Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Modus Create

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For this month's partner spotlight, we're featuring Modus Create, a Platinum Marketplace Partner! We caught up with Boris Berenberg, VP of Product Development, about how his team comes up with new ideas for apps, what's next for them, and more.

The Modus Create at Atlassian Team ‘23

Atlassian: What's your role at Modus Create?

Boris: I’m the VP of Product Development, which means I'm responsible for all activities related to the Atlassian Marketplace apps that Modus Create makes.

Atlassian: How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?

Boris: We build new apps out of a combination of inspiration, creativity, and customer need: 

• We've capitalized on open issues from JAC to help create some of our first apps.
• Some apps were built for services customers and then expanded to become full fledged apps for sale on the Atlassian Marketplace.
• We also find interesting new technologies via channels like Hackernews, and then look for ways to apply them to help Atlassian customers solve their challenges.

While not new per se, a number of our apps are “new to us” in the sense that we found great products on the Marketplace and acquired them from other vendors. We found that our expertise in operating apps has really helped accelerate their growth.

Atlassian: What do you think has been the secret to your success so far? 

Boris: I think one of our big successes has come from us spending a lot of time on fixing small bugs in our products. This is counterintuitive to how many others operate, but this allows our support team to be relatively small and manage costs, while still offering great customer satisfaction.

Atlassian: Tell us about your most popular app. What problem were you trying to solve for customers when you created it?  

I created our very first app, Markdown Macro, while I was still working at Atlassian. I built it as a ShipIt project in response to Atlassian's decision to phase out Markdown support around 2016/2017.

After departing Atlassian, I secured a license to continue the app’s journey on the Marketplace. It has since flourished with over 9k installs, and we've expanded its features from just Markdown to also support LaTeX, PlantUML, Graphviz, Mermaid, Swagger / OpenAPI, and more.

Markdown with inline Mermaid chart rendered in Atlassian Confluence Cloud using the Markdown Macro from Modus Create

Atlassian: What’s next for Modus Create?

Boris: We’re currently excited to lean into Cloud alongside Atlassian. We're working on bringing data residency and other compliance-related initiatives to our Cloud apps. We hope that doing this work will not only help our Cloud apps but generally improve the maturity of how we build and deliver all of our software. We’re also looking to align with other platform initiatives like supporting dark mode – and more that we can’t reveal yet. 😉

To learn more about Modus Create, check out their Atlassian Marketplace apps – and don’t forget to comment below and let us know what your favorite app is of theirs!

[Andy Gladstone]

Shout-out to Modus Create team member @Manon Soubies-Camy for finding the time to be an active Community Leader on top of her full-time responsibilities at Modus Create!

[Frederike Häusel_resolution_]

Hi @Kelsey Van Scoy

I was wondering how does a company become Marketplace Partner Spotlight??

We would love to be highlighted :) 

[Kelsey Van Scoy]

Hi @Frederike Häusel_resolution_

Partners can post them on their own. However, there are some guidelines here.

Please let me know if you have any other questions. Thank you!

[Frederike Häusel_resolution_]

Thank you so much @Kelsey Van Scoy 

Didn't know we can post it ourself. 

Then I am up and working on it :)