From 0 to $1M in a year (without venture funding)

Do you know Atlassian, a $10B company?

Do you know that it was started with no venture funding (with just $10,000 in credit card debt)?

The best part is that within a year they managed to generate $1.3 million USD.

How did they do it?

1. As developers, they experienced a big unsolved pain – the inconvenience of managing product development and support via email (manage bugs, plan features, track tasks, etc.).

2. They had lack of time, no venture funding, and only $10K in credit. So they created a super simple tool called Jira as quickly as possible.

3. Everybody was selling software via sales teams. But they had no money, so they decided something new – to offer a 30-day free trial + onboarding process that converted free users to paid. They also were among first to publicly list all prices, information about products, documentation, support requests, and training materials right on their
website.

4. This new, easy automated approach of selling the software + a solution to a huge, never before solved pain made Jira go viral.

Result: $1.3 million USD in a year.