Comment by daveoflynn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveoflynn | Hacker News Reader

This article misses the point. Atlassian's success is not because of their user onboarding. The onboarding process has been a serious weak point of JIRA and Confluence for as long as I can remember (and I worked at Atlassian from 2007-2011). Heaps of new-JIRA-users are completely baffled, and a significant percentage of them turn away from the product suite going "what kind of idiot would ever use that?!"

Thing is, once you figure out how to make JIRA and Confluence work for you and your organisation, you probably won't want to use anything else ever again. They're really powerful, really good products, with a pretty steep learning curve.

Atlassian's success is because existing, confident, users of JIRA and Confluence do two things:

1- They tell their friends, colleagues, and random people in the street to use JIRA and Confluence.

2- When these users change jobs, they bring JIRA and Confluence with them.

Put simply: it's word of mouth that has allowed Atlassian to grow without a traditional sales force.

I must be in the 'baffled' group, my employer moved to JIRA, and it's been a nightmare ever since.

In particular, because time reporting and billing decisions are made at the project level, and there is only a single list of projects, with no inter-project relationships, as opposed to other systems (redmine, etc) which feature hierarchical trees of projects, basically every interaction with the system is harder than it needs to be.

Also, 'smart commits' are hideously clunky, when it works at all, which exacerbates the issues above.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anybody, and in fact have strongly advocated against it.

JIRA and Confluence are fantastic at doing their core competency but there are a lot of fringe features that just seem bolted on because some big time customer or PHB decided to bolt on things. I found the time keeping to be one of these things, as well as smart commits- but I think the smart commits problem is just a matter of iterating the feature and making it 'smarter'. I think it will eventually be enormously useful.

My experience has been that if you have competent implementors and administrators of JIRA and Confluence together, and use them primarily to run projects they are very nice and they interplay very well from requirements and documentation in Confluence to tasks and WIP tracking I'm JIRA. But if you implement a crazy JIRA workflow of your own that isn't completely smooth or organize your projects and documentation in a way that JIRA/Confluence don't really get- you're going to have a jumble of buttons and hoops to jump through and your users will hate it.

I don't have a strong opinion on the onboarding process but I completely agree on the word of mouth points.

I actually hadn't used any Atlassian products when I switched jobs and when we were looking for better PM tools I asked my old coworkers and they had recently switched to JIRA so we gave the trial a shot and loved it. Now my company has paid for JIRA, Confluence, Crucible, and Fisheye. We also use HipChat (only one we use in the cloud) but we are currently on the free plan. I love the integration between the tools and they really do make solid products.

Hey Dave, long time no talk.

I can very much agree with both your points.

The first place I used Confluence/JIRA because they were recommended by a new employee or perhaps a friend of someone at Atlassian, and getting the $10 trial licences.

Since then I've moved jobs several times, and those two products in particular have been the baseline comparison for whatever tools are in place.

The biggest stumbling block I find is often the licensing - So many times managers have been reluctant to fork out for it.

The article isn't asking why Atlassian is successful.

Having a great product generating word of mouth is typical table stakes for success.

The article is asking how Atlassian grew so fast while only spending 12 and 21% of their revenue on customer acquisition in the last three years.

I agree their answer is a little lacking, but the question is a good one.

The overwhelming key is free/freemium. Word of mouth works much better when the product is easily accessible. And there are a zillion other advantages to a freemium approach.

atlassian products are not a freemium product - you pay a subscription, or outright buy it and run it on your own server. There's a trial period, of course, but that's not considered freemium.

Article indicates Jirra, Hipchat and Bitbucket are freemium. Is that not the case?

BitBucket is freemium. You can have a personal account with an unlimited number of private or public repos for free. As soon as you start needing to share privileges with other users you need to pay up. JIRA and Confluence are definitely NOT freemium.

Confluence/JIRA if you're self hosting will set you back $10 for 10 users.

At that price point, some people are willing to fork out for that and set it up as a long running demo/test-case for a particular product without needing to get management/finance departments involved (which is often a stumbling block).

It's not 'freemium' but it's close enough.

That's usually enough of a wedge in the door to get management interested in a wider deployment.

That's exactly what the article says, the onboarding process has lots of weak points and is not remarkable at all.

Given Atlassian recently IPO'ed, it's a public company and you might even be a shareholder. I know that in the Quiet Period (6 months before an IPO where PR is limited) people must not make claims about the company that are not filed in the F-1 (or S-1). Out of curiosity are you now allowed make subjective claims without backing them with facts, such as "They're really good and powerful products"? I totally approve of your opinion, I just wonder about the legality of disclosing it.

If he worked at Atlasssian from 2007-2011, that means he doesn't work there anymore.

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