Picture this - the year is 2002, Sam Raimiās Spider-Man is in theatres, the word āFacebookā means nothing, and smartphones are just sci-fi gimmicks. But somewhere in South Wales, Australia, there are two college graduates probably downing a couple of beers, reluctant to wear suits to a job they donāt want to wake up to, and thereās a start-up idea brewing in the midst of all this. Mind you, start-ups were nowhere near being household names even in the US back then, let alone in Australia.
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, college mates turned entrepreneurs/business partners, started Atlassian - a company that the Sydney Morning Herald referred to as āa tech giant nobody understandsā just a couple of years ago. It was born into an industry that was non-existent at the time in Australia, and to top it all off, what they did wasnāt really āsell-ableā, as some might consider.
Cut to right now, Atlassian has 6 offices around the world, with over 13,000 employees and 130,000 customers. 86% of Fortune 500 companies are today their customers. It is the 6th most valued company in Australia with a total market cap of $74.21 Billion. For reference - Atlassian today is larger than the National Australia Bank in terms of valuation. I like to think of Atlassian as the Forrest Gump of start-ups because thereās is a story thatās the polar opposite of what you might call āconventionalā.
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You would think that like most successful start-ups the story of Atlassian would also start from a college dorm or a garage, but no, the story begins with a $10,000 credit card debt and a rented office space in Sydney. Part of the reason is also that back in ā02, Venture Capital and investors werenāt a thing in Australia, so the founders decided to take it upon themselves to fund their project.
Computer Science graduates, the founders didnāt really have options like we have in 2022. Eager to come up with something that could onset a stir in the market, they realized that in the race of developing a platform for the world, the art of development itself needed a support pillar. So, with an idea to create a developer tool for developers, and with no money to pay for a sales team, the founders had to figure out a way to not just offer something that people would pay money for, but also figure out a marketing strategy without having to pay for it. The calling was steep, but a billionaire status doesnāt roll into your lap uninitiated. Both Mike and Scott took it on themselves and their marketing strategy was to physically spread the word to developers about their product Jira, and offer them to try it out for free.
š Jira was Atlassianās first-ever product that provided developers with issue tracking and project management on an interface to manage bugs, update features, collaborate, and release software.
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Today, Jira is the number one software development tool used by agile teams. Why? Because Jira offers everything developers need to manage their projects, all in one space. Not just that, developers can customize the platform to work exactly how they want it to work.
Atlassian pioneered this product, and although there was an equal possibility of failure, their hard work paid off. It paid off so much that it took them around the world and beyond, like literally. Both NASA and SpaceX use Atlassianās products like Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, and more, to manage their space missions.
š Confluence lets users create, collaborate, and organize their work all in one place. Any project, any idea, can be deconstructed, organized, and segmented into spaces for teams to have better visibility on resources, even when things get complicated.
Confluence became Atlassianās left hand after Jiraās success. Confluence and Jira became inseparable; anyone who used Jira, would also gradually gravitate towards Confluence because of how convenient it was for them to not just organize their code, but also collaborate on the resources that go behind it. With these two heading Atlassianās growth, what came after was in a way, inevitable.
The historic SpaceX launch of two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on Endeavor spaceship has an essence of Atlassian sprinkled on it.
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Whatās more? NASAās beloved curiosity rover exploring Mars as we speak crunches a dayās worth of data into a few hours and sends it back to earth demanding an updated list of tasks for the next day. Atlassianās Bamboo works in the background powering a deployment pipeline that delivers software updates quickly and directly to the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory - the manufacturer and owner of Curiosity Rover) cloud as soon as engineers deploy the code.
Pretty sick, right? š¤
Jira became so big that there was a time when people knew the product but had never heard of the company that owns it. In fact, when Scott approached Doug Burgum - the chairman of Atlassian - to see if heād be interested in taking the position, he said heād never heard of the company before but knew what Jira was.
Itās important to also note that Atlassian has been infamously known around the industry to stay under the radar and behave like an underdog, despite having a billion-dollar empire. In their early days, the founders turned down many offers from interested investors and stuck to their tradition of not raising any capital. This connects the bridge between the idea they put into marketing and how they chose to represent their brand.
Reportedly, Atlassian only spent 19% of their revenue on sales and marketing and focused more on R&D and organic marketing. For context, an average SaaS company spends 50% or greater on annual sales and marketing, so anything less than 20% seemed close to impossible before Atlassian did it. Instead of flashy ads, they let the product speak for itself by making it unbelievably inexpensive for even smaller teams to be able to use it without second-guessing the pricing model. Word spread like wildfire and developers quickly started chanting Jiraās name as a ālife savingā software.
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Have you ever felt out of your depth, like a fraud, and just guessed/bullshitted your way through the situation, petrified that at any time, someone was going to call you on it? - Mike Cannon-Brookes
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It wasnāt until he became colossally successful that Mike realized that he suffers from imposter syndrome. For those who donāt know - imposter syndrome is defined as a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments.
Coming from just average grades and no job experience, Mike often felt like he didnāt belong wherever he was, he didnāt deserve where he was going, and the worst of all, that heās come way too far to just sleep it off and never look back. The early days of Atlassian would be him attending meetings in a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and his signature trucker hat while everyone else would be in suits. The acronyms being thrown around would often go over his head, forcing him to jot everything down, go home, and look them up on Wikipedia to get a hang of whatās going on.
It took him a while to realize that imposter syndrome isnāt the frustration of not being able to do something because youāre not qualified enough for it, but instead is the fear of getting caught in the process of trying to do so. You canāt run away from it, all you can do is embrace it. And thatās exactly what he did.
If you appreciate stories and self-deprecating humor, check out this Ted Talk where Mike talks about Imposter Syndrome - the realizations he had, and what came of it. š
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Becoming successful hasnāt made the founders less grounded than they were. Within 4 years of existence, Atlassian Foundation was created along with a pledge to donate 1% equity, company profit, and employee time to charitable causes.
Mike himself has pledged USD 350 million in personal funds to organizations fighting climate change. Wanting to be more than just a billionaire philanthropist, he wants to affect change in the most impactful manner plausible and firmly believes that Australian companies need to focus on sustainability in the long haul. Given the speed at which infrastructures are expanding, he thinks that people who can affect real change need to realize the responsibility they have and take charge before itās too late.
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The founders always valued human connections more than anything. What their brand set out to be slowly inherited itself into an image with certain values at its core which was presented at a meeting during the companyās early days.
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The idea of a community manifested with the values that honed Atlassianās steady growth. The company became exceedingly people-centric and has since evolved into a $72 billion dollar community-powered engine.
Letās dive in.
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Okay, where do we even start?
Atlassianās community is perhaps one the best examples of how communities should be built and scaled through constant engagement.
How big is Atlassianās community?
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In 2021 the online community had 17.6 million visits with 85,000 average daily visitors. Atlassian has been named a top community by CMX, and FeverBee. Furthermore, they went on to win the Community of the year award at CMXās 2020 Community Industry Awards.
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Once you get to Atlassianās community page, it branches out into 3 main sub-categories:
Get involved with online forums for each Atlassian product. If you know your way around the products and are looking for something specific, this is the right place for you.
Get involved based on your interests in the community. Be it agile, DevOps, or if youāre looking to just blow off some steam and go off-topic, this is probably the right place for you to roam around.
Get involved based on the groups that appeal to you. And there are many.
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Our recommendation? Become a part of the Welcome Center group because thatās a pretty darn good place to start.
Hereās a little something for users to get started:
Dipping your toes - This is the stage where you first sign up, start reading articles, questions, and become a part of discussions.
Hopping onboard - Congrats, now youāre a community member. You start reading more discussions, articles and attending community events. At a personal level, this is where you start learning and thriving within the community.
Rising Star - Youāre not just an observer anymore but a participator. This is the level where you start giving back to the community and helping newer and existing members with the knowledge youāve garnered.
Becoming a leader - You know the insides of working in a community - how it functions and how it follows. Under the guidance of community leaders, you slowly start becoming one of them and community becomes not just an integral part of your day, but also a part of your identity.
Community leaders are the stewards of Atlassianās future; when you think youāre ready for it, you can apply to become a community leader at Atlassian, and the perks?
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But along the way, thereās a lot more that happens, after all, Rome wasnāt built in a day.
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Atlassian utilizes a very simple yet efficacious method for engagement in the community. Each member gets an opportunity to earn badges for everything that they do. You entered the community? Get a badge for that. Answered questions? Get a badge for that. A gamified metric to signify and glorify your efforts in the community keeps up involvement and induces gentle encouragements to keep doing what youāre doing (and perhaps maybe even more).
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Check out more on How you can earn badges in the community.
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How do you empower a community on a global scale? What can you do to ensure that people not just connect with your products, but empathize with the people that make the product what it is? You host events. But what do you do when hosting events become infeasible for a community so big? You let community builders do it for you.
Atlassian Community Events are free, user-let meetups that take place in cities all around the world. All you have to do is look up events happening in and around your area and RSVP! Here are the benefits you getš
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Looking to host community events? Sign up to become a leader and hereās what you have to do to be one š
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A sneak peek š
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It can get overwhelming working with a plethora of services and products, but the one thing that makes it easy is getting help from peers whoāve had hands-on experience. Atlassian has a whole forum for developers to hang around, ask questions, and answer them on their developer community. Anything remotely related to working with the Atlassian development tool can be found here.
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Powered by Confluence, the documentation suite provides a sophisticated yet comprehensive guide to working with all of Atlassianās products. Itās a goldmine, to say the least. Oh, and thereās different documentation for developers on API app integration and development, and enterprise documentation for learning everything there is to know about deploying and managing Atlassian products at scale.
Doesnāt end there.
You can do courses, certifications, and product training on Atlassian products with their online University.
The courses offered are from Atlassian experts and provide hands-on experience on the software.
Not just practical experience, but the courses are designed to offer advanced career opportunities.
In a 2021 survey, 73% of Atlassian Certified professionals reported that earning their credentialsĀ increased their job prospects.
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Are Fridays in your community just another workday? Well, that aināt the case for Atlassianās Community. Fun Fridays are when members gather around to talk on a topic posted by any one of them.
Hereās Stephanie Griceās - the Head of Global Community & Customer Advocacy at Atlassian -Fun Friday post urging members to post āTwo truths and a lieā about themselves while adding her own.
Here are our own Two truths and a lie:
Answer down in the commentsš
Theyāve been doing this since August 2017.
Hereās a list of all the Fun Friday posted by Laura Holten, a community leader at Atlassian.
The One With All The Friday Fun Topics Part 1 & Part 2
Caution: Enter at your own risk because these posts are a rabbit hole of entertainment. Iāve spent hours here š¤·āāļø
How do you measure community engagement? Is it something only done within the confines of āwork-hoursā or āprofessional-boundariesā? Atlassianās community has grown into a family, and the things they do together are living proof of that.
Take the Great Atlassian Bake-off competition for instance: The last holiday season, community members took to baking with the idea to āget off Zoom and get into the Kitchenā and compete to be crowned the āACE Bakerā.
Hereās what the crowned cake looked like:
I donāt know about you but Iād devour that in a second š¤·āāļø
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If you look at how the company came to be - Atlassianās journey has been mostly mesmerizing. And for the most part, as I read through articles after articles trying to boil down 20 yearsā worth of events into a 10-minute case study, I realized that failures are just successes being shy. Like most things Atlassian does, their community too is anything but conventional. Itās unlike anything youāve seen. A thriving, striving group of individuals, making the best of whatever curveball that comes their way, much like the founders did.
Stephanie, the Head of Global Community at Atlassian said in an interview with CMX that along with the companyās online forums and community events working together strategically, part of the Community growth curve has also been the investments.āIf you donāt invest in things. you canāt expect them to do well,ā she says. āThe reason that weāre successful now is that we put our money where our mouth is, and thereās actually an investment being made by the company.ā
Her advice for growing communities is this:
As for whatās next in the Atlassian community - there are way more events lined up already for the new year than there were last year. More webinars, events, discussions, and engagement. Atlassianās community is truly a titan, in all sense of the word.
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The CEO magazine referred to Atlassianās founders as āaccidental billionairesā. If anything, Mike himself would agree that itās true. You canāt help but think that sometimes the most inspirational of stories start off with something as simple as two college grads not wanting to wear suits to work. Itās ironic in a way too.
Two of the richest tech billionaires in Australia, co-founders, college mates, and neighbors own the two most expensive pieces of real estate in Australia.
Now, aināt that poetry in motion?
Poetry in motion
Imposter Syndrome
A timeline of Atlassianās journey
Focusing on things that matter
Connect globally, meet locally - Becoming a part of Atlassianās community
Upwards and Onwards
Living the Australian dream
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