I, alone, publish an add-on on the Atlassian Marketplace. I have several add-ons for diversification, but 1-2 of them is 99% of my income. Server sales are one-off (but 80% of my income) and Cloud sales are recurrent (better if you hope to hire).
Define successful: I 100% live off it ($50k/yr before taxes). Biggest new add-ons are often agencies who can afford to sponsor their development because it's a customer funnel for them; I'm one of the rare new who built a business from scratch and lives off it.
The Atlassian APIs could be difficult[1], but the reward is great: Being a vendor introduces you to the biggest corporates without having to be referenced or pass the Purchase Order process, so you can very easily sell to companies similar to Samsung, HSBC, Defense actors or Ubisoft.
My advice: Build a real product with your add-on, not just a tweak to Atlassian's products. Tweaks = SQL reader, theme, formatting of mathematical expressions, ... Products = Balsamiq, Gliffy, time management solutions, architecture/CAD solutions, requirement management, accounting, aeronautical check-lists, etc. Be a bit ambitious and you'll be the reason why people switch to Atlassian and money will pour onto you.
[1] Difficult = They're scattered between Server and Cloud apis, and architecture is widely different bw JIRA and BitBucket, but it's still possible to start quite fast with https://connect.atlassian.com .
Hi Tajen! Thanks so much for your input. The Atlassian Ecosystem was built by developers like you who saw the power of extending our platform and have built profitable businesses by selling add-ons on our Marketplace. We now have over 10,000 developers in our community and have paid out over $150M to developers selling on our Marketplace. In fact, 15+ developers have generated more than $1 million in direct sales each!
We recently revamped our developer site (developer.atlassian.com) to help folks find the right resources and start building with ease and scale. We're always open to feedback on how we can improve the development process and ways to help developers like you grow their business. Give us a shout on our new service desk and let us know what we can do better (https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/...)
Keep up the great work and a big thanks from our team!
Hi Tajen, most of these developers started off as one-person-shops then hired more folks as their sales scaled. TechCrunch did an overview of our success stories a while back. Check it out: https://techcrunch.com/2015/12/15/atlassians-marketplace-for...
Just yesterday I looked at Atlassian Marketplace and had similar thoughts (was looking to solve our reporting needs at work). Nice to hear about your success story!
Define successful: I 100% live off it ($50k/yr before taxes). Biggest new add-ons are often agencies who can afford to sponsor their development because it's a customer funnel for them; I'm one of the rare new who built a business from scratch and lives off it.
The Atlassian APIs could be difficult[1], but the reward is great: Being a vendor introduces you to the biggest corporates without having to be referenced or pass the Purchase Order process, so you can very easily sell to companies similar to Samsung, HSBC, Defense actors or Ubisoft.
My advice: Build a real product with your add-on, not just a tweak to Atlassian's products. Tweaks = SQL reader, theme, formatting of mathematical expressions, ... Products = Balsamiq, Gliffy, time management solutions, architecture/CAD solutions, requirement management, accounting, aeronautical check-lists, etc. Be a bit ambitious and you'll be the reason why people switch to Atlassian and money will pour onto you.
[1] Difficult = They're scattered between Server and Cloud apis, and architecture is widely different bw JIRA and BitBucket, but it's still possible to start quite fast with https://connect.atlassian.com .