Atlassian Marketplace Growth Strategy: Stop Clients Leaving
Introduction
In this article, we share our experience in controlling churn for our Atlassian Apps, which has fueled organic growth and established a stronger foundation for increased marketing spend. While the problem statement and suggestions may apply to any SaaS business, we focus on specifics relevant to the Atlassian Marketplace, which is our area of expertise and success.
Addressing Churn Challenges for Enhanced Growth in the Atlassian Marketplace
The Atlassian Marketplace is an excellent platform for bootstrapping SaaS businesses, offering a large customer base and an active community. If you have ideas for Atlassian Apps, you'll find the tools and capabilities needed to assess market fit and stimulate organic growth. However, you may soon realize that your growth isn't happening as quickly as you'd like. While there are known strategies to increase traffic, it's crucial to build a strong foundation to effectively control churn.
Consider the following questions:
- Why aren't people converting after a trial?
- Why do they leave after only a few months?
- Why don't they renew annual licenses?
Promptly addressing these issues involves:
- Determining if they're your target customers
- Identifying problems early
- Engaging with clients early to attempt to manage churn These are the challenges we encountered while developing our own growth strategy.
Solutions that did not work out
Our initial strategy was to leverage existing resources, like Amplitude (or alternatives like MixPanel), to manage churn. While these tools excel in product development, they fall short in identifying and handling churn effectively. The challenge was akin to ‘seeing a forest but missing the trees’—we couldn’t automate segment identification or detect early churn indicators. Initially, we attempted a manual approach, conducting daily reviews of segmented accounts to spot issues and engage clients. This quickly proved unsustainable due to unrealistic pace expectations, competing business focuses, and frustration over a lack of direct client feedback. On the Atlassian Marketplace, engaging the right contacts is challenging:
- Technical Contacts (often DevOps) are typically tasked only with installation, not engagement.
- Billing Contacts (procurement professionals) are mostly interested in procurement activities
- Partner Contacts usually consist of generic emails, rarely yielding responses to engagement invitations.
Fortunately, we maintained contact with individuals from demo sessions and could export additional contacts from Service Desk records. This approach had some success, but it wasn’t scalable.
Exploring PLG/SLG Solutions for Effective Churn Management and Enhanced Engagement
Based on advice from another Marketplace Partner, we explored the growing segment of Product-Led Growth (PLG) and Sales-Led Growth (SLG) solutions. We trialed journy.io and were impressed with its capabilities to manage churn effectively. Key features included:
- Defining custom scores and health profiles using our existing product analytics from Amplitude
- Automating churn signals for specific segments and configuring playbooks
- Properly segmenting clients based on usage tiers and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) scores
- Visualizing our client portfolio according to engagement stages and usage patterns
Currently, we're implementing an engagement solution to interact directly with our app users via Jira. If readers show interest in the comments, we're happy to share our implementation process, current status, and key results. We're also eager to learn about other churn reduction and conversion increase solutions and their outcomes. Additionally, we've discovered Segment.com, which opened new possibilities for us. This exploration led us to adopt an appropriate CRM—we transitioned from Mailchimp to a more robust solution quite quickly.
Was it difficult to start?
It wasn't super easy to achieve, but we managed it relatively quickly. Since we were already collecting product analytics, we redirected the data flow into Segment.com before sending it to Amplitude and journy.io, replacing the direct integration with Amplitude. We also used the no-code platform Make.com to extract data from the Atlassian Marketplace via Open API and upload it to journy.io through Segment.com. The entire setup took us about two weeks. If you're interested in trying this approach, we have created a step-by-step guide with reusable templates for no-code solutions, which we've published on Confluence: Atlassian Marketplace Connector Feel free to reach out if you need any assistance!
About us
We are Release Management Apps, a Platinum Atlassian Marketplace Partner. We proudly advanced from Silver to Gold to Platinum over three consecutive years, thanks largely to our award-winning apps - Best New App in 2020, Finalist for Agile-at-Scale in 2022, and Winner for Agile & DevOps in 2023. Despite these achievements, we continue to search for the most effective growth strategy, as our current growth rate doesn't meet our expectations. Our connection with journy.io began as clients, and we were so impressed that we seized the opportunity to take it over when it arose. We're excited to share this journey with the rest of the Atlassian Marketplace community.
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Yuri Kudin
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