ITDatabase uses Salesforce.com. We also use a number of Atlassian products. They sell completely different types of products. Salesforce.com is publicly traded and persistently in the spotlight. Atlassian is private and based in Australia. So comparisons are truly apples to oranges in many respects.
I wrote previously about three things Atlassian could teach Salesforce.com about building web applications. Now I just wanted to share a couple of words – as a customer of both companies – on why I will be attending Atlassian’s Starter Day event, but won’t be attending Salesforce’s DreamForce event.
When I visit the DreamForce web site (or see any email marketing from Salesforce.com about any of its events), it smacks of a vanity exercise to me. The thrust of the events always seem to be Salesforce.com describing some crystal palace (”cloud computing” or otherwise) and Marc Beniof bloviating. That formula has worked very well for them in getting publicity. But why would I (or our employees) spend a full day out of the office to hear some long-winded advertorial from a vendor that we already pay? At face value, little of the marketing language of Salesforce.com’s events speaks to me as a user of their product, OR to the specific challenges and opportunities that we face as a start-up. Salesforce.com is a great company with great revenues (and I am just a pipsqueak small software startup founder, so what do I know?), but just sayin’ that I find the hubris in their marketing approach very off-putting in general. They absolutely ran circles around Siebel in PR and marketing in their rise to the top – but now the posturing often seems disingenuous and pointless. The product has changed very little in the three years I’ve been using it, and I’m often wondering why as a start-up we had to subscribe to the “enterprise” version to get the degree of functionality that we needed.
This morning I got an invite from Atlassian to a startup event they are hosting in San Francisco in June.
“We won’t be talking about Atlassian products at this event. Instead, we thought it would be cool to run an event that is about the business of startups.”
Quite a difference. A company whose products are so kick-ass that they have every reason to throw a bunch of hubris around. But instead they are coming from a humble and helpful position, and just giving away great, highly relevant content.
Look at this speaker / topic lineup:
- Nathan Stoll, Founder, Aardvark (Google) on User-Centered Design
- Avner Ronen, CEO and Founder, Boxee on Questioning Everything
- Mike Volpe, VP, Hubspot on Non-traditional Marketing
- Steve Ginsberg, VP, Pandora on Operations and Scaling
- Glenn Kelman, CEO, Redfin on Iterating the Idea
- Jochen Frey, CTO, ScoutLabs on 3 Things Every Dev Team should Know
- Mike Cannon-Brooks and Scott Farquhar, CEO and Founders, Atlassian, on the Art of the Bootstrap
- Just added: Mike Arrington, Founder, TechCrunch
Throw in the fact that they choose an expensive venue but are only charging Atlassian customers $10 to attend (it’s currently $799 for the “Early Bird Special” for Dreamforce). The content is highly relevant to us as a start-up. The gesture itself is generous (and they are clearly eating the costs of producing the event instead of trying to turn a quick buck).
One feels like I’m being invited to pay a lot of money to hear a lot of grandstanding and visionary rhetoric aimed at A-tier business press in attendence. The other feels like a genuine invitation to an interesting and useful event by a company whose products evolve at a high rate and are very tied to the pulse of what we actually need.
Posted by David Deans
May 21, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Travis,
I wasn’t familiar with your company, but while reviewing data about the Lightreading site on Compete.com I discovered that your database sends more traffic to that publication than Google.
Naturally, I decided to learn more about your business model. Very interesting, indeed.
David Deans
Business Technology Roundtable
Posted by BillBo
June 8, 2010 at 6:18 am
talk about bloviating…
they’re not eating the costs, the sponsors are. and as it’s a small part of their larger conference (which only had 350 attendees last year) you’re still not talking about much of anything.
the moment you get as large as salesforce, people attending don’t want to go hear about top ten lists from other suppliers, they want to see where their favorite parts of a product suite are headed and be assured the company will be around in future.
Posted by Travis Van
June 8, 2010 at 9:29 am
Well, you’re probably right that my take that they were eating the costs was way overstated. I’m sure the partners are indeed shouldering a lot of that cost.
But my main point was that from a content perspective, one of those events was interesting to me at face value to attend, and the other was not.