Atlassian company-building moves, or why you should build your own playbook
💡JC's Newsletter #91
Dear friends,
In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate.
I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those.
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💡Must-read
👉Unpacking 5 of Atlassian’s Most Unconventional Company-Building Moves (Review First Round)
The team held a strong belief that customers wanted to help themselves, and architected everything around that self-service model. “First you have to build a great product that people can discover on their own, begin to use on their own, onboard effectively on their own. If you can’t do those things, it’s not going to work,” he says.
We needed a price point that didn’t require a lot of explaining or convincing.
Now, Atlassian has a tiered pricing structure which includes a free version, a standard version, a premium version, and an enterprise version. But that wasn’t the case in the earliest days. “At the time, we were so focused on reducing the cognitive load on the customer that was coming to us. And if you have four different versions at four different price points, that’s very difficult to help the customer wade through,” he says. Instead, Atlassian landed on a single price point for the product, at just above free. But that meant reducing the overhead on distribution to stay out of the red.
When we started we also had only one product to remove the cognitive load. We progressively expanded the product as people got to know us and we understood the needs of the market.
Rather than an army of salespeople, the company invested in what it called product advocates. “We would say to every customer, ‘Let us know how we can help.
They’d answer a question on product capability, or competitive alternatives, or pricing, but with a great answer, they would then send the customer back into the self-service path.
What would you think if our sales team was named “health advocates” as they are really trying to advise customers?
When it came to building up their enterprise customer base, once again Atlassian resisted the urge to pull from others’ playbooks. “When Atlassian was really young, we would come across customers in the enterprise and they’d say, ‘I’m comparing you to IBM Rational and IBM is sending in a whole demo team and doing a dog and pony show, I want Atlassian to do the same thing.’ We chose not to invest in that directly”.
Holding strong positions on what we will do and what we won’t do is very important (and sometimes very hard). We decided to go direct in terms of distribution because we felt we wanted to build the relationship with customers.
We thought it was the perfect opportunity to build a channel partnership ecosystem.
It’s hard to trust a third party outside of your company with the core part of your business — which is finding, selling, converting and making customers successful.
It is really hard to trust third parties to build the ecosystem for you.
And then let's incorporate automation work in the product to nudge an admin or nudge a primary sponsor of Jira towards this premium version that they could either add to their bill, or they could upgrade at an annual renewal cycle and do it on their own if they don't want to talk to anybody,” he says.
I love all the automations you can do in your product.
🏯 Building a company
👉Nike’s Phil Knight: How to sell without selling (Master Of Scale)
Improve functionality and quality, while keeping their price point below that of Puma and Adidas.
Best Equation ! The best product at the best price :)
You can find that original 1987 commercial online, and however you feel about the Beatles, the ad is still electric. Not just because of the song, or McEnroe, or Michael: but because of the old couple speed-walking in the park. The little kid caught midair as he sails across the basketball court. The exhausted marathoners collapsing under their foil blanket after the race. The ad draws a direct connection between ultra-elite athletes and the people who could be … you. You and the greats exist side by side in the same sweaty, happy tribe.
I really like this connexion. Very hard to build, but that is what great influencers and brands do.
The ad first aired during the NFL season opener, a not-so-subtle dig at Kaep’s former employer. By making him the face of Just Do It, Nike wasn’t just stirring controversy. They were taking a clear stand in a moment of extreme political division. They were picking a side.
Nike decided it was important to double down on their values, including the one that told them never to play it safe. They trusted that the love it would generate in athletes and fans would far outweigh the anger it would raise in others.
It was basically a system where we said, “We don’t care how many people dislike us as long as enough people like us.”
On the importance of taking risks, even with our communication. It is OK to be disliked by some, if many others like us!
👉The Architecture of Tomorrow: An Interview With Ben Horowitz ( Sotonye )
An easy way to think of abundance is that it's the anti-hater/anti-jealous mindset. If you believe there is plenty in the world for everyone and you are always happy to see people who contribute succeed, then you become part of "team contribution".
People with scarcity mindsets are always unhappy in my experience. You see somebody stealing credit for someone else's work or being deeply jealous about someone else's promotion — these people are almost never happy.
🗞In the news
📱Technology
👉Twitter struggles in India (Platformers)
The Shop Module launches in the US today and offers a carousel of products for visitors to browse. Tapping a product will link to a listing with the option of making a purchase without ever leaving Twitter. The pilot is currently limited to iOS devices for people who use the service in English, Twitter says.
Have you tried it?
A look at virtual YouTubers in Japan. Digital personalities voiced by actors have attracted millions of followers, and have become lucrative businesses for their creators. (Roland Kelt / Rest of World).
👉 The ‘Holy Grail’ of Social + Fintech (a16z)
There are also more offline examples than we’re all typically aware of. So one I learned about over the last few years is called ROSCAs, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations, which are these offline communities, mostly immigrant communities, that are managed by an individual. Everyone contributes, let’s say, $1,000 a month. And then each month if there are 10 members, one member receives $10,000. And typically these are folks in your community, you might meet them at church. It’s really hard to save $10,000, it’s a lot easier to contribute $1,000 a month. And then when you receive the lump sum, there’s always some big thing you want to do with the $10,000. There are tons of examples of these micro-communities that have not yet successfully been brought online. So, you know, not everything is starting from zero when it comes to digital products.
🏥 Healthcare
👉Healthcare news (HealthTechNerds)
Devoted Health is reportedly raising up to $1.2 billion at a $11.5 billion valuation. At roughly 40,000 members.
Mental health:
Yet another mental health startup raises a big round as Meru Health raises $38 million. Link.
Ginger announced this week that it launched a Spanish language version of its product.
Mental health startup Spring Health raised $190 million, putting it at a $2 billion valuation. Spring is going after the now well- worn path of selling its mental health solution to employers, hitting 6x revenue growth last year as its now available to 2 million employees across 150 companies. Link.
Tia, a women's health startup, announced that it raised $100 million this week from one of the Tiger Cub hedge funds, Lone Pine Capital.
Starting as a digital only service, then pivoting to build bricks-and-mortar clinics, and then partnering with a health system has struck me as a really intelligent approach to building a business in the space.
Tia currently operates three primary care clinics and has one health system partnership with CommonSpirit.
On the other hand, this is a crazy amount of money for a company that has built three primary care clinics (+ a virtual clinic infrastructure) and is likely providing healthcare services for a few thousand women in this country.
👉How To Build Patient Communities (OutOfPocket)
Onboarding will also be impacted based on the stage of the patient journey you expect most patients will be when they join. Is it post-diagnosis? Is it someone trying to self-diagnose? Is it someone that turns to patient communities when all else has failed?
Interesting for Alan Baby!
Once onboarding is finished, the first screen someone arrives at will tell them what kinds of things people in the community post, how active the community is, what the community values, and what tools/information they have at their disposal as a part of the community.
The work on that screen will make a huge difference both for our specific apps (Alan Baby) and our main app.
Highlighting the strong parts of your community and making it as easy as possible for someone to shift from “lurker” to “contributor” is key. This could be pointing out questions in the community they’re particularly suited to answer, have them post something easy like an introduction, or even having other members of the group chat with new users as part of the onboarding.
For Alan Baby, it seems really interesting.
IMO one unexplored area is pseudo-anonymous patient communities, where people are verified by the platform and can choose to reveal themselves to individual users.
Something I have been a big big fan since the very beginning of Alan Baby.
Moderators jobs are a few-fold:
Post themselves and demonstrate what “good” community engagement looks like.
Organize activities, surveys, AMAs, etc. to get the community to engage and contribute themselves.
Discipline “bad” behavior : This is especially pertinent in healthcare communities where managing misinformation is very important - moderating this while being condescending will cause some users to go to sketchier sources for their information.
Provide encouragement and positive reinforcement for people that do post, especially to people that are new or participate infrequently. This includes engaging people 1:1, disseminating rewards/points, and highlighting good member contributions to the rest of the community.
Do we do it enough on Alan Baby?
Many patient communities have relied on nonprofits and patient advocacy groups to help with moderation, event organizing, and acting as a filter for advertisements/partnerships.
Strava has nailed this for example - where you can use it to track your bike rides and others can comment on it.
If you’re building a patient community, you need to think about how people will be elevated on the platform and what they get as a result of their influence.
Good communities throw good events.
Plus getting members to work together on projects like setting up an event for the community has a secondary effect of making those volunteers closer.
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