Atlassian built a $20B dollar company with no sales team | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian built a $20B dollar company with no sales team

intercom.com

58 pointsgeordilaforge22 comments

No, they have a massive sales team, they just call them "customer advocates" or "Ecosystem Account Manager" or "Product Advocate"

https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-jobs?team=Mark...

I particularly like that they have a role called "Loyalty Advocate" that requires experience "working in a channel sales model." If that's not a sales gig I don't know what is.

edit: To be fair to the author that wrote the article, he nearly immediately called out that Atlassian simply had a lower-than-normal amount of money spent on sales and marketing, and made no claim that they didn't have a sales team. I suspect he didn't write the hyperbolic headline -- blame his editor.

They do have a sales team. This has been discussed several times. They don't have sales representatives but they have a huge third party selling channel and a large sales enablement organization.

Well the ease of use sure wasn't their selling point. The only decent Atlassian product is Bitbucket...and they bought it and made it worse.

Trendy design, too much configurability, and an "Enterprise" user base.

If I could, I wouldn't use any Atlassian software.

Well that's rather unconstructive. I have used much worse software, but also better... but arguing that doesn't really help anyone here.

Came here looking for this comment. There was a time where their product was a selling point.

Bugzilla -> Redmine -> Jira -> Trello/Asana -> Gitlab -> ...

I'd say things are slowly getting better.

JIRA was fine. The recent UI changes are taking big steps backwards in both performance and usability. At least there is more white space on the screen now...

Confluence is a pretty nice product.

Needs more plugins

Atlassian get away with their awful software because there is no decent competition.

Rather than moonshots from Google, or free internet from Facebook, or even buying a football team; somebody putting their hand in their pocket and funding a decent, modern Agile software suite that is GPL would make the world a far better place than it is now.

Nobody I know likes Jira. The rest of the Atlassian suite is a dumpster fire. Jira itself is hated by everybody, but we learn to tolerate it.

> Atlassian get away with their awful software because there is no decent competition.

There was/is competition for nearly every atlassian product, they were all worse, at least at the time atlassian surpassed them. Having used many of them, I love jira.

> modern Agile software suite that is GPL would make the world a far better place than it is now.

What feature do you want? There are a lot of open source alternatives.

One of my most important takeaways from patio11’s list of thing you need to know (https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/936615043126370306...) was that for B2B companies sales to engineering ratio is at least 2x and usually much larger because that’s the bottleneck. Atlas Siam is no exception.

Nice. Here's a thread-reader-app mirror: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html

I've used a lot of issue tracking systems, including JIRA, and I consider it one of the worst. But maybe that's because it was being used for software development and really didn't have the granularity of function necessary for that kind of project.

With no in house sales team.

They have a large partner ecosystem that sells/implements the product for larger companies.

I don't understand where they are going with Bitbucket. It lacks a lot of features. Except for a UI re-design, I haven't seen any change for a long time. (Off topic hoping someone from Atlassian might pick this up here)

The math on this confuses me. If they have 125,000 customers and are worth $20,000,000,000... investors are valuing each individual customer as being worth $160,000.

There's gotta be a typo in there somewhere, right?

The market value of a company is (in theory) the sum of the lifetime value of all of the customers. No idea what Atlassian's ACV is but $160K is $30K/year over five years (not a crazy estimate for the lifetime of line of business software in an organization). However, investors also care about growth and Atlassian grew subscription revenue 64% from FY17 to FY18.

So this is normal? Crazy. Clearly I'm not a finance guy.

Success Bias.....

Either that or this is a lie

Misleading headline

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