Atlassian is famous for pioneering the #productledgrowth (PLG) model in SaaS. What is less known is that 🎯 $1bn out of Atlassian's $3bn revenue last year was sourced by #channelpartners.
Let's take a look at how their #partnerships were built over the last 15 yrs.
📈 Atlassian, founded in 2002 in Australia, innovated many essential ideas in #saas: self-serve, PLG, etc.
Today the company that builds software for developers and project managers has $3Bn+ in ARR and 50K customers.
But to make this all work at global scale, covering 000s of use cases, Atlassian has 3 types of partners:
🤝 Solution (channel) partners
This started organically in 2008,~ 6K customers, 5-6 yrs in.
Consulting clients used Atlassian products themselves and started helping customers implement the same products to track their work. At the same time, customers came to Atlassian asking to help with consulting and implementation work. Atlassian started signing up partners…
✔️ Long story short, Atlassian now has 700+ solution partners in 84 countries.
✔️ On top of 1Bn+ of sales of Atlassian products they deliver, partners charge for their own services (implementation, training, etc.) they deliver to customers.
Jay McBain would call it “multiplier” (e.g. for each 1$ in Salesforce software, SF partners earn $6+)
🛠️ #Marketplace
Atlassian officially launched app marketplace in 2012 at ~$100M ARR.
✔️ Later they discovered that integrations make their product 2X stickier.
“When customers add at least one app or integration in Jira Software, dollar churn reduces by approximately half”.
✔️ Over the next 10 yrs, they booked $2Bn+ in marketplace sales with $1.5Bn being transferred to partners (~ 25% commission).
✔️ Today Atlassian has 5.3K apps and integrations from 1.3K partners.
Customers add 28K apps/week, 70% of Jira and Confluence customers have 1+ app installed.
💎 Strategic technology partners
I remember using HipChat in our team in 2015. At that time Atlassian partnered with Slack. 3 yrs later they sold HipChat to Slack and now integrate closely instead.
Here is why:
“Let’s say you paste a link to a Jira ticket into a Slack channel. Anyone in that channel who already has a Jira seat will see vital stats from that ticket like the summary assignee, and status right there in the chat. Anyone who doesn’t already have a Jira seat will be invited to create one. On the flip side, there’s a button on every Jira ticket that lets you share that ticket via Slack. If your organization doesn’t use Slack already, that button will prompt you to set up a free trial. The result is more usage of both products, and satisfied customers all around.”
👋 TBC - Atlassian is a fascinating example of a combination of PLG and building partner #ecosystem.
Sources: #saastr presentation by Cameron Deatsch, Atlassian's CRO; IR materials.
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