Why We Chose to Build Our Business on Top of Atlassian

We're passionate about customer communication. It's fundamental, and often overlooked as a tool to grow your business.

But the market for customer communication is full of tools that, frankly, all look the same. A dozen variations on a theme. A portal with roadmaps and release notes.

But the biggest issue is not that they all look the same. The issue is that none of them truly solved what’s hard about customer communication… writing updates.

That's where we saw the opportunity. We wanted to create a truly enjoyable experience where others just tick boxes. And the path to building a truly great experience, we realized, was to deeply integrate into the tools people already use. That way, we're not asking our users to change their behavior. We're enhancing the workflow they're already comfortable with.

Betting on Atlassian

Naturally, we looked to Jira. With a colossal ecosystem that includes millions of customers and a marketplace teeming with thousands of apps, Atlassian wasn't just a platform; it was a community. Jira, in particular, stood out as a tool that was already at the heart of so many development teams' operations. So, we set out to build a release notes solution that felt like it was made for Jira because, well, it was.

We recognized that although we were targeting a niche—release notes within the Atlassian ecosystem—this niche was more like a niche metropolis. It's sizable. It's thriving. And it's proven fertile ground for companies to grow revenues into the tens of millions.

But it wasn't just the size of the market that attracted us. It was also the speed at which we could move. Atlassian's ecosystem meant we didn't have to reinvent the wheel with billing, user management, or permissions. All that infrastructure was already there, allowing us to focus on our core product experience.

Shipping early

And so, with a lean team and a clear vision, we shipped the first version of our app in less than 5 months. One developer was all it took to go from concept to customers. That's the kind of efficiency that building on Atlassian's ecosystem affords you. It was even faster for our second app. We went from idea to beta in 2.5 weeks with Roadmaps.

In the end, choosing Atlassian as our foundation was about more than leveraging a popular platform. It was about alignment with our ethos—making the complex simple and the cumbersome intuitive. It was about giving our users the ability to create and manage release notes right where they are: in Jira. And it's about doing so in a way that feels less like using a tool and more like a natural extension of their work.

That's the story of how we built Released. It’s a story about finding a niche that allows you to provide a vastly superior experience than players outside of that niche. And it's a story about the power of integration, simplicity, and focus. Because when you get those right, everything else tends to fall into place.