A lot of companies in building an indirect channel is in part just the thing that I mentioned. It's hard to trust a third party outside of your company with kind of a core part of your business, you know, finding and selling and converting and making customers successful. And so it could be a lot of companies start out where it's like, hey, it's great to have a company in Korea that represents us in resale. But then when we get to a certain size, we're going to have our own people there. Then our own people are going to focus on the biggest opportunities for us.
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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