pictures which give a short summary of some of her arguments. http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of-software-different/ http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of...
latch 15y ago
Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible. Not sure if I'm just the odd man out on this though.
- xbryanx 15y ago
  I use and manage our JIRA instance in a small tech group inside a large non-profit. Probably only ever had 10 users. I love it, and our team has grown to be more efficient as a result of its use. Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  I've used both tools for two start-ups now. I can't imagine using anything else (well, Redmine is a nice free tool). But you're not in the minority in startups. I personally can't understand how anyone is productive with PivotalTracker, Lighthouse, or GitHub Issues (at least the older one). But people are and to each his own. FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.
- cujo 15y ago
  I agree with you, but as a developer, I prefer these types of tools to get out of the way. Jira and Confluence seem to be written for managers that can live in them. For them, I'm sure the experience is much different.
- stephen_g 15y ago
  We use Jira at our company and it's probably one of the best issue tracking systems I've tried. Confluence is alright but I think that there are a few open source wiki packages that are at least as good, if not better.
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    Which free ones do you like? My biggest Confluence draws are rich text editor (nice for one-off pages), attachment indexing, and attachment versioning. But I'm always open to trying something else.
Zuz 15y ago
Atlassian as a company rocks (the code behind some of the products less so but I digress). The reality is that they do have sales people, in fact a lot of them. It's just that they are not Atlassian employees but are Atlassian partners employees. Atlassian has a massive partner/reseller network these days
ph0rque 15y ago
Interesting that they mention topgrading. It's a concept explained in the book Who: the 'A' Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. When I first read the book, I was really skeptical, but maybe there's something to it.
- farkas 15y ago
  I think that it is useful to understand the philosophy behind the process, but adapt the process to your own style. There are two points that I have taken from the TopGrading process: - hire people who are 'A' players who have succeeded at whatever they have done AND who have a passion for the role you are hiring for - past performance IS the best determinant of future success, and the best way to answer the first question The interview process generally starts at college where you dig into why they chose their course, the highlights, where they excelled, where they failed, who influenced them and why. Did they take on any leadership positions? Win any awards? Then for each job they have had since, find out - why they chose it, what they found, what they fixed, what they learnt & what they would do differently. Would their boss give them a reference, and why did they leave. At each turn, you are looking for: 'were they an A player / had outstanding results' and 'does their career path lead you to believe that they will be passionate about this job'. There's a lot of nuances to it, but I wouldn't hire senior people any other way. I recently compared our hiring notes to a comprehensive personality test of a new employee, and they matched exactly.
  - amirhhz 15y ago
    How do you treat blips in people's past? What if they had a bad year at university, for example, but have been consistently "A" players since beginning a career?
davidw 15y ago
As an interesting aside, JIRA is based on some of the code behind Apache's OFBiz: http://ofbiz.apache.org/ http://ofbiz.apache.org/
- nl 15y ago
  It would be more accurate to say that Atlassian wrote some of the code behind OFBiz (and a lot of other open source Java projects) back in the early-mid 2000's.
schiptsov 15y ago
The trick was about giving free licenses to big and popular open Java projects, such as Spring, Hibernate or JBoss. That was a million dollar idea.
abotwright 15y ago
I find it irksome when founders talk about culture and firing people like its some kind of sublime process. Like this guy is some kind of pariah that wouldn't get canned or treated marginally by the next doofus manager who felt he/she didn't like him.
- farkas 15y ago
  Hey - I'm not sure what you mean? You mean do I realise that the guy I fired wouldn't find a job again?
  - abotwright 15y ago
    Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another. I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically impossible.
    - ghshephard 15y ago
      I don't know where you are located abotwright, but out here in California, by the time it gets to a termination, the employee has all but stopped coming into the office and burned the place down. From my perspective, taking credit for always firing the right person, is setting the bar really, really low. I'm much more impressed with a manager that manages to fire all the people that should, not that he should have fired the people he did. For whatever reason, only the bottom 5% ever get fired. Where organizations tend to make the mistakes you are talking about is during layoffs, in which quite often, the wrong person is let go - but, in "theory" layoffs aren't performance related - though, in practice, they almost always are. Top Performers are almost never laid off, despite their role in the organization, and bottom performers somehow always turn out to be redundant. One exception to this is when a company drops a division or location - then it's across the board.
snorkel 15y ago
Jira is the Microsoft Office of SCRUM teams, but that's not a compliment.
sandieman 15y ago
Summarizing his points: - Start with two founders - You need a business model - freemium has serious advantages - Use your own product - Measure everything - Test everything - Always be closing marketing - First idea will fail - Think long-term - Know when to switch gears - Build something you want to work
brndnhy 15y ago
The Greenhopper acquisition was pretty slick. What used to be (I think) a $700 plugin now adds $2,000 to the annual maintenance cost of JIRA.
MattGrommes 15y ago
"I think for a company don’t give people cash. Use that cash and give people experiences." It's interesting to contrast with the model Netflix seems to use, which is "Don't give people gym memberships, give them the money and let them sort it out." Attracts different types of folks I guess, everybody has their preferences.
- malbs 15y ago
  We get a $30 per-week allowance for "OH&S Health and Well-being" - It can be used for pretty much anything exercise related, gym, green fees, tennis court hire, it's a lot better than simply being forced to go to some particular gym. It's not a massive amount of money, but it certainly adds up
gergles 15y ago
The thing that I don't get about Atlassian is that they make gigantic, unwieldy products that have ludicrous hardware requirements for what they are (compare the performance of a mediawiki install and a Confluence install on the same box) yet they AREN'T targeting the enterprise. In fact, they seem outright enterprise-hostile in their sales process (they don't take purchase orders, period, so you have to find someone with a company credit card, that is authorized to use it on software, that ... you get the picture.) You have a cap of licensed users, but no way to view only users who are burning a license (we had open registration on our Confluence install for a while, so many employees made 5 or 6 accounts - the only way to figure out which ones are still enabled and which ones aren't is to manually click through every fucking one), things like that. I love the feature set of Confluence, and feel like it is generally pretty easy to use and well-received by my users, but I dread the annual license renewals (and the upgrades that automatically start sending your users mail with no way to opt out of that globally -- that you have to install, because they contain security fixes.)
mattm 15y ago
A good talk but from the title I was hoping there would be more about how they grew their sales. The talk was more about growing the company and evolving from a startup to a large company but with little mention of how they actually did that.
dmor 15y ago
There are a lot of gems in here, this is a "save forever" post.

166 points by joshuacc 15y ago

It's a good talk, but I disagree with the advice "you don’t have time to go out there and talk with the customers, get feedback." Not every company builds products that they might need internally, and even among those that do, their use of it may not match the usage patterns of ideal customers.

baltcode 15y ago
I'd love to use bitbucket instead of github (since they allow free privste repos), but they need to have an online editor. I think they should just run through more of the feature requests.
latch 15y ago
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford Mr Ford's reasons for not talking to customers though is a lot better than "you don't have time"
- jonpaul 15y ago
  I do love that quote and I find that it's true that customers don't know what they want. But what that quote tells us is that the customer's problem is speed. That is the value of talking to customers, not asking them what they want, but learning what their problem really is.
  - ljf 15y ago
    Exactly - customers and users think in terms of features that they want. Our job is to look through the features and pull out requirements, then prioritise those requirements and work with a great team (or alone) to turn them back into the features that bring the most value. So feature: I want a faster horse Requirement: Get places faster, and without stopping for rest periods New feature/tool: <profit>
  - latch 15y ago
    I totally disagree with this. What the quote means to me, is that the customer's imagination (for lack of a better world) is so limited, that their problems are sandbox by the context of their understanding. Something that doesn't shit all over their yard might actually be more important than speed, but they wouldn't even begin to think of asking that because it's not a possibility in their world. What do you want in the next Blackberry? "real touch" and "real browser" were pretty far outside the box when the iPod touch launched..people weren't asking for it because they didn't know they wanted it (or that it was possible).
    - atldev 15y ago
      I think jonpaul is exactly right with his response to the famous Ford quote. Perhaps the customer's imagination is limited, but they know the pain points well. If you're listening carefully, you could figure out the solution. Unfortunately, too many companies use this quote as an excuse to think they're smarter than the customer and develop in a vacuum. RIM did this. I was a Blackberry to iPhone convert, and I bet a company that was willing to listen to me could eventually figure it out. I would have asked for a browser that actually worked, a larger screen, and thin enough to fit in my pocket (rather than the ridiculous belt clip I had to wear). I had no idea we were capable of the iPhone when it came out, but sounds like my checklist doesn't it?
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    Sometimes customers don't know what they want. Many times they do. It's rather arrogant to believe otherwise. Most of us aren't creating cars. Some of us think we are and we spit out Segways (should've heard all the dummies that wanted faster legs!). But most tech startups are providing incremental, not disruptive, improvements. And flat out ignoring feedback from people that are going to buy your product and doing so because "they don't know what they really want" is an odd approach to me. What really kills me about all this is your customer almost certainly understand the competitive landscape, problem space, and industry better than you do. Maybe every other entry failed because they tried to read between the lines rather than delivering what people want. That's not to say your product should be built as an amalgamation of every feature request thrown your way. Balance is key. But thinking you know better than your customer might not be a great strategy.
- kingofspain 15y ago
  A car is a faster horse.
- shabda 15y ago
  Mr. Ford might not have actually said that. http://www.foolproof.co.uk/three-old-chestnuts-cracked/ http://www.foolproof.co.uk/three-old-chestnuts-cracked/ http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-If-Id-asked-my-customers-what-they-wanted-theyd-have-said-a-faster-horse http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-...
- NEPatriot 15y ago
  Customers know their problems - not necessarily the solutions required to solve their problems. They may have a solution in mind for their problems. It is the job of the founder is boil down problems to their core and find solutions. edit: grammar
  - iand 15y ago
    Also important for founders not to leave the customer with the impression that the customer's solution will be the one implemented
- VuongN 15y ago
  This actually reminds me of a Simpson episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F) where Homer designed a car according to his own needs. It didn't go well :P
- SkyMarshal 15y ago
  Yes, if you're trying to create something new, like a car or an iPad, then both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are right - most people don't know what they want until you build it and show it to them. And to succeed you need people with some mix of vision, taste, and demanding standards making something they want to use for it to succeed. If it passes their test, it will most likely pass the test for the general public as well.
farkas 15y ago
Yep - I don't think that I said that particularly eloquently. And it was related to a point (that I can't remember) that had been brought up earlier in the conference. But my overarching belief about product design: - build stuff you are passionate about because you use it - listen to customers, but don't do what they say The reason that products all start to look the same is that customer's only experience of 'better' is a competitors product. That's why you have Audi's advertising about their safety record, and Volkswagon's advertising about their performance features. A great read on this topic is Youngme Moon's book different: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme-Moon/dp/0307460851 http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...
- marklittlewood 15y ago
  Young Me's book is definitely worth a read. I am really sad that we are not able to share that video at her own request. I did take some notes and grab some pictures which give a short summary of some of her arguments. http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of-software-different/ http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of...

latch 15y ago

Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible. Not sure if I'm just the odd man out on this though.

xbryanx 15y ago
I use and manage our JIRA instance in a small tech group inside a large non-profit. Probably only ever had 10 users. I love it, and our team has grown to be more efficient as a result of its use. Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.
nirvdrum 15y ago
I've used both tools for two start-ups now. I can't imagine using anything else (well, Redmine is a nice free tool). But you're not in the minority in startups. I personally can't understand how anyone is productive with PivotalTracker, Lighthouse, or GitHub Issues (at least the older one). But people are and to each his own. FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.
cujo 15y ago
I agree with you, but as a developer, I prefer these types of tools to get out of the way. Jira and Confluence seem to be written for managers that can live in them. For them, I'm sure the experience is much different.
stephen_g 15y ago
We use Jira at our company and it's probably one of the best issue tracking systems I've tried. Confluence is alright but I think that there are a few open source wiki packages that are at least as good, if not better.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  Which free ones do you like? My biggest Confluence draws are rich text editor (nice for one-off pages), attachment indexing, and attachment versioning. But I'm always open to trying something else.

Zuz 15y ago

Atlassian as a company rocks (the code behind some of the products less so but I digress). The reality is that they do have sales people, in fact a lot of them. It's just that they are not Atlassian employees but are Atlassian partners employees. Atlassian has a massive partner/reseller network these days

ph0rque 15y ago

Interesting that they mention topgrading. It's a concept explained in the book Who: the 'A' Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. When I first read the book, I was really skeptical, but maybe there's something to it.

farkas 15y ago
I think that it is useful to understand the philosophy behind the process, but adapt the process to your own style. There are two points that I have taken from the TopGrading process: - hire people who are 'A' players who have succeeded at whatever they have done AND who have a passion for the role you are hiring for - past performance IS the best determinant of future success, and the best way to answer the first question The interview process generally starts at college where you dig into why they chose their course, the highlights, where they excelled, where they failed, who influenced them and why. Did they take on any leadership positions? Win any awards? Then for each job they have had since, find out - why they chose it, what they found, what they fixed, what they learnt & what they would do differently. Would their boss give them a reference, and why did they leave. At each turn, you are looking for: 'were they an A player / had outstanding results' and 'does their career path lead you to believe that they will be passionate about this job'. There's a lot of nuances to it, but I wouldn't hire senior people any other way. I recently compared our hiring notes to a comprehensive personality test of a new employee, and they matched exactly.
- amirhhz 15y ago
  How do you treat blips in people's past? What if they had a bad year at university, for example, but have been consistently "A" players since beginning a career?

davidw 15y ago

As an interesting aside, JIRA is based on some of the code behind Apache's OFBiz: http://ofbiz.apache.org/ http://ofbiz.apache.org/

nl 15y ago
It would be more accurate to say that Atlassian wrote some of the code behind OFBiz (and a lot of other open source Java projects) back in the early-mid 2000's.

schiptsov 15y ago

The trick was about giving free licenses to big and popular open Java projects, such as Spring, Hibernate or JBoss. That was a million dollar idea.

abotwright 15y ago

I find it irksome when founders talk about culture and firing people like its some kind of sublime process. Like this guy is some kind of pariah that wouldn't get canned or treated marginally by the next doofus manager who felt he/she didn't like him.

farkas 15y ago
Hey - I'm not sure what you mean? You mean do I realise that the guy I fired wouldn't find a job again?
- abotwright 15y ago
  Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another. I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically impossible.
  - ghshephard 15y ago
    I don't know where you are located abotwright, but out here in California, by the time it gets to a termination, the employee has all but stopped coming into the office and burned the place down. From my perspective, taking credit for always firing the right person, is setting the bar really, really low. I'm much more impressed with a manager that manages to fire all the people that should, not that he should have fired the people he did. For whatever reason, only the bottom 5% ever get fired. Where organizations tend to make the mistakes you are talking about is during layoffs, in which quite often, the wrong person is let go - but, in "theory" layoffs aren't performance related - though, in practice, they almost always are. Top Performers are almost never laid off, despite their role in the organization, and bottom performers somehow always turn out to be redundant. One exception to this is when a company drops a division or location - then it's across the board.

snorkel 15y ago

Jira is the Microsoft Office of SCRUM teams, but that's not a compliment.

sandieman 15y ago

Summarizing his points: - Start with two founders - You need a business model - freemium has serious advantages - Use your own product - Measure everything - Test everything - Always be closing marketing - First idea will fail - Think long-term - Know when to switch gears - Build something you want to work

brndnhy 15y ago

The Greenhopper acquisition was pretty slick. What used to be (I think) a $700 plugin now adds $2,000 to the annual maintenance cost of JIRA.

MattGrommes 15y ago

"I think for a company don’t give people cash. Use that cash and give people experiences." It's interesting to contrast with the model Netflix seems to use, which is "Don't give people gym memberships, give them the money and let them sort it out." Attracts different types of folks I guess, everybody has their preferences.

malbs 15y ago
We get a $30 per-week allowance for "OH&S Health and Well-being" - It can be used for pretty much anything exercise related, gym, green fees, tennis court hire, it's a lot better than simply being forced to go to some particular gym. It's not a massive amount of money, but it certainly adds up

gergles 15y ago

The thing that I don't get about Atlassian is that they make gigantic, unwieldy products that have ludicrous hardware requirements for what they are (compare the performance of a mediawiki install and a Confluence install on the same box) yet they AREN'T targeting the enterprise. In fact, they seem outright enterprise-hostile in their sales process (they don't take purchase orders, period, so you have to find someone with a company credit card, that is authorized to use it on software, that ... you get the picture.) You have a cap of licensed users, but no way to view only users who are burning a license (we had open registration on our Confluence install for a while, so many employees made 5 or 6 accounts - the only way to figure out which ones are still enabled and which ones aren't is to manually click through every fucking one), things like that. I love the feature set of Confluence, and feel like it is generally pretty easy to use and well-received by my users, but I dread the annual license renewals (and the upgrades that automatically start sending your users mail with no way to opt out of that globally -- that you have to install, because they contain security fixes.)

mattm 15y ago

A good talk but from the title I was hoping there would be more about how they grew their sales. The talk was more about growing the company and evolving from a startup to a large company but with little mention of how they actually did that.

dmor 15y ago

There are a lot of gems in here, this is a "save forever" post.