Just over three years ago, we embarked on a journey with a simple goal in mind. The software world was moving quickly in the direction of rented servers, hosted solutions, and outsourced vendors, all in service of allowing teams and companies to move quicker and to be more nimble than ever before. What used to be built and maintained internally was now delegated to other services or vendors.
And although every service provider and vendor strives for perfect uptime and operations, the data around availability tell us what we already know. Unexpected problems happen, and they happen to everyone. From Amazon Web Services, to Salesforce, to Comcast phone service this week, nobody is safe from things going wrong (even Pokemon Go!).
This new world was great, but it was missing a core component in the relationship between companies and their service vendors. That component, of course, was status communication.
Before we got started, status communication was very costly to build and maintain, and in most cases just didn’t exist. Our simple goal was to provide the ability for every software company in the world to build and maintain their own custom status page. Having felt this pain ourselves, we were as equipped as anyone to build the right solution, and the timing couldn’t have been better. From a handful of customers in early 2013 to thousands of customers today, it’s been amazing to watch all different types of companies build trust with their customers and their colleagues, saving everyone lots of time and money in the process.
Today, we’re super excited to announce that we’re joining forces with Atlassian to accelerate our progress and our continued march toward transparency across the web.
Why Atlassian
Whether you know it or not, chances are you’ve used a product built by an Atlassian customer. Companies from eBay to NASA use their software to ship great products. They were an early Statuspage customer, and have always been a strong Statuspage advocate. They understand that building software isn’t just about shipping features, but also about providing a reliable service and being transparent with users when things don’t go as planned – it’s why we’re a natural extension to their suite of products. Most importantly, when we explored the opportunity to join Atlassian, we were aligned on three important things: our complementary cultures, our desire to offer Statuspage as a standalone product, and our shared vision of the future of software.
Product vision
Three years ago, we pitched our big vision as building the status layer of the internet. As developers and users of many SaaS products ourselves, we understood the pain of not having access to the status of your mission-critical tools. Statuspage would be our first step in solving that problem by allowing companies to transparently communicate with their users. The more we saw customers joining the platform over the past few years, the more apparent the need for the status layer of the internet became. The usage of our product speaks volumes to this as we’ve also tracked an increase in per-customer usage as time has gone on.
In just 3 years:
- The number of incidents created per customer each month has increased 3x
- The number of email and SMS subscribers signing up each month has increased 5x
- We now send over 8 million email and SMS notifications per month to subscribers of all of our status pages
Our data confirm that the number of affected customers will only continue to grow as companies move away from building software and infrastructure in-house, choosing instead to invest in best-of-breed hosted services. Any one outage has the possibility to domino through a chain of thousands of affected services and millions of end users.
Given these big ambitions, the clear market need, and Atlassian’s commitment to investing in our product and customers, we knew they were the right partner to help us execute on this vision.
Culture and values
From day one we’ve been dead set on building a sustainable, profitable company where we enjoy coming to work every day. We established our 6 core values in 2015 to help guide our decision making when it comes to hiring, product, day-to-day interactions, and now joining up with Atlassian. We’ve always admired how Atlassian has grown profitably over the years by focusing on building great products within a culture centered around customer trust. One of their core values is (literally) “don’t #@!% the customer”! In a world of unicorns, amazing burn rates, and grow-at-all-costs cultures, there isn’t a better company we could have chosen to join.
What’s Next?
The Denver team will be moving to San Francisco and all employees will be relocating to Atlassian’s San Francisco office to continue working on Statuspage within Atlassian. We’ll also be given some internal engineering resources to accelerate the integration process.
While nothing will be changing with any customer accounts, we’ve put together this FAQ article to answer common questions that may arise. Over time, you’ll see us building tight integrations across Atlassian’s collaboration stack, so there’s never been a better time to check out Atlassian’s products! If you’re a current Atlassian customer and have your own ideas about what integrations would be useful, just give us a shout at hi@statuspage.io.
A truly heartfelt thanks to all of our team, customers, and partners for helping us get to this point. It’s been a great first three years for us, and we’re excited for continued success at our new home.
Sincerely,
Scott, Steve, Danny
Statuspage Co-founders
This post was originally published on the Statuspage blog in 2016.