Atlassian

Atlassian built a $50 billion software company with no sales team. In an industry where enterprise software companies spend 40 to 50% of revenue on sales and marketing. Atlassian spends around 20%. When Mike Cannon Brooks and Scott Farqua founded the company in Sydney in 2002 with $10,000 on a credit card, they could not afford salespeople. So they built products good enough that customers sold themselves. They called it product-led growth before that term even existed. The model works like this. A developer downloads JIRA or Confluence for free or for a tiny amount. They use it. Their team starts using it. Their department adopts it. Eventually, the entire organization is running on the company's products and someone in procurement formalizes the contract. The sale happened bottom-up, driven by the users, not top-down, driven by a salesperson playing golf with the CIO.