💡 Introduce yourself and earn our new Founding Founders kudos badge!

[Kristen Roth]

Who’s who in our community group? 🤔

We’d love to learn more about who’s joining us in this group and are curious to hear about the organizations you work for, your roles, and any other information you’d like to share!

Introduce yourself within the discussion thread below and you’ll earn our new Founding Founders kudos badge.

✨ Bonus points: here are a few (optional!) questions to answer that’ll help us get to know you even better:

• What’s your favorite thing about working in the startup space?

• What’s been your team’s biggest challenge thus far?

• What are you hoping to gain from being a member of this group?

We're looking forward to learning more about who's here! 

[Philip Braddock]

Maybe this won't count for a badge because I'm an Atlassian -- I defer to my world-class TEAMmate, @Kristen Roth to make that decision 🤩 -- but I'm happy to kick off the convo!

My favorite thing about working in the startup space is the constant energy and creative.  It takes A LOT of energy to build something and it takes arguably even more creativity to experiment, learn and pivot on a regular basis.  With respect to the latter, it doesn't have to be only related to the core product.  I've seen founders / startup teams pivot go-to-market (GTM) tactics; pivot pricing strategies; pivot entire business models.  And while those decisions are always hard, from what I've experienced, it's often the hardest decisions that yield the biggest rewards. 🚀

REALLY excited to see what others share here. 🤓

[Kristen Roth]

We'll give ya the badge, @Philip Braddock! Thanks for sharing your favorite thing about working in the startup space; creativity often means standing out from the crowd. ✨

[Eren Kalelioğlu]

Dear all,

I’m the founder of Ponsatlas. 

At Ponsatlas, we are not just developing applications; we are shaping the future of teamwork by crafting innovative solutions for the Atlassian Marketplace. As a rapidly growing company, we specialize in providing top-tier consulting services and a unique Maturity Index service tailored for CxO level leaders utilizing Atlassian products.

In our pursuit of excellence, we are proud authors of the globally recognized book "Implementing Atlassian Confluence," available on major platforms like Amazon and O'Reilly. This publication is part of our continuous effort to enrich the community’s understanding and implementation of Atlassian tools. We are excited to announce that more books are on the way, further establishing our expertise and thought leadership in the industry.

To realize our dreams, we aim to secure investment in the next six months, with our ideal partner being Atlassian Ventures. This crucial step will support our ambitious plans, including the imminent launch of our first application on the Atlassian Marketplace, quickly followed by a series of others. Our expertise particularly shines in utilizing Atlassian products, such as Jira, to enhance governance in modern companies that operate asynchronously and are distributed across various locations.

Our goal is to transform Istanbul into a globally recognized hub for Atlassian education and networking, establishing it as a pivotal center of excellence. By doing so, we strive to become one of the most trusted and well-known Atlassian partners in our region, ensuring that we not only meet but exceed the expectations of our clients.

At Ponsatlas, we believe in a new mindset—one that embraces transparency, agility, and collaborative teamwork. These core values guide our operations and inspire our commitment to innovation in team collaboration technologies.

Best

Eren

[Kristen Roth]

Welcome to the group and the Atlassian Community, @Eren Kalelioğlu! We're glad you're here and hope you find networking with other community members and reading some of the great content posted here to be insightful as you and your team continue on with your great work. 

[Darin - Opus Guard]

Welcome @Eren Kalelioğlu! I'd love to connect with you and learn more (Linkedin request heading over now). In the mean time, congrats on your entry to the Atlassian Marketplace space, it's a friendly place.

[Sweta Upadhyay]

Hello everyone,

I'm thrilled to be a part of this dynamic group focused on startups and innovation! Let me take a moment to introduce myself. I'm Sweta, a UX Designer with a passion for creating impactful solutions and disrupting industries.

I believe in the power of community and collaboration in the startup space. Let's use this platform to exchange ideas, share resources, and support each other's ventures. Whether you have a burning question, a success story to celebrate, or a roadblock to navigate, this group is here to lend a helping hand.

Cheers,
Sweta

[Kristen Roth]

Nice to meet you, @Sweta Upadhyay! We look forward to exchanging ideas and supporting you all along your journeys. Excited to watch this group grow! 🚀

[Darin - Opus Guard]

I'll go first, I'm joining on behalf of Opus Guard. New to Atlassian Marketplace as a Vendor but far from new to Atlassian. We're focusing on helping Teams and SaaS products solve the recent updates to ISO27001 which has much more strict requirements around information governance. 

Our inaugural app, Content Retention Manager for Confluence aims to shore up the immediate gaps on ISO data management requirements. We've got some great initial customers with more in the works and are loving being the solution to these new regulations.

As for ourselves, I'm a long standing Atlassian Alumni having previously worked on the Atlassian Ecosystem space and I'm joined with my partner @Shu Shen who comes from Amazon and Okta as a technical co-founder. Joining our start up as a strategic founder advisor is @Nick Wade help guide us through the growing pains of Marketplace and how to best align with partners.

What’s your favorite thing about working in the startup space?

So far it's the energy, urgency, and the rollercoaster of emotions. At any given point I am at a high point of solving a key part of all our personal privacy, and at other moments I'm scared out of my mind that I won't meet the needs fast enough. It's a typical founder dilemma. But we absolutely love the energy and positive support from others who have gone through this. Living in the SF Bay area, I feel welcomed and part of a community as a co-founder, and that helps remove the fears of being a founder.

What’s been your team’s biggest challenge thus far?

Time and early sales motions. We both come from strong product, strategy, finance, and tech backgrounds, but forward sales motions are new to us. We're learning rapidly and training ourselves to have a muscle in sales, but this is our largest challenge so far. Luckily it's not finances or APIs yet.

What are you hoping to gain from being a member of this group?

Experience from those who have succeeded and failed before us. Learning when to pivot, when to refocus, when it's ok to offshore, when to focus more on sales, and the overall comfort of being in like company.

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

Hi, @Darin - Opus Guard 👋   The Atlassian Community Spam bot moved your intro. to spam quarantine due to the link to your website. The community guidelines for marketplace partners explains that only links to your Atlassian Marketplace pages are permitted in your community posts.

I changed the link and released it.

Best,

-dave

[Darin - Opus Guard]

@Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_ thanks! The error wasn't clear, I used our home page given the nature of this subsection of the community being all about start ups in general, I thought it would be fitting to share our home page, but happy to link to our vendor page in Marketplace being a start up on Marketplace. 

[Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_]

I'm not sure the spam bot is that smart, @Darin - Opus Guard  🫤   Human intervention was required.

[Kristen Roth]

Thanks for the great intro, @Darin - Opus Guard It's great to know we're in good company with Atlassian alums in the group! 🤩 We hope this group will be an excellent resource for startup teams to do just that - learn from each other and help you feel like you have a true community to lean on. 

[Susheel Daswani]

Hey all, Susheel Daswani from HeadSpin here - nice to meet you all!

At HeadSpin, we help our customers perfect their digital experiences across mobile devices, browsers, and even TVs! It is truly an honor and privilege to help our customers provide amazing digital experiences for their millions of customers.

My favorite thing about working in the startup space are the constant challenges that we need to navigate through. Whether it is having to figure out how to incorporate the latest Android or iOS changes, how to help a customer optimize the performance of their app, or how to prioritize our product roadmap, every day requires focus and creative thinking.

Our biggest challenge - which is really a privilege and testament to our customer's faith in our product - is finding enough time in the day. We have great customers but limited cycles so everyday is an effort in ruthless prioritization.

No specific expectations for this group beyond I'm hoping to support others and meet some amazing peers.

Best!

Susheel

[Kristen Roth]

Absolutely relatable - a few more hours in the day would be a total game changer. Thanks for sharing and for your great intro, @Susheel Daswani! We're glad you're here!

[Abdullah Kamel]

We are adam.ai, a Board & Meeting management platform that enables our customers to manage meetings, workflows and content in one place powering decision-making to achieve business goals.

My favorite thing in the startup space is the ability to be nimble, flexible and adaptable to our customer's needs (truly being able to build for the customers)

Our biggest challenge thus far has been building strong use cases without customer feedback (the more customers, the more use cases)

I would love to learn if and how startups are building strategic partnerships. I'd also love to know more about the startups in group and how they are helping/solving big problems for their customers.

[Kristen Roth]

Thanks for joining us, @Abdullah Kamel! Feel free to start a discussion at any time among the members of this group as I'm sure others have similar questions and challenges. We're glad you're here!

[Darin - Opus Guard]

Welcome @Abdullah Kamel! Depending on how you are bootstrapping or which ecosystem you are building in, the solutions partners have the pulse of the customer in a way that, as a PM, can really help us scale in new spaces. If your pitch is good and you're able to articulate your hypothesis and early solution well enough, a solutions partner will be able to help connect that to the customer needs and help you iterate quickly on. The easy button on this is go to the platform's "Partners" space. In Atlassian, you're looking for solutions partners specifically, not so much resellers (though they can be helpful), or Marketplace Builders (we are like you). From there seek out the Strategic Partnership Managers, these are the folks who are there to spin up the key partner relationships which could include you in the future if the fit is there. If for nothing else, you'll likely get an easy 30-minute coffee chat and learn about the space.

[Laurie Sciutti]

Hello group!  I'm not <currently> a part of a startup but I've been seriously considering starting some side-hustles to bring a bit of variety (and some extra fun $$!) into my day-to-day and hopefully embark on new adventures that are outside my comfort zone.  Though side-hustles may not necessarily fit into the "startup" model, I'm hoping to gain insight into others' perspectives (and learn about new companies!) as well as maybe a bit of inspiration to take that initial leap.  So thank you for sharing and thank you in advance to those who will be sharing!

[Darin - Opus Guard]

Welcome @Laurie Sciutti! To get you inspired, the community here is a treasure trove of opportunities to help teams do more. There are more needs within the 300,000 teams using Atlassian products than can be solved by Atlassian or the many Marketplace Partners. We're all working together in our own ways to shore this up. As you get started here, in the customer focused areas of the Atlassian Community, I have no doubt something will speak to you and your idea will come to life. Much of the Atlassian Marketplace's success is attributed to this simple strategy from the early days of the Kanban board (a former App), Automation, Timesheet Management, and now the rise of enterprise requirements, to make it the $1B+/year marketplace it is now.

[Kristen Roth]

We absolutely welcome you to join us in conversation, @Laurie Sciutti ! Thanks for joining the group!  

[Andy Gladstone]

What’s your favorite thing about working in the startup space?

Like many others, I am not currently working in a startup. However, as a seasoned COO I have consulted with many startups and founders to provide them guidance on how to build for scale, and not allow the chaos of startup culture become the norm (for too long). I am also an early seed investor in a few startups and keep close tabs on them to make sure the funds are being translated into strategies.

What’s been your team’s biggest challenge thus far?

In the advisory role getting the founders to work on strategy instead of execution. A strong visionary needs a strong tactician, and any visionary founder that thinks he/she can do both is going to burning the candle at both ends and burning out their team in the process.

What are you hoping to gain from being a member of this group?

I'm excited to see how Atlassian plans on supporting more founders and startups in the tech/fintech industries and hope to add some of my operational insights to the discussions.

[Kristen Roth]

Thanks for joining us here, @Andy Gladstone !

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

Hi, I'm Shawn. I introduced my two companies in another post. So I won't drag on about them here.

I have two current companies I have founded and several previous companies.  I enjoy discussing what it takes to get a startup up and running.

[Kristen Roth]

Welcome to the group, @Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM !

[Ben King]

Hey,

Founded Aviato Consulting (yes, the name inspiration ius from the amazing TV Show Sillicon Valley) we are a Google Cloud Partner and app dev studio. Based in Sydney but have engineering teams in India.

Growing pretty strong, and hoping we don't outgrow our 50 free seats in the next 12 months. 

[Kristen Roth]

Welcome, @Ben King! Love the company name, and of course, the inspo. (Now I want to go back and rewatch the show!) We're glad you're here!

[Rino Jose _Forthix_]

Hi, everyone --

Great to meet you all!

I'm new to the Atlassian Community, but I've actually built a lot of Jira based apps (like 827 :-)) as part of LinkedIn's Tools Team. To handle this much volume, I created a language called Forthic and built a platform where end users could tweak their own apps.

This year I started Forthix with the goal of bringing this platform to the Atlassian Marketplace to help other medium/large organizations with the same kinds of problems I solved at LinkedIn: primarily highly custom reports, forms, and automations involving org hierarchies.

Our first challenge was figuring out how to run Forthic on the Forge framework. The next has been figuring out how to make this as easy as possible for users. Our first two apps had a bit of a learning curve, but our third app, OrgJQL, feels about right. The biggest challenge right now (as @Darin - Opus Guard  also mentioned) is figuring out Sales and Marketing. I'm not really sure how to do this, so I'm hoping to learn from others here.

Thanks for forming this Startup Group -- it'll be a great place for us all to help each other. I'm looking forward to getting to know you all!

--Rino

[Kristen Roth]

827! 🤯 Thanks for joining us, @Rino Jose _Forthix_ ! We're glad to have you here!

[Eren Kalelioğlu]

Hi @Rino Jose _Forthix_ . Nice to meet you. Happy to connect here and on Linkedin. My LI profile is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erenkalelioglu/

[Rino Jose _Forthix_]

Hi, @Eren Kalelioğlu . Nice to meet you, too! Just connected with you on LinkedIn. Here's my profile link: www.linkedin.com/in/rinoj

[Evan Fishman - Rallybetter_com]

Hi All, I am Evan, founder of Rally Rally a Jira plugin (we will be in the marketplace soon. 😉)

New to the Atlassian community but definitely not to Atlassian as a whole.

Rally was built to make agile meetings more productive and collaborative by;

◾ Simplifying agenda creation

◾ Easy and smart estimations

◾ Post-meeting AI-optimized highlights.

◾ AI-generated questions and discussion points.

All this and more, irrespective of how your team works either in real-time or async.

Rally was built because we were tired of meetings that didn't get things done.

With Rally, you can plan well and move fast.

We are currently in beta and offering free lifetime access to all beta users when we launch on the marketplace.

You can join at rallybetter.com

Outside of Rally, my favorite thing about working in the startup space is the actual impact being made.

As a member of this community, I hope to connect with other founders and get you to try Rally lol.

[Fadoua]

I may be new to this group but not to the community. I have been a community leader for very strong 7 years. I keep bouncing between NOVA ACEs and answering questions within the community. I noticed some time ago that my heart is more into helping others. I am dedicating more time answering questions when time permits.

I am a full time Atlassian Admin for a Corporate. I enjoy Martial Arts and Painting.

I am always looking to connect with great people to learn from them. I am a strong believer that we can learn anything at any age as long as the willingness is there.

All the best,

Fadoua

[Nick Wade -Opus Guard-]

Jumping in, I'm one of the co-founders at Opus Guard. We're a Marketplace vendor and are funded by Atlassian Ventures, although in my past I led the Marketplace business at Atlassian (tenure 2012 until 2018!). Here's my App Central intro post.

I'm loving being back in Atlassian's ecosystem as a small vendor, because I'm learning a ton again since we do everything at a startup :) , and this is also the best crowd I've people I've personally ever worked with.

Our biggest challenge so far has been helping people understand that compliance doesn't have to be complicated, and you can start with the first things first. Like, implementing your retention policy across Confluence and Jira in the cloud, with our Marketplace apps.

As a member I'm hoping to meet more people in the same phase of growth and exchange ideas and tips on doing what we all do best - creating great products that solve real problems.