Build story · Australia · 2002–2023
Atlassian: selling software without a sales team
Two Sydney graduates funded with a $10,000 credit card built Jira and Confluence into a multi-billion-dollar business by letting customers buy online at low, transparent prices.
By Shivam Bhandari · Reviewed 31 October 2026 · How we write
by the numbers
- Starting funding
- about $10,000 credit card
- Founded
- 2002, Sydney
- IPO
- 2015, Nasdaq
- Revenue (fiscal 2023)
- about $3.5 billion
What happened
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 with about $10,000 on a credit card. They released Jira, an issue-tracking tool for software teams, and later Confluence, a team wiki. Their customers were developers who disliked sales calls.
Instead of building an expensive enterprise sales force, Atlassian posted prices publicly, kept them low, and let teams download and buy online. It invested heavily in product and relied on word of mouth inside companies: one team adopted Jira, then others followed. It spent far less on sales and marketing, as a share of revenue, than most software peers.
Atlassian listed on Nasdaq in 2015. Its tools became standard in software teams worldwide, and fiscal 2023 revenue was about $3.5 billion. The company showed that a global software business could be built from Australia, far from Silicon Valley.
Timeline
- 2002
Founded; Jira released.
- 2004
Confluence launches.
- 2010
First outside investment, from Accel.
- 2015
Nasdaq IPO.
what made it work
- Transparent, low prices that teams could approve themselves.
- Product quality and word of mouth instead of a sales force.
- Bottom-up adoption: one team, then the whole company.
- Capital efficiency from day one.
the lesson
When users can try, buy, and spread a product themselves, great product can replace an expensive sales team.
Apply it to your business
- 1Publish your prices and make buying easy.
- 2Land with one team, then expand across the company.
- 3Put spending into product before sales overhead.
Laws at work in this story
Figures are rounded and drawn from public reports, company filings and widely cited coverage at the time. Check the company's latest filings before relying on any number.