Products for teams, from start-up to enterprise
Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar met during their time at the University of New South Wales in Australia, where both participated in the same prestigious scholarship program. After spending some time developing a close friendship, they decided to start a company. Together they founded Atlassian in 2002, during what they would later refer to as “the nuclear winter for tech.” At the time, technology investors were still reeling from the dot-com crash, so the two founders found it nearly impossible to raise venture capital. They ultimately decided to bootstrap the company, a move that had profound effects on the products they designed and sold.
The duo did not have a clear idea of the product they hoped to sell when they began the company, but they decided early on to focus on teams developing software. As the team experimented with various product ideas, they developed a custom bug-tracking tool to help address issues in their code. Over time this bug tracker grew into a full-fledged issue tracker, which eventually became JIRA—a bug-tracking, issue-tracking, and project management tool for development teams that leveraged agile methodology. Like all good names in the software industry, the name JIRA started as an in-house code name. The team originally used Bugzilla, another popular bug-tracking tool, which they began calling Gojira (the Japanese name for film character Godzilla). When the team began developing their own bug tracker, they dropped the “Go” and called it JIRA.
Company Summary
Atlassian's Business Model
As Cannon-Brookes discussed in the video above, Atlassian's business model focused on a frictionless sales process. In order to distribute the low-cost, volume-based product, Atlassian had to create a model that supported customer self-service and removed as much friction as possible: there were no forms to fill out, no custom contracts, and no hidden pricing.
Atlassian's values heavily influenced the the organization's culture of innovation:
"Most things worth doing aren't a one-person job. They take a team to bring to life."
Atlassian Product Video
Atlassian's suite of products:
All of Atlassian's products focused on helping teams collaborate more effectively. While its first two products—JIRA and Confluence—were originally designed for technical teams, customers soon found that other non-technical teams could benefit from Atlassian products.