Their description of Jira ("like Asana") and Confluence ("like SharePoint") are far off the mark.
Confluence does not equate to SharePoint except possibly in the limited case of a SharePoint Enterprise Wiki site. SharePoint is more like a web-based RDBMS with both list and file-metadata schemas, a web-based RAD environment to assemble schemas and views (where pages are separate citizens from other data types), centrally managed metadata, and .NET support for enhancement.
Asana is task management with folder and hierarchical organization, Jira is practically a RDBMS with a web-based RAD environment, its own de-facto scripting and query languages, and... Wait a minute, it's actually closer to SharePoint than Confluence.
Source: I've run a SharePoint training and consulting company for over a decade, and actually use Jira, Confluence and Asana in our own internal systems (because we'd be remiss to naively assume SharePoint is ideal for any of the things we use Jira, Confluence or Asana for, and we're not apologists for Microsoft but rather evangelists for business collaboration). I know very well how both proverbial halves live (the MS crowd and the non-MS crowd) and they're not as different as they'd like you to believe.
Confluence gets sold directly against Sharepoint. The communications department says, "we need to create a corporate strategy for communicating. Dealing with culture is hard, so instead we're going to go and throw money at mechanism." The contenders are sharepoint and confluence. This sales systems is what ruined confluence - they used to have a delightful markup syntax that was a joy to work with, but in order to get checkbox competition against sharepoint they created an awful broken pretend-WYSISYG.
Asana and Jira joust for dominance in the all-important "issue-based team work management systems" segment. You can hire agile consultants to tell the people how to do their jobs using it. (actually I think Jira is awesome, but I hate that culture)
It speaks well of you that you find this senseless despite your experience.
I'm not the biggest fan of markdowns for complex documents.
It's fine for little things like adding bold text or inline code blocks, it as soon as you start getting into anything complex it requires help text and constantly checking of the preview window.
Good WYSIWYG editors are much more pleasant to use. Quip, Medium and Facebook notes all do a good job of constraining formatting and being predictable.
tl;dr: there is no onboarding magic. It's "product simplicity".
So if Atlassian’s onboarding experience leaves a lot to be desired, how is it that they have scaled to $320M in recurring revenue with no sales team? How is the company only spending 12-21% of revenue on sales and marketing while other SaaS businesses are spending 50-100%?
Atlassian's low sales costs might simply be a function of who they are selling to.
E.g. Jira & Salesforce both have the same approximate ease of use, and the same approximate level of configurability.
Sales implementations are typically top down. So you sell the salesforce solution to the sales executives. This requires a sales team. And because you are selling into sales management, you need to a good sales team. I have sat on these sales calls, and at times it almost felt like a game of "sell me this pen."
In my limited experience, Jira implementations are the complete opposite. Even in big companies, they are bottom up. The target audience does not want a demo, and may not even want to talk to a sales person, they simply want to get their hands on the product.
Does anyone have any insight into sales costs of other saas development tools?
> the median SaaS company spends between 50-100% of their annual revenue of sales and marketing
The fact that we're considering companies that spend 100% of revenue on sales and marketing makes it pretty clear why Atlassian's costs are so low - the comparison is nonsense. No company except a VC funded startup can spend 100% of revenue on any one (or two) things, because then there's no money left. And calculating anything as a percentage of revenue makes no sense when you're spending many multiples of revenue because you're running on a VC runway, rather than like a normal company. This would _maybe_ make sense if we were looking at percentage of total costs rather than of revenue.
Maybe their sales/marketing costs really are low, but show that by comparing them to something that makes a little bit of sense. 20% does not sound unreasonable at all to me.
I for one prefer well executed email confirmations above overzealous validation, making me type my email twice, etc.
As long as I don't have to wait for the mail to arrive, it's fine with me.
Regarding their sales strategy, I'm surprised the article didn't mention product-integration. There's a great deal of integration going on between their products and that – if I had to guess – translates to a market of existing customers that are vastly more likely to buy (/rent) another of their products. Anecdotal evidence: after some people at our company successfully politicked for Jira, now they've got their Crucible license and are already evaluating Confluence and HipChat. Well played, Atlassian.
Also: personally, I don't agree with the article that Jira is simple, but our managers seem to love it.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What the author fails to mention is that these are on-demand instances, and what's seen is the 'environment provisioning' delay, not some sort of 'loading screen'.
I'm getting the feeling this article is written from the viewpoint of a long-suffering Windows/Microsoft ecosystem user.
That's probably true, but in most cases users don't think about how what they just signed up for is served under the hood, so there is some merit in this view.
This was a funny one to read. I worked at Atlassian for around a year, focussing mainly on this onboarding process.
When I started, the provisioning delay was about 7 minutes and the loading screen was actually first just a 404 error and then just a static page saying something like "please wait while this gets set up" (no progress bar and no redirect on completion).
It's funny knowing that has been one of the biggest onboarding advancements and it's still being seen as a flaw.
The "without a sales team" meme is utter nonsense. I still don't quite understand how all the press can ignore the fact that Atlassian has a huge network of partners (in the hundreds), in almost every country of the world, that started many years ago and has been growing every single year.
All these partners/experts are resellers who make a margin on licenses and have sales targets if they want to move up the ladder (better margin, better payment terms).
Source: I worked for one from 2009 to 2011 and the network has grown massively since then.
The contrast in this article is ridiculously low. So low I assumed it was trying to "dim" the content so I could focus on some modal dialog that didn't load.
Free Unlimited Private Repos was what got me onboard to start using their services. I then went and also told people that it was my preferred platform and they eventually bought an account.
Github still is great for public repos but Atlassian is just great for my use.
We're prepping to dump JIRA and Confluence because of the user experience. It's just frankly poor and the flows are overly complex. Way too much work for what we want out of that tool.
32 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 80.9 ms ] threadConfluence does not equate to SharePoint except possibly in the limited case of a SharePoint Enterprise Wiki site. SharePoint is more like a web-based RDBMS with both list and file-metadata schemas, a web-based RAD environment to assemble schemas and views (where pages are separate citizens from other data types), centrally managed metadata, and .NET support for enhancement.
Asana is task management with folder and hierarchical organization, Jira is practically a RDBMS with a web-based RAD environment, its own de-facto scripting and query languages, and... Wait a minute, it's actually closer to SharePoint than Confluence.
Source: I've run a SharePoint training and consulting company for over a decade, and actually use Jira, Confluence and Asana in our own internal systems (because we'd be remiss to naively assume SharePoint is ideal for any of the things we use Jira, Confluence or Asana for, and we're not apologists for Microsoft but rather evangelists for business collaboration). I know very well how both proverbial halves live (the MS crowd and the non-MS crowd) and they're not as different as they'd like you to believe.
Asana and Jira joust for dominance in the all-important "issue-based team work management systems" segment. You can hire agile consultants to tell the people how to do their jobs using it. (actually I think Jira is awesome, but I hate that culture)
It speaks well of you that you find this senseless despite your experience.
It's fine for little things like adding bold text or inline code blocks, it as soon as you start getting into anything complex it requires help text and constantly checking of the preview window.
Good WYSIWYG editors are much more pleasant to use. Quip, Medium and Facebook notes all do a good job of constraining formatting and being predictable.
So if Atlassian’s onboarding experience leaves a lot to be desired, how is it that they have scaled to $320M in recurring revenue with no sales team? How is the company only spending 12-21% of revenue on sales and marketing while other SaaS businesses are spending 50-100%?
Product simplicity.
Of the various issue trackers I've used, JIRA is, by a fair margin, the least suited to that tagline
E.g. Jira & Salesforce both have the same approximate ease of use, and the same approximate level of configurability.
Sales implementations are typically top down. So you sell the salesforce solution to the sales executives. This requires a sales team. And because you are selling into sales management, you need to a good sales team. I have sat on these sales calls, and at times it almost felt like a game of "sell me this pen."
In my limited experience, Jira implementations are the complete opposite. Even in big companies, they are bottom up. The target audience does not want a demo, and may not even want to talk to a sales person, they simply want to get their hands on the product.
Does anyone have any insight into sales costs of other saas development tools?
The fact that we're considering companies that spend 100% of revenue on sales and marketing makes it pretty clear why Atlassian's costs are so low - the comparison is nonsense. No company except a VC funded startup can spend 100% of revenue on any one (or two) things, because then there's no money left. And calculating anything as a percentage of revenue makes no sense when you're spending many multiples of revenue because you're running on a VC runway, rather than like a normal company. This would _maybe_ make sense if we were looking at percentage of total costs rather than of revenue.
Maybe their sales/marketing costs really are low, but show that by comparing them to something that makes a little bit of sense. 20% does not sound unreasonable at all to me.
Regarding their sales strategy, I'm surprised the article didn't mention product-integration. There's a great deal of integration going on between their products and that – if I had to guess – translates to a market of existing customers that are vastly more likely to buy (/rent) another of their products. Anecdotal evidence: after some people at our company successfully politicked for Jira, now they've got their Crucible license and are already evaluating Confluence and HipChat. Well played, Atlassian.
Also: personally, I don't agree with the article that Jira is simple, but our managers seem to love it.
Edit: typos/grammar
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What the author fails to mention is that these are on-demand instances, and what's seen is the 'environment provisioning' delay, not some sort of 'loading screen'.
I'm getting the feeling this article is written from the viewpoint of a long-suffering Windows/Microsoft ecosystem user.
When I started, the provisioning delay was about 7 minutes and the loading screen was actually first just a 404 error and then just a static page saying something like "please wait while this gets set up" (no progress bar and no redirect on completion).
It's funny knowing that has been one of the biggest onboarding advancements and it's still being seen as a flaw.
All these partners/experts are resellers who make a margin on licenses and have sales targets if they want to move up the ladder (better margin, better payment terms).
Source: I worked for one from 2009 to 2011 and the network has grown massively since then.
http://www.atlassian.com/resources/experts/
Github still is great for public repos but Atlassian is just great for my use.