Atlassian was founded in the early 2000s as a self-service software company. The idea of bottoms upsass, getting people to take their credit cards out and then upselling and cross selling is sort of it penetrates a given organization today. But back then, it was quite non-consensus. And so I think what we did that was very unconventional at the time was think about how could we build a self service model? It's not going to work if you have four different versions at four different price points with different features across those price points. We had to put a lot more energy into building a great product and improving over time.
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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