How did Atlassian reach 100 million dollars in revenue with no salespeople, and where did that model stop working?
In January 2012 Atlassian's CEO Scott Farquhar said it plainly: 2011 revenue was 102 million dollars, up 35 percent, profitable, 450 employees, and "we have no sales people." What they had instead were product advocates focused on customer success, more than 400 channel partners they deliberately did not compete with, and a refusal to negotiate price or terms with anyone for their first 50,000 customers. Jay Simons joined in 2008 at 20 million dollars ARR and grew it to roughly 2 billion as President, and at IPO sales and marketing was only 19 percent of revenue against roughly 5,000 new customers a quarter. The honest part of the story is where it broke: low touch turned out not to mean no touch, and Atlassian added an Enterprise Advocate organisation with quota carrying reps roughly four years before Simons told the story in 2019.
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The contemporaneous record, written while the claim was still true, with Scott Farquhar saying it in his own words rather than a retelling years later.
Jay Simons on the five decisions that made the model work, including product advocates instead of reps and refusing to negotiate price for the first 50,000 customers.
The useful half is where Simons says the model breaks and enterprise advocates became necessary, which stops this being read as an argument for never hiring sales.
