The $50B Atlassian story

Hey, it's Guy & Farzan.

Having been away for 6 weeks I am back to reality at home in Sydney. It’s lovely to be back in my own bed. Let’s get into some founder stories…

Reading time: 9.7 mins

In the mail today. 3 founder stories, 1 founder note, 1 founder tip

 Founder story 1 

Mike Cannon-Brookes & Scott Farquhar: From $10K Credit Card Debt to $50B with Atlassian

From two Aussie students who didn't want real jobs to building the bootstrapped B2B giant that redefined how teams collaborate worldwide.

The journey
- Met as IT students at University of New South Wales in Sydney in 2002
- Started with a mass email: "Anyone want to start a business?" with one goal: match a graduate salary of $48K AUD
- Began as a glorified tech support agency helping businesses manage customer service chaos
- Built Jira out of frustration with existing bug tracking tools like Bugzilla
- Received their first major order via fax from American Airlines - no sales pitch required
- Went public on NASDAQ in 2015 with ticker symbol TEAM
- Became fully remote-first company during 2020, eliminating headquarters entirely

The evolution of vision
- 2002: "Let's not get real jobs and match a $48K graduate salary"
- 2004: "Build useful tools for developers, by developers"
- 2010: "Create an integrated suite of collaboration tools"
- 2015: "Democratize team collaboration across all industries"
- 2020: "Define the future of distributed work"
- 2024: "Power every team's potential with intelligent, integrated tools"

Overcoming obstacles
- Started with $10,000 credit card debt and no business plan
- Ran a unglamorous tech support agency to pay the bills initially
- Built products out of personal frustration rather than market research
- Grew without traditional sales teams or venture capital for years
- Navigated major cloud migration backlash from long-time users
- Maintained company culture through rapid scaling and going public
- Transitioned to fully remote model ahead of global workforce shifts

Today's impact
- $50 billion company valuation
- 300,000+ customers worldwide including NASA, LinkedIn, and American Airlines
- Jira: Used by millions of developers for project management and bug tracking
- Confluence: Powers internal documentation for thousands of companies
- Trello: 50+ million users for visual project management
- Atlassian Marketplace: Generated over $500M in third-party plugin sales

Growth strategies that worked
- Product-Led Growth: Let the software sell itself through free trials and word-of-mouth
- Developer-First Focus: Built tools by engineers for engineers, ensuring authentic product-market fit
- Strategic Acquisitions: Bought complementary tools (Trello, Bitbucket, Loom) without killing their identity
- Ecosystem Building: Created marketplace for third-party developers, generating $500M+ in revenue
- Remote-First Culture: Embraced distributed work model before it became mainstream
- No Bullshit Philosophy: Maintained authentic culture with clear values like "Don't #@!% the customer"

Key milestones
- 2002: Founded with credit card debt and desire to avoid corporate jobs
- 2002: Built Jira to solve their own bug tracking problems
- 2004: Launched Confluence for team documentation and collaboration
- 2010: Acquired Bitbucket for code repository management
- 2012: Launched Atlassian Marketplace for third-party integrations
- 2015: IPO on NASDAQ as ticker TEAM
- 2017: Acquired Trello for $425M, expanding beyond developer tools
- 2020: Went fully remote, eliminating physical headquarters
- 2023: Acquired Loom for async video communication

The philosophy

"Open company, no bullshit." "Build with heart and balance." "Don't #@!% the customer."

"Real leadership isn't about pleasing everyone today. It's about positioning your company to thrive ten years from now."

"You don't need to raise capital to build momentum. You don't need to scale fast to matter. You don't need a vision statement carved in stone. You need to care. You need to ship. And you need to not compromise when it counts."

Founder story 2

See how Angus built a simple website that makes $40K a month.

This is Angus Chang from Hong Kong. He built the world's simplest SaaS - a tool that converts PDF bank statements to Excel. One feature. Zero employees. $40K monthly revenue.

Here's his story
→ Quit his job needing to track personal expenses
→ Banks only provided PDFs, needed Excel format
→ Built a converter tool for himself in one week
→ Launched with Google Ads to validate demand
→ Now: $40K MRR, 75K users, 1K paying customers

The counterintuitive part?
Marketing that "worked" actually hurt.

What failed
- Google Ads (spent $1K, made $300)
- Cold emails (1 sale in 3 months)
- Social media building
- Blogging

What worked
- Stopped all paid marketing
- Focused purely on product improvements
- Fixed what customers complained about
- Let organic growth happen naturally

Key insight
"Don't show your product to friends and family - they'll lie to you and won't buy anyway. Get it in front of real users immediately."

The brutal reality
- First 2 years: basically no money
- Worked 3am customer support
- Social isolation from leaving 9-5
- People called it a "crappy business"

Today's results
- $40K monthly revenue
- $39K monthly profit (97.5% margins)
- 100% bootstrapped solopreneur
- Customers in multiple countries

His advice: 
Save 2-3 years of runway. SaaS takes time. Ignore social media. Focus on solving real problems for real users.

The best part?
He can wake up and go hiking instead of commuting to work.

Founder story 3

See how Andy built Email Love into a $200K revenue business by solving his own problems."

The journey
- Born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand, with a normal upbringing playing cricket, soccer, and rugby
- Studied Marketing and International Business at Auckland University of Technology (AUT)
- Won scholarship to study abroad in Montreal, first time away from home alone Started career as Marketing Assistant at Kia Motors, printing flyers for direct mail campaigns
- Moved to London for e-marketing role at Institute of Directors, discovering passion for email marketing
- Relocated to US for sales engineering role at Lyris, then Campaign Monitor
- Became disillusioned with tech company culture of burning VC money and layoffs
- Started freelancing on Upwork while working at DocuSign during pandemic
- Purchased Emaillove.com from friend Rob Hope in 2023 on payment plan
- Co-founded EmailStack with former colleague in 2024 to build portfolio of email SaaS products

The evolution of vision
- 2020: Built first email inspiration website "Kurated Email" and "Curated Inspiration"
- 2021: Launched "Bettr.email" while freelancing evenings and weekends
- 2023: Acquired Email Love and began daily curation of email designs
- 2024: Developed Figma Plugin to export email designs as code
- 2025: Reached $200K annual revenue with comprehensive email marketing toolkit

Overcoming obstacles
- Worked evenings and weekends for years while maintaining day job
- Multiple failed website attempts before finding success with Email Love
- Spent 12 months finding right developer on Upwork for Figma Plugin
- Balanced family life (marriage, kids) with entrepreneurial pursuits
- Overcame disillusionment with corporate tech culture to build own path

Today's impact
- $200K annual revenue
- 5,000 registered users
- 5,000 Figma Plugin users
- 11,000 newsletter subscribers
- 25,000 website visitors per month
- Automatically captures 30,000+ emails monthly from 4,000+ brands

Growth strategies that worked
- Existing Audience Leverage: Used Email Love website traffic to launch Figma Plugin
- Daily Curation: Personally curates best emails for homepage every day Integration
- Partnerships: Collaborated with Braze and Iterable for lead generation Content
- Marketing: Weekly blog posts, newsletter, and social media content
- Email Marketing: Primary distribution channel for email marketing audience
- Community Engagement: Active in Email Geeks Slack Community and LinkedIn

Key milestones
- Started with failed inspiration websites while working corporate jobs
- Acquired Email Love from Rob Hope on payment plan in 2023
- Developed automated email capture system from 4,000+ brands
- Built comprehensive email analytics extracting ESP, images, GIFs, responsive code
- Launched Figma Plugin with 10 free exports, then paid subscription
- Co-founded EmailStack holding company for email SaaS portfolio

The philosophy

"Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection"

"I suppose I'm a little different because I am my target customer. Even today, I still work directly with clients on their email design, so I use our product every day, and this gives me an unusually good view of what we need to build."

"I still get a buzz when sales come in for a product I've built, honestly - it's one of the best feelings. The hard part is figuring out what works and what doesn't. I have never had an overnight smash hit, so playing the long game and making incremental improvements every day is key."

Founder note from Adam Robinson

Over the past 10 years I’ve read over 250 books about startups. Here are the 8 books that got me from $0-$25m ARR with zero funding (in order of impact) and what I learned from each of them:

1. Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank

If you are an aspiring founder, this is a must read. I re-read the first half of this book each time I start a startup. It’s dense, but there is no better description of the steps to take to reduce your chance of failure to ZERO. Takeaway: Build your audience of buyers before you launch, or you’re screwed.

2. Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt

This has been more impactful than anything I’ve ever done in business. Yes, I have magical alignment in that I am my ICP and my ICP lives on LinkedIn. Even if you do not have that alignment, Founder Brand content creation is an automated trust-building machine and will pay dividends.

3. ReWork by Jason Fried

The OG SaaS bootstrappers have great takes on the benefits of creating a business outside of the VC ecosystem. You should read this book, then immediately do Y-Combinator’s Startup School, and land somewhere in the middle. (Jason agreed to come on UnF*ck My Startup. Just don’t have a date yet. We can’t wait!)

4. Y-Combinator Startup School

These guys understand the importance of pursuing growth as a key metric, but can skew towards making you think you should try to go big (because many of the biggest went through YC). As I said, land between here and ReWork.

5. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Such an incredible articulation of the things that make the CEO job difficult. Must-read for any aspiring Founders to know what you’re getting yourself into.

6. The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary

Read and re-read as you advance along your journey. Different bits will resonate each year. Being a CEO is hard, and creating a balanced life around the job is even harder. Matt rolls out playbooks for inside and outside the company.

7. $100m Offers by Alex Hormozi

“Have an offer so good your prospects will feel stupid not doing it.” Read, and re-read again. Then look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself if that statement is true for you. If not, make it true… And when you do, everything will change.

8. Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Nothing describes the necessity of being different better than this book. Make yourself a Purple Cow so you get talked about. It’s within your control, do it!

TAKEAWAY:

These books have formed my beliefs about how successful startups happen.

You reading this today - and RB2B going from $0-$5m - is the direct result of me picking up Founder Brand by Dave Gerhardt two years ago.

It planted a seed that led to a rabbit hole and I just kept digging.

That's the power of a great book.

If you're a founder and you feel stuck, logoff Linkedin for a bit.

Head over to Amazon and order one of these 8 classics.

Then put 10 minutes a day aside and start reading.

It may change your life.

 A founder tip we loved

All done. I’m off to bed to watch The Lincoln Lawyer.

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See you next week.

Guy + Farzan
Founderoo