From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/09/from-0-100million-with-no-sales-people-the-atlassian-10-commandments-for-startups.html

by joshuacc • 15 years ago

166 112 15 years ago

blog.businessofsoftware.org

ilamont• 15 years ago

It's a good talk, but I disagree with the advice "you don’t have time to go out there and talk with the customers, get feedback."

Not every company builds products that they might need internally, and even among those that do, their use of it may not match the usage patterns of ideal customers.

latch3• 15 years ago

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford

Mr Ford's reasons for not talking to customers though is a lot better than "you don't have time"

jonpaul• 15 years ago

I do love that quote and I find that it's true that customers don't know what they want. But what that quote tells us is that the customer's problem is speed. That is the value of talking to customers, not asking them what they want, but learning what their problem really is.

kingofspain• 15 years ago

A car is a faster horse.

shabda• 15 years ago

Mr. Ford might not have actually said that.

http://www.foolproof.co.uk/three-old-chestnuts-cracked/ http://www.quora.com/Quotations/Did-Henry-Ford-actually-say-...

NEPatriot• 15 years ago

Customers know their problems - not necessarily the solutions required to solve their problems. They may have a solution in mind for their problems. It is the job of the founder is boil down problems to their core and find solutions.

edit: grammar

VuongN• 15 years ago

This actually reminds me of a Simpson episode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F) where Homer designed a car according to his own needs. It didn't go well :P

SkyMarshal• 15 years ago

Yes, if you're trying to create something new, like a car or an iPad, then both Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are right - most people don't know what they want until you build it and show it to them. And to succeed you need people with some mix of vision, taste, and demanding standards making something they want to use for it to succeed. If it passes their test, it will most likely pass the test for the general public as well.

baltcode• 15 years ago

I'd love to use bitbucket instead of github (since they allow free privste repos), but they need to have an online editor. I think they should just run through more of the feature requests.

farkas9• 15 years ago

Yep - I don't think that I said that particularly eloquently. And it was related to a point (that I can't remember) that had been brought up earlier in the conference.

But my overarching belief about product design: - build stuff you are passionate about because you use it - listen to customers, but don't do what they say

The reason that products all start to look the same is that customer's only experience of 'better' is a competitors product. That's why you have Audi's advertising about their safety record, and Volkswagon's advertising about their performance features.

A great read on this topic is Youngme Moon's book different: http://www.amazon.com/Different-Escaping-Competitive-Youngme...

marklittlewood3• 15 years ago

Young Me's book is definitely worth a read. I am really sad that we are not able to share that video at her own request. I did take some notes and grab some pictures which give a short summary of some of her arguments.

http://thebln.com/2010/10/professor-youngme-moon-business-of...

latch3• 15 years ago

Do people generally like Jira and/or Confluence? I know they are popular in the enterprise. However, I've used them, and I consider them pretty horrible. Not sure if I'm just the odd man out on this though.

xbryanx• 15 years ago

I use and manage our JIRA instance in a small tech group inside a large non-profit. Probably only ever had 10 users. I love it, and our team has grown to be more efficient as a result of its use.

Now, Confluence? Not a big fan. Tried it, ditched it.

nirvdrum3• 15 years ago

I've used both tools for two start-ups now. I can't imagine using anything else (well, Redmine is a nice free tool). But you're not in the minority in startups. I personally can't understand how anyone is productive with PivotalTracker, Lighthouse, or GitHub Issues (at least the older one). But people are and to each his own.

FWIW, one of the reasons I love both of them is they're the only tools of their type that I've been able to throw a non-tech person at and they can use. When roping the spouses into helping out, that counts for a lot.

cujo• 15 years ago

I agree with you, but as a developer, I prefer these types of tools to get out of the way. Jira and Confluence seem to be written for managers that can live in them. For them, I'm sure the experience is much different.

stephen_g• 15 years ago

We use Jira at our company and it's probably one of the best issue tracking systems I've tried. Confluence is alright but I think that there are a few open source wiki packages that are at least as good, if not better.

nirvdrum3• 15 years ago

Which free ones do you like? My biggest Confluence draws are rich text editor (nice for one-off pages), attachment indexing, and attachment versioning. But I'm always open to trying something else.

imperialWicket• 15 years ago

Even as a developer, I think that Jira and Confluence are outstanding tools. They do a great job of allowing enough customization (easily) to keep them from detracting from your workflow.

What did you find particularly horrible about them, and what tools do you think do a better job at those aspects?

moondowner• 15 years ago

Jira and FishEye are a really good combination. Love it. Haven't been really keen on Confluence but it's a decent tool too. Another good thing is that you can integrate Jira with Eclipse via Mylyn, and manage all the tasks you're working on without even opening Jira.

silverbax882• 15 years ago

After using it extensively, I hate it with a passion. I don't believe they are conducive to development workflow at all, but they are built for middle managers.

ghshephard10• 15 years ago

Name a single product that works better for software development organizations as a generic issue tracker?

What I'm finding about the hate-on I'm seeing from some people about Jira, is that they CLEARLY have never, ever been forced to deal with the pain that is remedy as an issue tracker. Jira is like a breath of fresh air, a touch of heaven, compared to that product. I have a 50 bullet-point list of unresolved issues with Remedy. My issues with Jira are tiny-corner cases problems that 99% of users wouldn't even notice.

Confusion• 15 years ago

We use Jira with the Greenhopper Agile planning plugin at our startup and that's freaking awesome for planning iterations and releases. FishEye and Crucible are great for code reviews. As soon as we hit 10 users, Atlassian will have an additional paying customer.

eftpotrm2• 15 years ago

I had a partner organisation insist on Jira for their project a few years back. It'll obviously have changed since then and much might be down to user-specific customisations, but I hated it. Awkward, obstructive, poorly thought out workthrough that mostly involved jumping through hoops and provided us very little actual value.

My main memory actually was of poor fit and finish. Just a tiny thing but every time I logged in, no matter how, it offered to remember my login. Every time, I clicked that box in hope. It never once worked.

farkas9• 15 years ago

Sorry that 'remember me' didn't work for you. It could have been a bug with how it was set up, or equally likely - a bug in some edge case that you were hitting.

I can assure you that it works now :)

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

I've used Jira, Confluence, and testing out FishEye. We use Crowd for single sign on stuff. I really like fisheye because we have tons of different projects on different repositories. Confluence is nice although it took some getting used to. Jira was awkward, but we're still running Jira 3 and we'll be upgrading soon. For what it's worth, Jira is the best issue tracking software I've used on the web.

2muchcoffeeman2• 15 years ago

I hate Jira and Confluence too. Most in our team hate it. I'd rant but I've wasted too much time on that.

ghshephard10• 15 years ago

Having gone through half a dozen different issue trackers in my career, Jira is the first one I've fallen unreservedly in love with - and I'm fascinated as to why others wouldn't feel the same way.

Is it a Jira issue, or has someone created an overly restrictive workflow, complex data entry screen?

I'm not sure if you can blame the product for how it's configured by it's users, particular when the default configuration is pretty bog simple and easy to use.

What about Jira do you hate? What about other members of your team?

I'm genuinely interested - maybe I'll see something in a different light.

jmathes2• 15 years ago

I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker.

Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB.

I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.

jmathes2• 15 years ago

farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.

ghshephard10• 15 years ago

You can take Jira from "www.atlassian.com" to a fully running instance with a baseline Software Development Issue tracking Project in 15 minutes.

I will give you this - _should you chose to_ fully mastering it's screens, issue types, screen schemes, issue type screen schemes will take the better part of few hours to completely map in your head. Jira gives you amazing flexibility to do almost anything you want on the issue type level, but with that flexibility, comes an very complex model.

When I first encountered it, I was exasperated that I had to take those couple hours to draw the hierarchy and map it out in my head - but now that I know It, I'm happy it's there.

pointyhat10• 15 years ago

No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity.

My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM.

Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit.

I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe.

That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please".

If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.

ghshephard10• 15 years ago

I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test purpose no less than 50 times.

The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8 Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server.

90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL

Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be)

JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun. We only use fisheye and Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience.

In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software package I've ever used.

Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.

ryanackley• 15 years ago

"useless paid support"

Sorry if you feel the support is useless. We try our hardest but that's your opinion and you're entitled to it.

However, saying it's "paid" is flat-out wrong. No customer ever pays for support from Atlassian. It's included in the license fee. Free support to current customers is the only type of support we offer.

nl3• 15 years ago

I get people saying "can we have Trac back please"

People actually like Trac? I thought people used it because it is better than Bugzilla and is free.

supportdiva• 15 years ago

Any chance I could chat with you about your experience with our support? If so, drop me an e-mail? donna at atlassian.com

alnayyir2• 15 years ago

The funny part is trac isn't that fast either. It's overall a superior tool for the job, and loads simpler in every respect, but I get a healthy amount of delay on each and every action I perform in most trac deployments.

I keep meaning to take time out one of these weekends to profile and determine how to mitigate this, but it's just not a priority.

ghshephard10• 15 years ago

Jira and/or Confluence are _not_ popular in the enterprise. They are the tool for the small scrappy startup, and end up in the enterprise because hackers, or team-leaders need a tool and just go buy it (Jira and Confluence both cost less than $10,000 - which requires almost no purchase authority in a company)

I _LOVE_ Jira - I find it to be the greatest extensible issue tracker out there, and, after extensively using both it, and Remedy (a tool which costs on the order of $800,000 to do an enterprise install, and another $100,000/year to support, and is therefore popular in the enterprise) - I can say with some authority it outperforms Remedy in almost every category.

There is zero doubt in my mind that if someone is looking for a flexible issue tracker, that Jira has to be final-3 consideration in any down selection.

Ask me anything about Jira - I live, eat, and breath the product.

Gring• 15 years ago

We just started using Confluence. Design-wise, it's an absolute piece of junk. Nothing aligns, everything is ugly. Lots of plugins to adapt to what you want (which is great), but all those plugins add yet more design differences.

earino• 15 years ago

We use it. We love it. Confluence / Jira / Fisheye really work together very well for our needs. I don't understand people being negative about this toolset... I haven't hit any real limitations yet with it. Mind you, our software teams are small teams (7 people or less), but it's work splendidly for us.

We are a manufacturing / media / distribution company with billions in revenue.

liquidcool• 15 years ago

I've had my frustrations with both, but I haven't found an alternative that does everything we need and isn't way more expensive. Things I need to do, outside of the usual:

   - time tracking
   - detailed planning/reporting (we use Greenhopper)
   - customer service (hiding projects and fields for internal use)
   - integration with version control

We use a few plugins, but not many, and the whole 10 users for $10 is pretty amazing. By the time you need more, you can afford it. I also like FogBugz/Kiln, but the price is much higher for 3-10 users (OnDemand gives 2 free to startups and students).

By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that.

pointyhat10• 15 years ago

I use Trac for all those things with the following plugins:

   * Time tracking: http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TimingAndEstimationPlugin
   * Planning/reporting: simple trac reports + wiki dashboard.
   * Customer service, we have a separate trac instance with Intertrac set up between so you can link tickets.
   * VCS integration: works with hg and svn fine

Also costs zero and upgrades flawlessly.

farkas9• 15 years ago

> By far, my biggest complaint to Atlassian is upgrades, which are a huge PITA. There has to be an amazing new feature for me to go through that.

Just as a FYI - the latest version of JIRA (4.4) and the soon to be released (next week) version of Confluence (4.0) have had the install and upgrade process rewritten from the ground up.

If you've been bitten in the past, I'd strongly recommend taking another look.

A summary of the features here: http://blogs.atlassian.com/jira/2011/06/jira-44-sneak-peek--...

brown9-2• 15 years ago

I've used both and have been happy with them.

On the other hand, I've never seen an instance of Fisheye deployed for an OSS project that didn't take minutes and minutes to load a single page.

Jacquass12321• 15 years ago

I'm developing on a 4 man team trying out Jira+fisheye+crucible. I have no complaints so far and the crucible review process is pretty slick.

timcederman2• 15 years ago

Those of us who have to use Jira on a daily basis have a saying - jira delenda est.

sim0n• 15 years ago

Absolutely not. I was forced to use Jira at a previous job which actually made me actually quit my job and start building my own project management app (which took part in YCS11)!

notJim• 15 years ago

Until recently, I hated Jira, but my current company uses Jira + Greenhopper, and I actually really like it. Greenhopper gives you a sort of PivotalTracker like interface, except that I've always found PivotalTracker to be a good idea, poorly implemented.

We also use Crucible, which is a great code review tool, and Confluence, which I don't really care for, but I don't really dislike it any more than any other wiki software.

Aloisius• 15 years ago

Hate them so much.

I had to deal with both products at my last company and maybe it was just how they set it up, but entering a bug into Jira was ridiculous. Finding anything was worse. It was probably the most user unfriendly piece of web software I've ever had to use.

Confluence? Ugh. The WYSIWYG editor was questionable at best. I had hours of fun cleaning up pages with big tables that were edited by multiple people. And seriously, a hierarchical wiki? Do you know what you get when you have a hierarchical wiki? A wiki that has almost no inner links because no one can remember what the path is to any document.

Again, it could have just been how they set it up, but I just feel like they threw every feature and the kitchen sink into that product in the name of "flexibility."

Produce• 15 years ago

I've never had any problems with Jira (about 3 months' worth of experience) but Confluence is so broken when trying to paste content into an article.

jholman• 15 years ago

I had a very negative experience with Jira and Confluence. The context was a very small development team (around 5) in a very small company (under 50), and some very inexperienced administrators, so maybe some of those are key factors. And again, I want to emphasize that no one really knew what they were doing with it, including me, so maybe in 20 years I'll have better context that lets me appreciate what Jira was doing for us.

Certainly when I read ghshepard's several comments, I think "wow, okay, if you're a much bigger heavier bloatier organization, with much more byzantine needs from an issue tracker, maybe this thing actually has some value!"

I eventually got superuser privileges, and spent a lot of time myself trying to figure out how to beat it into getting out of our way and just tracking some frigging tickets. That's a week of my life I'll never have back, with no benefit to anyone.

At some point, management decided to double-down, and renew our license, to get an upgrade (I think to Jira 4.0, since this decision was late 2009). Oh my god. For one thing, we wasted SO MUCH TIME on that upgrade. And for another, the dashboard started taking 30-60 seconds to load, because it's suddenly full of clever (read: not clever, not performant) AJAX. And I still don't remember getting anything out of it.

Please, Jira, just get the hell out of our way!

At this point, if Jira was the only product on the market, I'd rather use one huge text file to track tickets, shared via svn or git. It would offer less useful features, sure, but it'd also offer way way less pain.

The main argument anyone could give was that it would have features not present in our other issue tracker, RT 1.0. Uh, y'think?

Short summary of my experience: on my small team, in a small company, with no experienced hands to manage it quickly and efficiently, Jira is a big bag of slow-down pain, with nothing to recommend it, and I'd rather use NO tool than use THIS tool. $10 for 10 users sounds like about $1000 too much.

Oh, and don't get me started on Confluence. I mean, less pain than Jira, but ZERO useful features (relative to free pain-free alternatives). Why would you ever choose this over Mediawiki? My new company uses ikiwiki, and that's beautiful, and it clocks in under 25kloc of Perl.

Zuz• 15 years ago

Atlassian as a company rocks (the code behind some of the products less so but I digress). The reality is that they do have sales people, in fact a lot of them.

It's just that they are not Atlassian employees but are Atlassian partners employees. Atlassian has a massive partner/reseller network these days

ph0rque• 15 years ago

Interesting that they mention topgrading. It's a concept explained in the book Who: the 'A' Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. When I first read the book, I was really skeptical, but maybe there's something to it.

farkas9• 15 years ago

I think that it is useful to understand the philosophy behind the process, but adapt the process to your own style.

There are two points that I have taken from the TopGrading process: - hire people who are 'A' players who have succeeded at whatever they have done AND who have a passion for the role you are hiring for - past performance IS the best determinant of future success, and the best way to answer the first question

The interview process generally starts at college where you dig into why they chose their course, the highlights, where they excelled, where they failed, who influenced them and why. Did they take on any leadership positions? Win any awards?

Then for each job they have had since, find out - why they chose it, what they found, what they fixed, what they learnt & what they would do differently. Would their boss give them a reference, and why did they leave.

At each turn, you are looking for: 'were they an A player / had outstanding results' and 'does their career path lead you to believe that they will be passionate about this job'.

There's a lot of nuances to it, but I wouldn't hire senior people any other way. I recently compared our hiring notes to a comprehensive personality test of a new employee, and they matched exactly.

amirhhz• 15 years ago

How do you treat blips in people's past? What if they had a bad year at university, for example, but have been consistently "A" players since beginning a career?

davidw• 15 years ago

As an interesting aside, JIRA is based on some of the code behind Apache's OFBiz: http://ofbiz.apache.org/

nl3• 15 years ago

It would be more accurate to say that Atlassian wrote some of the code behind OFBiz (and a lot of other open source Java projects) back in the early-mid 2000's.

schiptsov• 15 years ago

The trick was about giving free licenses to big and popular open Java projects, such as Spring, Hibernate or JBoss. That was a million dollar idea.

abotwright2• 15 years ago

I find it irksome when founders talk about culture and firing people like its some kind of sublime process. Like this guy is some kind of pariah that wouldn't get canned or treated marginally by the next doofus manager who felt he/she didn't like him.

farkas9• 15 years ago

Hey - I'm not sure what you mean? You mean do I realise that the guy I fired wouldn't find a job again?

abotwright2• 15 years ago

Not really. imagine it was the other way around. imagine as company owner you can be eliminated by your employees on a "gut feeling" or because they decided you just weren't doing the job they envision you should be doing. I think most founders would be tossed out on the curb at one time or another.

I'm pointing out that culpability in a perceived bad job performance isn't a two way street and it would be responsible to speak about how you don't always get it right. nothing is more irksome then someone who has fired dozens of people and says they made the right choice every time. statistically impossible.

marklittlewood3• 15 years ago

He doesn't at all but if you have ever been an entrepreneur, you will probably know that firing people is usually the worst thing that you can have to do but at the same time, the results of firing someone in terms of the impact on other people in a team can often be very positive.

snorkel• 15 years ago

Jira is the Microsoft Office of SCRUM teams, but that's not a compliment.

sandieman• 15 years ago

Summarizing his points: - Start with two founders - You need a business model - freemium has serious advantages - Use your own product - Measure everything - Test everything - Always be closing marketing - First idea will fail - Think long-term - Know when to switch gears - Build something you want to work

brndnhy• 15 years ago

The Greenhopper acquisition was pretty slick.

What used to be (I think) a $700 plugin now adds $2,000 to the annual maintenance cost of JIRA.

MattGrommes2• 15 years ago

"I think for a company don’t give people cash. Use that cash and give people experiences."

It's interesting to contrast with the model Netflix seems to use, which is "Don't give people gym memberships, give them the money and let them sort it out." Attracts different types of folks I guess, everybody has their preferences.

malbs• 15 years ago

We get a $30 per-week allowance for "OH&S Health and Well-being" - It can be used for pretty much anything exercise related, gym, green fees, tennis court hire, it's a lot better than simply being forced to go to some particular gym. It's not a massive amount of money, but it certainly adds up

gergles• 15 years ago

The thing that I don't get about Atlassian is that they make gigantic, unwieldy products that have ludicrous hardware requirements for what they are (compare the performance of a mediawiki install and a Confluence install on the same box) yet they AREN'T targeting the enterprise. In fact, they seem outright enterprise-hostile in their sales process (they don't take purchase orders, period, so you have to find someone with a company credit card, that is authorized to use it on software, that ... you get the picture.)

You have a cap of licensed users, but no way to view only users who are burning a license (we had open registration on our Confluence install for a while, so many employees made 5 or 6 accounts - the only way to figure out which ones are still enabled and which ones aren't is to manually click through every fucking one), things like that.

I love the feature set of Confluence, and feel like it is generally pretty easy to use and well-received by my users, but I dread the annual license renewals (and the upgrades that automatically start sending your users mail with no way to opt out of that globally -- that you have to install, because they contain security fixes.)

mattm• 15 years ago

A good talk but from the title I was hoping there would be more about how they grew their sales. The talk was more about growing the company and evolving from a startup to a large company but with little mention of how they actually did that.

dmor• 15 years ago

There are a lot of gems in here, this is a "save forever" post.

From $0-100million with no sales people. Atlassian's commandments for startups.

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