Atlassian

Atlassian built a fifty billion dollar software company with no sales team. In an industry where enterprise software companies spend forty to fifty percent of revenue on sales and marketing, Atlassian spends around twenty percent. When Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded the company in Sydney in 2002 with ten thousand dollars 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 company is running on Atlassian products and someone in procurement formalises the contract. The sale happened bottom up, driven by the users, not top down driven by a salesperson playing golf with the CIO.