Atlassian's Self-Service Flywheel

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Atlassian always had people that were involved in that self-service flywheel. We refer to this team as advocates. They were either product advocates or their customer advocates. And what they were there for is to remove whatever hiccups or speed bumps or potholes the customer might step into. But with a great answer, they would then send the customer back out into this self-service path. That's the part that we scaled.

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.

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