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Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

thedisruptors.beehiiv.com

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Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#11

Post by gabereiser »

waihtis wrote: post #7
KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, 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. rend…

Asking 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

Every open source developer has been asking this question for the better part of three decades. Possibly four.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#12

Post by rozenmd »

moneywoes wrote: post #6
rozenmd wrote: post #2

The 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 Most of their growth playbook from back then is obsolete or basic knowledge these days.

Yep, 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.

I have very little personal brand (I went from writing about React to around 900 subscribers to running an uptime monitoring SaaS - 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 :)

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#14

Post by waihtis »

gabereiser wrote: post #11
waihtis wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking 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

Every open source developer has been asking this question for the better part of three decades. Possibly four.

I think there's still a difference of using small libraries which contribute to a single or couple functions here and there, versus taking an entire open source product and wrapping a commercial structure on top of it. Could be hypocrisy on my behalf though

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#15

Post by KingOfCoders »

Y_Y wrote: post #8
KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, 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. rend…

So 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.

No 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-t...

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#16

Post by KingOfCoders »

waihtis wrote: post #7
KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, 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. rend…

Asking 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

Mostly not.

But sometimes yes, company created billions [0] and I haven't seen a cent :-)

[0] Yes, also JIRA

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#19

Post by vGPU »

sleepychu wrote: post #4

Yikes, 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.

And 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.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#20

Post by garrickvanburen »

matt3210 wrote: post #13

How 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.

Start with sales.

It may take a few of months ( In my experience, almost all new businesses price far too low in the early days.

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