
Atlassian built a $20B dollar company with no sales team - geordilaforge
https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/
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gatsby
No, they have a massive sales team, they just call them "customer advocates"
or "Ecosystem Account Manager" or "Product Advocate"

[https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-
jobs?team=Mark...](https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-
jobs?team=Marketing%20%26%20Sales&location=&search=)

~~~
ragona
I particularly like that they have a role called "Loyalty Advocate" that
requires experience "working in a channel sales model." If that's not a sales
gig I don't know what is.

edit: To be fair to the author that wrote the article, he nearly immediately
called out that Atlassian simply had a lower-than-normal amount of money spent
on sales and marketing, and made no claim that they didn't have a sales team.
I suspect he didn't write the hyperbolic headline -- blame his editor.

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whoisjuan
They do have a sales team. This has been discussed several times. They don't
have sales representatives but they have a huge third party selling channel
and a large sales enablement organization.

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timw4mail
Well the ease of use sure wasn't their selling point. The only decent
Atlassian product is Bitbucket...and they bought it and made it worse.

Trendy design, too much configurability, and an "Enterprise" user base.

If I could, I wouldn't use any Atlassian software.

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dwaltrip
Confluence is a pretty nice product.

~~~
shmooth
Needs more plugins

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sofaofthedamned
Atlassian get away with their awful software because there is no decent
competition.

Rather than moonshots from Google, or free internet from Facebook, or even
buying a football team; somebody putting their hand in their pocket and
funding a decent, modern Agile software suite that is GPL would make the world
a far better place than it is now.

Nobody I know likes Jira. The rest of the Atlassian suite is a dumpster fire.
Jira itself is hated by everybody, but we learn to tolerate it.

~~~
flukus
> Atlassian get away with their awful software because there is no decent
> competition.

There was/is competition for nearly every atlassian product, they were all
worse, at least at the time atlassian surpassed them. Having used many of
them, I love jira.

> modern Agile software suite that is GPL would make the world a far better
> place than it is now.

What feature do you want? There are a lot of open source alternatives.

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Jun8
One of my most important takeaways from patio11’s list of thing you need to
know
([https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/936615043126370306...](https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/936615043126370306?lang=en))
was that for B2B companies sales to engineering ratio is at least 2x and
usually much larger because that’s the bottleneck. Atlas Siam is no exception.

~~~
ignoramous
Nice. Here's a thread-reader-app mirror:
[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html)

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sunstone
I've used a lot of issue tracking systems, including JIRA, and I consider it
one of the worst. But maybe that's because it was being used for software
development and really didn't have the granularity of function necessary for
that kind of project.

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NegativeLatency
With no in house sales team.

They have a large partner ecosystem that sells/implements the product for
larger companies.

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stunt
I don't understand where they are going with Bitbucket. It lacks a lot of
features. Except for a UI re-design, I haven't seen any change for a long
time. (Off topic hoping someone from Atlassian might pick this up here)

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nickelcitymario
The math on this confuses me. If they have 125,000 customers and are worth
$20,000,000,000... investors are valuing each individual customer as being
worth $160,000.

There's gotta be a typo in there somewhere, right?

~~~
rmckayfleming
The market value of a company is (in theory) the sum of the lifetime value of
all of the customers. No idea what Atlassian's ACV is but $160K is $30K/year
over five years (not a crazy estimate for the lifetime of line of business
software in an organization). However, investors also care about growth and
Atlassian grew subscription revenue 64% from FY17 to FY18.

~~~
nickelcitymario
So this is normal? Crazy. Clearly I'm not a finance guy.

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danielpal
Success Bias.....

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shmooth
Either that or this is a lie

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hgasimov
Misleading headline

