
Trello generates $4m in annual revenue, Atlassian earnings report indicates - tiffanyh
http://www.zdnet.com/article/atlassians-customer-roster-swells-delivers-solid-q2/
======
blktiger
If true, and if the internet is correct about company size being between 51
and 200, then that means each employee only generates between ~$78K and ~$20K.
Anyone know if that is low or not? Seems low to me (compared with software
engineer salaries), but I suppose that depends on what kinds of employees they
have and how much they pay.

~~~
elevensies
From their 2016 Annual report (
[https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/2016/Q4/...](https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/2016/Q4/Atlassian-
FY2016-Annual-Report.pdf) )

Employees = 1760 (page 43)

Revenue = 457 Million (page 48)

Revenue per employee ≈ 260k

~~~
blktiger
That's for Alassian, not Trello.

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eps
Duh.

We wanted to pay for Trello, we tried paying for Trello, we even explicitly
asked _how_ can we give you money, but the only option was to get stickers and
smileys as premium pro features. So $4m sounds not a bit surprising.

~~~
fnbr
What do you mean? Couldn't you sign up for a Business Class account? [1]

[1] [https://trello.com/pricing](https://trello.com/pricing)

~~~
eps
In the end we did, but it was ultimately a donation, because none of paid
features was useful in our case.

~~~
fnbr
I get that. That was my company's experience with Slack.

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openmosix
So it was acquired with a multiplier of 106x its revenues. WOW

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newsat13
Wow, this is news. Trello is such a popular product and it only makes like 4m
a year? That really is very very low. I wonder what changes we will see now
that Atlassian have to make up for 400m.

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mrkurt
Atlassian is really good at growing Trello like business. I bet their
marketinf/growth folks are salivating.

~~~
vemv
Userbase is large enough already... problem ia more of a monetization one?

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joshmn
Does this mean that Atlassian is looking for Trello to generate more sales for
their core products? I think it does. Having said, how long until they see
(whatever that means in this context) the $425MM they paid for it? How are
they defining a successful acquisition?

~~~
trjordan
Obviously this wasn't about revenue!

A sane valuation is 2x-10x revenue, so their bet is that this quickly can be
turned into something that generates $30m a year. You could think about this
as incremental to a business with $400mm a year in revenue: are there enough
people using Trello that, with a few points of integration, could be convinced
to switch to Atlassian products? You'd "only" need to add 10% to your growth
for this year to feel like this is worth it.

Realistically, this is probably more of a strategic play. Atlassian wants to
own the development workflow, and Trello is one of only a couple players in
this space that are entrenched enough to be attractive. If you assume the
market for dev tools is $100b (think total value of Github's market + Slack's
market + StatusPage's + ...), buying a dominant market share in one of ~10
major products for half a billion isn't crazy. As Trello-type tools move from
"a good way to interact with the business" to "crucial for all development
teams", this may just be a way to keep themselves from dying. Success is
merely being a player in this space.

~~~
pavlov
Some have found the opposite. In the recently published RethinkDB postmortem
[1], the founder suggests that the dev tools market is inherently unattractive
for startups:

 _" Unfortunately you’re not in the market you think you’re in – you’re in the
market your users think you’re in. And our users clearly thought of us as an
open-source developer tools company, because that’s what we really were. Which
turned out to be very unfortunate, because the open-source developer tools
market is one of the worst markets one could possibly end up in. Thousands of
people used RethinkDB, often in business contexts, but most were willing to
pay less for the lifetime of usage than the price of a single Starbucks coffee
(which is to say, they weren’t willing to pay anything at all)._

 _" This wasn’t because the product was so good people didn’t need to pay for
support, or because developers don’t control budgets, or because of failure of
capitalism. The answer is basic microeconomics. Developers love building
developer tools, often for free. So while there is massive demand, the supply
vastly outstrips it. This drives the number of alternatives up, and the prices
down to zero._

 _" To see how this plays out for other companies consider MongoDB (valued at
roughly $1.6B with ~700 employees), and Docker (valued at roughly $1B with
~300 employees). Both companies completely dominate in their respective
markets. Two very rough rules of thumb for private growth stage technology
companies is that valuations are a 10x multiple of annual revenue, and that
revenue per employee is around $200K/year. Which means that MongoDB’s annual
revenue is around $140-$160M, and Docker’s annual revenue is around
$60-$100M._

 _" That looks pretty good, until you look at dominant B2B technology
companies in markets that aren’t developer tools. Companies like SalesForce,
or Palantir, or Box (which faces stiff competition). All of a sudden MongoDB
and Docker start looking tiny."_

[1] [http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-
failed.ht...](http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html)

~~~
trjordan
I don't actually disagree with that post-mortem. Databases (and similarly,
SDKs, widget libraries, and all other sorts of code-only deliverables) are
rough to monetize, precisely for the reason that the RethinkDB founders
believe. In addition, if you need some capability to build your product,
purchasing it always means buying more capability than you need and doing more
integration work than you thought you would have to.

On the other hand, workflow tools, especially if hosted, do really well and
get to charge money. Jira, Github, New Relic, PagerDuty, and if you stretch it
far enough, AWS do a rocking business selling to developers, because (imho)
they are tied to the business process of delivering a product, not the
developer need to build things.

The market for selling to developers is huge, because the market for things
created by developers is huge and developers are expensive to hire. You can't
sell just anything because of the supply problems cited above, and I think
Trello's user base is the big story here that RethinkDB didn't have.

~~~
pavlov
Good points, thanks!

It's interesting to consider that PagerDuty is a developer product that can be
successfully monetized whereas RethinkDB isn't. This runs counter to
developers' own assumptions about what are the "hard" (and therefore presumed
valuable) problems.

Maybe a rule of thumb: If you can come up with a developer product that solves
a need but is not technically interesting for developers themselves to build,
you might have a winner.

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jnordwick
Trello blows. Sorry, it does. It seems more for show than actually getting
things done. Functionality was sorely lacking for me.

Last year I tried to do my first Android app, a Trello widget and found the
functionality of the REST API lacking too, and there was no way to use the
Trello credentials from their own app not interface with it well. After some
exchanges with their dev team I basically gave up.

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sctb
We've updated the title from “Trello only generates $4m in revenue, Atlassian
earnings report indicates”, which breaks the submission guidelines by
editorializing.

~~~
petercooper
The reason people seem to be in this thread is because of the tidbit of
information about Trello, not because Atlassian's had a "solid Q2". The new
title is not very discussion worthy.

I appreciate HN has policies around editorialization but it seems titles that
better tell the story HNers would be interested in are changed to more opaque
ones on a frequent basis. (Admittedly I'd have dropped the "only".)

~~~
sctb
I appreciate this thoughtful comment, but this is more like DNA than policy.
Hacker News is emphatically focused on content. Titles are not the things that
should be discussion-worthy, content is. And titles are subservient to the
content they aim to represent, and need to do so as accurately as possible.
Original titles are often best suited for this.

It's not up to the submitter to decide what readers might find interesting,
especially when doing so misrepresents what the content actually is. It's not
fair to mislead readers with a title about Trello when the article is
primarily about Atlassian.

But all is not lost: if there's a particular tidbit that the submitter has
found interesting, the perfect place to bring that up is in the comment
thread.

~~~
petercooper
_I appreciate this thoughtful comment, but this is more like DNA than policy._

I considered it policy because it has changed. Up until about two years ago,
it was okay to provide context in titles as long as they weren't "over-
editorialized" \- I believe this word was actually used in the guidelines
document.

 _And titles are subservient to the content they aim to represent, and need to
do so as accurately as possible._

Titles are an unavoidable and valuable gateway to content because a reader's
decision to read rests upon them.

For 2 hours today there was an item just titled "Joxa" on the front page that
meant nothing. It was basically clickbait because HN junkies like me _had_ to
click on it to work out what it meant. You've since edited it, yet I
frequently see titles here being edited the _other_ way.

 _It 's not fair to mislead readers with a title about Trello when the article
is primarily about Atlassian._

What _is_ the best, HN-friendly approach to highlighting more interesting
"background" stories, such as this? Would it have been for someone to write
their own blog post quoting the original story? This sort of thing has
sometimes been shot down here as "blogspam" (although I'm fine with it).

~~~
sctb
On reflection, this seems a fair point; we've restored the submitted title
(removing "only" as suggested) from “Atlassian's customer roster swells,
delivers solid Q2”. If the original title weren't such droning PR-speak there
might be a stronger case for sticking to the rule, especially since the
article is particularly light on Trello details, but it's close enough.

