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Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
- galoisscobi 3y ago[flagged]
- rozenmd 3y agoThe thing that blew my mind at the time was that the initial licence was like $9, something you could throw onto your credit card as a dev and just have a heaps better way of tracking bugs. Most of their growth playbook from back then is obsolete or basic knowledge these days.
- moneywoes 3y agoYep, exactly. The more I read and it seems that these huge incumbents were all building in a blue ocean market. Have you ever found any useful guides for bootstrapping in competitive markets? It seems based on indie hacker building a personal founder brand is the only viable method for low customer acquisition.
- jimbokun 3y agoI guess the meta lesson is find today's blue ocean markets. The "obvious" things the Atlassian founders did back then were not obvious at all at the time.
- rozenmd 3y agoI have very little personal brand (I went from writing about React to around 900 subscribers to running an uptime monitoring SaaS - https://onlineornot.com https://onlineornot.com), but am still managing to grow in a red-ocean market. The trick is: - being default-alive (the business will never go under, as I have a full time job) - continuous progress (2 hours a day, every workday) - learn everything you can about sales and marketing, the engineering is the easy part :)
- caditinpiscinam 3y ago> learn everything you can about sales and marketing Are there resources you'd recommend for this?
- rozenmd 3y agoI've mainly been learning by doing (and failing), though I've read these books which helped solve problems I had at the time: - Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra - Obviously Awesome by April Dunford - The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick - Every book Seth Godin has written, particularly This is Marketing - Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen - Forget the Funnel by Claire Suellentrop and Georgiana Laudi
- KingOfCoders 3y agoAtlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) [Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. render syntax highlighted code, diagrams and integrate with third party systems. It implemented this with a macro system using {...} syntax. You would need to add at least load/safe e.G. with Hibernate to have a (minimal) Wiki application. But with Radeox you could create your Wiki app in perhaps 100 LOC. [0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200773455_The_Radeox_Wiki_Render_Engine https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200773455_The_Radeo...
- Y_Y 3y agoSo you're the one ultimately responsible for all the suffering it's wrought? It looks nice, but not having access to the plain text source for pages is infuriating.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoNo they wanted to have a wiki, it was fashion back then. I brought a lot of suffering with the {...} notation of macros though (also not using {/...} but {...}, but I was young) I'm responsible for everthing like e.G. https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-the-code-block-macro/ https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-t...
- waihtis 3y agoAsking this in a friendly manner, but don't you feel bad that something you created was taken essentially for free by a corporation and monetized? Money isn't everything, but I would think it fair for the creator to receive their share
- gabereiser 3y agoEvery open source developer has been asking this question for the better part of three decades. Possibly four.
- sleepychu 3y agoYikes, I have to create an account and subscribe to read the second half of the article? Think the complaints about that are obvious. Leaving a comment in case anyone else wants to avoid that particular experience. Shame, it was an interesting and well written article.
- vGPU 3y agoAnd neither 12ft.io nor google cache are able to bypass it. Guess I’m not reading it then. Even though I have emails created specifically for stuff like this, I refuse to uphold the practice.
- max_ 3y agohttps://10minutemail.net/ https://10minutemail.net/
- dal 3y agoGreat! Lucky I haven't clicked the link yet so not giving traffic to them.
- a_c 3y agoI assume the article is a transcript of an episode of "How I Built This", if podcast is more your thing https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/atlassian-mike-cannon-brookes-and-scott-farquhar/id1150510297?i=1000508150130 https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/atlassian-mike-cannon-...
- bunnyfoofoo 3y agoI used the author's email and that was accepted. No confirmation necessary.
- carlossouza 3y ago> ... but that product had terrible support and documentation. So they decided to provide documentation and support services for it, charging customers $360 to solve their issues. However, they faced two problems: First, their documentation was so good that customers rarely needed to call them... Interesting to see how documentation & support are such pain points to sell enterprise software, and yet how few companies manage to differentiate themselves by making truly great documentation & support experiences. Stripe is another good example
- matt3210 3y agoHow do people pay the bills when they start a company? I'd go start a company right now if I could figure out how to pay my car payment while doing it.
- garrickvanburen 3y agoStart with sales. It may take a few of months ( <6 ) to cover your cost of living, but if you can sell, it’s readily achievable. The trick is pricing high enough to actually achieve this on 2-4 customers. In my experience, almost all new businesses price far too low in the early days.
- newaccount74 3y agoI started my business with a product that cost 5€. There's no single path to success, there are a million ways to start a profitable company.
- garrickvanburen 3y agoCharging anything is more than many new businesses charge.
- newaccount74 3y agoDon't have car payments? Just buy a cheap or used car for cash instead of a fancy car that you can't afford. Live below your means, so you're not stuck in working longer and longer hours just to pay for your lifestyle. Accept help from family. If your parents have a big house, move back in with them. If your wife has a good job, ask her if she's okay with being the primary breadwinner for some time. Build a small fraction of your company on the side, while still working as an employee. Maybe even find some contract work to do part time. Or find an investor who pays you a salary to work on your startup :)
- seanalltogether 3y agoWork nights and weekends until you start getting paying customers and then hopefully you can reach a point of walking away from your existing job.
- sunk1st 3y agothe headline raises important questions that we aren’t guaranteed an answer for in the article; what did revenue start at? and how much additional debt (of any kind) was incurred on the way to $20M revenue?
- ilyt 3y agoIt's interesting they had "don't fuck the customer" on value list...
- mindaslab 3y agoIt's hated software by developers.
- adamsmith143 3y agoClassic survivorship bias, 100s of other startups went bankrupt and left their founders with massive high interest debt.
- pyrrhotech 3y agoIt's a great story, but at least in the software world, this sort of thing is exponentially more difficult to pull off today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The internet was the most economically revolutionary invention of all time. Sell to anyone! Connect anyone in the world instantly! It created a lot of low hanging fruit. So much that it took 20 years or so to grab it all. However, in 2023, all that low hanging fruit is gone, and the market is largely saturated. A quick Google search of nearly any idea will pop up at least a handful (sometimes 30+) of established competitors fighting over scraps, none of which ever have a chance of achieving Atlassian-level success. Even B2B SAAS is reaching that saturation point. The golden age of the garage tech startup becoming a billion dollar business in a few years are probably behind us.
- rightbyte 3y agoStrange to think of, that at some point Jira was a small dream made by a handfull of real people, labeling Jira beer at the office to give devs.
- wooque 3y agoStill not profitable after 20 years, so I wouldn't call this success. I can make millions in revenue by selling dollar for 50c as well.
- Mandatum 3y agoIt’s certainly been profitable for the founders who’ve been selling millions of dollars in stock every few weeks for the past year.