
From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups. - joshuacc
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million-with-no-sales-people-the-atlassian-10-commandments-for-startups.html
======
latch
Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in
the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible.
Not sure if I'm just the odd man out on this though.

~~~
pointyhat
No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity.

My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made
me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS
and Sun hotspot VM.

Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out
for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to
race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because
it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM
tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their
plugin management - it's a crock of shit.

I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe.

That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac
back please".

If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not
fit for purpose.

~~~
ghshephard
I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have
installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test
purpose no less than 50 times.

The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8
Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server.

90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL

Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up
to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be)

JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun. We only use fisheye and
Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience.

In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random
failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software
package I've ever used.

Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.

~~~
davidu
Do you have ~100 developers using it and 1000s of issues? Definitely does not
scale.

~~~
nl
That's nonsense. I've used it on projects much (MUCH!) bigger than that.

You didn't try and use it with the built in database or something did you?

For a public example, <https://issues.apache.org> currently has 209560 issues,
thousands of users and it works fine.

~~~
pointyhat
...until you plug Greenhopper in.

------
Zuz
Atlassian as a company rocks (the code behind some of the products less so but
I digress). The reality is that they _do_ have sales people, in fact _a lot_
of them.

It's just that they are not Atlassian employees but are Atlassian partners
employees. Atlassian has a massive partner/reseller network these days

------
gergles
The thing that I don't get about Atlassian is that they make gigantic,
unwieldy products that have ludicrous hardware requirements for what they are
(compare the performance of a mediawiki install and a Confluence install on
the same box) yet they AREN'T targeting the enterprise. In fact, they seem
outright enterprise-hostile in their sales process (they don't take purchase
orders, period, so you have to find someone with a company credit card, that
is authorized to use it on software, that ... you get the picture.)

You have a cap of licensed users, but no way to view only users who are
burning a license (we had open registration on our Confluence install for a
while, so many employees made 5 or 6 accounts - the only way to figure out
which ones are still enabled and which ones aren't is to manually click
through _every fucking one_ ), things like that.

I love the feature set of Confluence, and feel like it is generally pretty
easy to use and well-received by my users, but I dread the annual license
renewals (and the upgrades that automatically start sending your users mail
with no way to opt out of that globally -- that you have to install, because
they contain security fixes.)

------
ilamont
It's a good talk, but I disagree with the advice "you don’t have time to go
out there and talk with the customers, get feedback."

Not every company builds products that they might need internally, and even
among those that do, their use of it may not match the usage patterns of ideal
customers.

~~~
latch
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
- Henry Ford

Mr Ford's reasons for not talking to customers though is a lot better than
"you don't have time"

~~~
jonpaul
I do love that quote and I find that it's true that customers don't know what
they want. But what that quote tells us is that the customer's problem is
_speed_. That is the value of talking to customers, not asking them what they
want, but learning what their problem really is.

~~~
latch
I totally disagree with this. What the quote means to me, is that the
customer's imagination (for lack of a better world) is so limited, that their
problems are sandbox by the context of their understanding.

Something that doesn't shit all over their yard might actually be more
important than speed, but they wouldn't even begin to think of asking that
because it's not a possibility in their world.

What do you want in the next Blackberry? "real touch" and "real browser" were
pretty far outside the box when the iPod touch launched..people weren't asking
for it because they didn't know they wanted it (or that it was possible).

~~~
atldev
I think jonpaul is exactly right with his response to the famous Ford quote.
Perhaps the customer's imagination is limited, but they know the pain points
well. If you're listening carefully, you could figure out the solution.
Unfortunately, too many companies use this quote as an excuse to think they're
smarter than the customer and develop in a vacuum.

RIM did this. I was a Blackberry to iPhone convert, and I bet a company that
was willing to listen to me could eventually figure it out. I would have asked
for a browser that actually worked, a larger screen, and thin enough to fit in
my pocket (rather than the ridiculous belt clip I had to wear). I had no idea
we were capable of the iPhone when it came out, but sounds like my checklist
doesn't it?

------
sandieman
Summarizing his points: \- Start with two founders \- You need a business
model - freemium has serious advantages \- Use your own product \- Measure
everything \- Test everything \- Always be closing marketing \- First idea
will fail \- Think long-term \- Know when to switch gears \- Build something
you want to work

------
schiptsov
The trick was about giving free licenses to big and popular open Java
projects, such as Spring, Hibernate or JBoss. That was a million dollar idea.

------
snorkel
Jira is the Microsoft Office of SCRUM teams, but that's not a compliment.

------
MattGrommes
"I think for a company don’t give people cash. Use that cash and give people
experiences."

It's interesting to contrast with the model Netflix seems to use, which is
"Don't give people gym memberships, give them the money and let them sort it
out." Attracts different types of folks I guess, everybody has their
preferences.

~~~
malbs
We get a $30 per-week allowance for "OH&S Health and Well-being" - It can be
used for pretty much anything exercise related, gym, green fees, tennis court
hire, it's a lot better than simply being forced to go to some particular gym.
It's not a massive amount of money, but it certainly adds up

------
davidw
As an interesting aside, JIRA is based on some of the code behind Apache's
OFBiz: <http://ofbiz.apache.org/>

~~~
nl
It would be more accurate to say that Atlassian _wrote_ some of the code
behind OFBiz (and a lot of other open source Java projects) back in the early-
mid 2000's.

------
abotwright
I find it irksome when founders talk about culture and firing people like its
some kind of sublime process. Like this guy is some kind of pariah that
wouldn't get canned or treated marginally by the next doofus manager who felt
he/she didn't like him.

~~~
farkas
Hey - I'm not sure what you mean? You mean do I realise that the guy I fired
wouldn't find a job again?

~~~
abotwright
Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you
can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided
you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most
founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another.

I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a
two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always
get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of
people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically
impossible.

~~~
ghshephard
I don't know where you are located abotwright, but out here in California, by
the time it gets to a termination, the employee has all but stopped coming
into the office and burned the place down. From my perspective, taking credit
for always firing the right person, is setting the bar really, really low. I'm
much more impressed with a manager that manages to fire all the people that
should, not that he should have fired the people he did.

For whatever reason, only the bottom 5% ever get fired. Where organizations
tend to make the mistakes you are talking about is during layoffs, in which
quite often, the wrong person is let go - but, in "theory" layoffs aren't
performance related - though, in practice, they almost always are. Top
Performers are almost never laid off, despite their role in the organization,
and bottom performers somehow always turn out to be redundant. One exception
to this is when a company drops a division or location - then it's across the
board.

------
mattm
A good talk but from the title I was hoping there would be more about how they
grew their sales. The talk was more about growing the company and evolving
from a startup to a large company but with little mention of how they actually
did that.

------
ph0rque
Interesting that they mention topgrading. It's a concept explained in the book
_Who: the 'A' Method for Hiring_ by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. When I first
read the book, I was really skeptical, but maybe there's something to it.

~~~
farkas
I think that it is useful to understand the philosophy behind the process, but
adapt the process to your own style.

There are two points that I have taken from the TopGrading process: \- hire
people who are 'A' players who have succeeded at whatever they have done AND
who have a passion for the role you are hiring for \- past performance IS the
best determinant of future success, and the best way to answer the first
question

The interview process generally starts at college where you dig into why they
chose their course, the highlights, where they excelled, where they failed,
who influenced them and why. Did they take on any leadership positions? Win
any awards?

Then for each job they have had since, find out - why they chose it, what they
found, what they fixed, what they learnt & what they would do differently.
Would their boss give them a reference, and why did they leave.

At each turn, you are looking for: 'were they an A player / had outstanding
results' and 'does their career path lead you to believe that they will be
passionate about this job'.

There's a lot of nuances to it, but I wouldn't hire senior people any other
way. I recently compared our hiring notes to a comprehensive personality test
of a new employee, and they matched exactly.

~~~
amirhhz
How do you treat blips in people's past? What if they had a bad year at
university, for example, but have been consistently "A" players since
beginning a career?

------
brndnhy
The Greenhopper acquisition was pretty slick.

What used to be (I think) a $700 plugin now adds $2,000 to the annual
maintenance cost of JIRA.

------
dmor
There are a lot of gems in here, this is a "save forever" post.

