Published: 2025-07-21
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It started with pierogi.
Summer 2023. I had just landed in Warsaw to meet the two founders of Warsaw Dynamics — Krzysztof and Kamil — in person for the first time. We sat down at a local Polish restaurant. The kind with mismatched tablecloths and the smell of dill and smoked sausage hanging in the air. Kamil debated between gołąbki and żurek. I went straight for pierogi ruskie.
Between bites, we talked shop.
They told me about their plugins — highly rated, rock-solid additions to the Atlassian ecosystem. My personal favorite was “External Share,” a beautifully simple tool that lets you share Jira or Confluence content with people outside your workspace. It was solving a real problem, and it was making money.
But underneath that success was a quiet bottleneck: no marketing team, no CRM system, no real way to nurture all the incoming trials.
“We’re getting hundreds of users trying the product,” they said, “but we have no real process to support them.”
No brand voice. No automation. No structure. Just great code — and a growing business that was starting to feel the pain of not following up.
The Starting Point: Solid Product, Silent Funnel
At that time, Warsaw Dynamics was already doing over $100K per month through Atlassian. That’s a great place to be. But when you looked closer, most of that revenue came in despite the lack of customer engagement.
There was no social media presence, no onboarding sequences, no insights into who was trialing their products. And most of all — no system in place to prioritize leads or communicate value once the trial clock started ticking.
We started small. Built the brand. Defined their voice. Set up a few basic outbound flows and gave the visual identity a light refresh. Within a few weeks, the lights started to come back on. People were responding to the brand again — because it finally had a pulse.
But the real turning point came when we turned our attention to their CRM.
Building the Brain: Why Zoho Was the Right Fit
There was already a Zoho CRM instance floating around, mostly dormant. After reviewing options like HubSpot or building something custom, we decided to lean into what was already there — and give it a proper brain.
It wasn’t always pretty. Zoho’s UI still has some turn-of-the-millennium vibes. But when you want raw flexibility, especially for a dev-savvy team, it’s a brilliant canvas. And that’s exactly what we needed.
From Trials to Triage: Building the CRM That Thinks
Over the next 18 months, we transformed that half-configured Zoho instance into a highly adaptive, revenue-aware system. Here’s what we built, layer by layer:
🔁 Automated Data Ingestion & Enrichment
- Hourly import of trial data via Atlassian API
- Included: app name, hosting type (cloud vs. data center), user count, license type
- Enriched with: employee count (via LinkedIn/Wiki), estimated revenue, and lead quality scoring
📥 Lead Handling Logic
- All new entries land in the Leads module
- Cloud-hosted leads auto-convert into Deal + Contact + Account
- Server/DC and event leads handled via manual “Mass Convert” for safe triage
- Support for CSV imports from events, meetups, partner uploads
📊 Deal Pipelines (Clear, Segmented, Actionable)
- Direct Sales: auto-fed from cloud trials
- Partner Sales: filtered by known partner resellers
- Manual Conversion: everything else, waiting for human eyes
- Probability-driven expected revenue tracking tied to deal stage
✉️ Automated Email Sequences
- Smart sequences by app and hosting type (0, 4, 8, 24 days)
- First touch (“Email Zero”) designed to get past spam filters
- Lightweight HTML and contextual content, with tracked open rates and template versions
👥 Governance & Roles
- One superadmin (Krzysztof), one system owner (me, later Tomasz)
- Jamale handling daily sales ops
- No staging environment — so we enforced single-point change control
📆 Daily Workflows & Pipeline Monitoring
- Manual review of high-value trials
- Slack-based alerts with screenshots
- CRM exports for cross-referencing with Atlassian backend
And Then… The Revenue Started Climbing
When I first joined in summer 2023, monthly revenue was hovering around the 100K mark. But then things started to shift — slowly at first, then sharply.
You can see it in the chart below.
This graph shows estimated monthly revenue paid by customers through Atlassian, broken down by:
- Cloud monthly (light blue)
- Cloud annually (mint green)
- Data center (pink)
From the moment we got the CRM humming — and combined it with structured outbound messaging, better partner handling, and lead tagging — things moved.
Steady growth through late 2023. A jump in Q1 2024 as pipeline visibility improved. Another step-change in mid-2024 when we fully activated automation and began handling partner leads more aggressively.
By April 2025, just as my engagement ended, monthly revenue had nearly tripled. That wasn’t a fluke — it was the result of building the right foundation, then letting it compound.
What I Learned — and What Others Can Steal
This project reminded me of something simple: great products don’t scale on their own. Even in developer-first ecosystems like Atlassian, communication matters. Context matters. Follow-up really matters.
We didn’t run big paid campaigns. We didn’t overcomplicate things. We just put structure in place:
- So the sales team knew who to talk to
- So every trial user got the info they needed — without being chased manually
- So partners got a clean handoff and visibility
- So the founders could finally see what was happening in their own funnel
And that made all the difference.
Final Thoughts
The engagement was supposed to last six months. It turned into eighteen.
Not because we kept adding scope — but because we kept seeing results. And when things are working, you keep going.
I’m proud of what we built together. A brand, a system, a structure that made sense — and that scaled. Warsaw Dynamics has a strong team and even stronger products. Now, they also have the backbone to support serious growth.
And to think… it all started over a plate of pierogi.
