Marketplace Partner Spotlight: Codefortynine
For this month's partner spotlight, we caught up Marlene from codefortynine, makers of popular cloud apps like Deep Clone for Jira. As a relatively new partner building for Atlassian's Cloud Marketplace, codefortynine has already built up a robust portfolio of apps and even shared a bit about their experience in the Marketplace Bug Bounty Program.
So, let's get to know codefortynine!
How was your company started?
Back in 2016 Ben, Nico, and I worked at a mobile games company. At that time Ben developed a slack app, which we used internally. Just out of curiosity he uploaded the app to the Atlassian Marketplace and realized that it was well-received by Confluence users. So Ben started to work part-time, later full time as an Atlassian vendor.
After the release of our flagship app Deep Clone for Jira in 2018, the workload increased a lot. So Nico and I joined between 2019 and 2020.
What's your role at your company?
I usually call myself a Product Manager or Atlassian Expert, but since we’re still a small company my area of responsibility is diverse. Currently, I’m in charge of all Marketing and Atlassian community-related topics, but I also contribute to product development.
What's your favorite thing about working there? What’s your favorite team ritual?
It’s great to work with people who have a similar mindset. We enjoy a calm work climate and want to avoid risky stunts. On the other hand we are not afraid to make decisions to prevent chaos. I love that I’m able to have a real impact on our products and our company.
Like Jexo, we also have a monthly board game night. I guess that’s obvious since all of us worked in the games industry before :)
How does your team come up with ideas for new apps?
We have regular sessions about new app ideas and everybody gets her/his inspiration from somewhere else. Since I'm pretty active in the Atlassian community, I get most of my inspiration there.
Tell us about your most popular app. Why do customers love it?
Our most popular app is Deep Clone for Jira. With Deep Clone you can clone a bulk of issues, entire projects, and advanced issue content (like comments).
Our customers love our app because it’s easy to use and a huge time saver for them. They can clone thousands of issues with a few clicks, and move or edit them while cloning.
Currently, the most popular feature is the Project Clone, which clones entire Jira company-managed projects along with issues, settings, components, and versions.
We assume that with the new focus on cloud the Instance Clone feature will be more interesting for customers, which clones issues between Jira instances.
Think back to when you were developing your flagship app - did you see yourself here now? What do you think has been the secret to your success so far?
We were sure that we would be able to build apps that would be valuable for Atlassian customers. But to be honest we were a bit surprised about our success, especially in 2021.
Customer requests have a high priority for us. We keep the first version of a new app rather slim and monitor the interest and needs of our customers after the initial release.
Another reason for our success is probably our focus on Atlassian cloud products. I remember that we discussed several times if we should shift our focus more to server, but realized that the quality and development speed of our apps would suffer from that. Today we’re very happy about that decision.
How do you stay on top of customer support with such a small team?
At the moment we get around five customer requests per day, which we're sharing across our team. To guarantee a smooth process we use Jira Service Management, our app Merge Agent for Jira, and Canned Responses.
We also try to help our customers before they need to contact us. For example, we send out onboarding emails and strive for documentation that is up to date and easy to understand. As documentation tools, we’re using Confluence in combination with Scroll Viewport to enable everybody in the team to contribute to it.
Another reason for the low amount of support requests could be the stability of our apps. We use certain methods to deliver high-quality products. To detect and fix issues as soon as possible, we monitor our error logs on a daily basis. Ben and Nico review each other’s programming code at least once a week. And we try to cover as much code as possible with tests.
Of course, we get customer requests on a daily basis, but we appreciate it. It’s good to get constant feedback to understand the needs and struggles of our customers.
Nevertheless, the support effort will increase in the future. That’s why we are actively looking for new team members at the moment.
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Maggie Norby Adams
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Product Marketing Manager, Ecosystem
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