The business model is going to evolve. The product advocates largely are measured by volume of customers that they serve and the satisfaction of those customers that they touch. And so in our particular case, I think there really was a negligible difference in trying to traditionally go one to one with every single customer. That high velocity flywheel has customers in the thousands and thousands that kind of flow through it. So short answer to your question is really just enterprise advocates.
Today’s episode is with Jay Simons, who’s currently a partner at Bond and serves on the boards of Hubspot and Zapier. But before that, he had a long run as the President of Atlassian, which develops software collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence and Trello.
In today’s conversation, Jay dives into Atlassian’s growth story, from what’s misunderstood or not talked about enough, to the strategic choices that went against the grain. He shares an inside look at how Atlassian built a product that can sell itself and deferred short-term openings for more durable long-term opportunity.
In addition to unpacking what he calls their “three-legged stool” of self-service, a global network of channel partners, and eventual enterprise upselling, Jay gives us a deep dive into their pricing strategy and how they thought about exploring adjacent product areas. From spinning the flywheels of a remarkable product and a high-velocity self-service funnel, to building a culture that focuses on first principles, there’s tons of great advice in here — not only for go-to-market and revenue leaders, but for anyone who works at a startup.
This blog post from Intercom has the flywheel graphic that Jay mentioned in the episode. https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/scale-how-atlassian-built-a-20-billion-dollar-company-with-no-sales-team/
You can follow Jay on Twitter at @jaysimons.
You can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @twitter.com/firstround and @twitter.com/brettberson