The "indie hacker" part is underselling the value of hooking into these marketplaces.
The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.
We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.
It’s a smart move for entrepreneurs who aren’t VC-backed to leverage marketplaces. How was your experience with the Atlassian Marketplace in terms of integration and marketing? I’ve seen many big companies advertise that they help with marketing resources but I assume it’s exaggerated. I presume you’d still have to do the legwork, which is fine.
Atlassian's ecosystem is really good. Nothing is perfect, but we tested Google, Salesforce (horrific, but a _lot_ money in there), Dropbox and MS. Atlassian just hit the sweet spot for us.
Ie. Building this thing where your platform gets essentially free product research data and can decide you are a feature they will build themselves at any time?
Are there agreements in place that provide meaningful protection against this?
Funny enough, I reversed engineered your numbers a few days ago. I guesstimated at least 3 million ARR with 2 - 10 FTEs. From revenue per FTE perspective you have the most impressive numbers I have ever seen!
We have 20k in-maintenance customers. Is the Atlassian marketplace a single point of failure? Yes, that's the main risk. But this is a $2B annual company, it would take time to disappear.
We still have many fingers in many pies. If that revenue stream went we'd be able to bring up $1M a year from one or more of the other marketplaces within 12 months, which is enough to keep us in the black.
The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.
We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.