Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
thedisruptors.beehiiv.com
Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#2The 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Most of their growth playbook from back then is obsolete or basic knowledge these days.
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#3Atlassian, 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_Radeo...
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#4Yikes, 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.
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#5> ... 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
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#6The 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.
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#7Atlassian, 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
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#8Atlassian, 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.
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#9[flagged]
Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years
#10The 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 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.