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

thedisruptors.beehiiv.com

31–40 of 63 posts

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

#31

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.

1) Have jobs that pay well, and do a pretty good job of saving for years and years. There are several reasons that, despite the prominence of young founders in pop culture, successful founders in fact tend to be quite a bit older—that's one of them.

2) Family money. Either have access to it directly, or be personally "poor" but with an excellent safety net in the form of rich (-enough) relatives who won't let you really suffer if things go poorly (and may help fund your business, even). Doesn't need to be, like, Rockefeller money, either—parents who can guarantee you a place to live, comfortably cover your living expenses for a while, give you the occasional four or five figure interest-free loan without putting their financial security at risk, that kind of thing, can be enough to eliminate most of the personal risk of trying to start a business.

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

#32
post #25
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you don't want that to happen, then don't release your software as free software. Use a CC-NC license or something similar.

I'm not nearly talented enough to build something open source someone else would want to commercialize

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

#33
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> learn everything you can about sales and marketing

Are there resources you'd recommend for this?

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

#34

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.

Maintain low expenses, be OK with going down in life quality, be willing to burn through your life savings and be OK if you lose it all.

I did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.

I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.

So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.

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

#36
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

Mostly not. But sometimes yes, company created billions [0] and I haven't seen a cent :-) [0] Yes, also JIRA

it is an impressive feat, sorry if it came across as negative! hopefully they treat you to dinners at least

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

#37

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…

[edit] This is a response to the original unedited comment that claimed he wrote the first version of Confluence

I'm a former Confluence developer (2008-2013). I don't know anything about you or the detailed history of Confluence.

- When I started there were 12 people on the team including me. I wasn't there at the very beginning but some people on that team were and they would discuss design decisions from the start of the project.

- It was a spring-hibernate-webwork Java web application. Very complex and structured. Not your typical weekend project. Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founder) of Atlassian wrote a book on this type of architecture.[0]

- They were always very open and forthcoming about open source they were leveraging. I don't remember this ever being discussed or mentioned.

[0] https://www.wiley.com/en-ie/Java+Open+Source+Programming:+wi...

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

#38

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.

Great! Lucky I haven't clicked the link yet so not giving traffic to them.

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

#40
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> learn everything you can about sales and marketing Are there resources you'd recommend for this?

I'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

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