That's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.
Jira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought.
If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good.
But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
Yea, it's so customizable, that every complaint about "Jira" is usually actually a complaint about how the person's organization has deliberately set up Jira. Jira workflows can be configured to be amazing, or they can be configured to be the ninth circle of hell.
The last time I used Jira, the CTO who decided he should be the project manager had made a ticket category named "Category".
He also put all hardware and software issues into the same sprint "to work as one team", except the hardware issues had very little to do with the software issues; also, the hardware people never updated their tickets, so each sprint just had the same 40-50 spam messages for which you had to create custom filters to avoid.
He also changed the issue sizing mechanism once in a while. So we'd have hours, t-shirts, and Fibonacci numbers (including some odd non-Fibonacci numbers that "seemed right").
I would always prefer a less feature-rich issue tracker with sane defaults.
Linear.app, GitHub Projects, post-its on the back wall of an antisocial project lead, anything other than Jira. It just attracts people who think "Category" is a good category.
Once you get venture cap, there’s no turning back…
Kago can do this because they bootstrapped it.
From their website:
Kagi was bootstrapped from 2018 to 2023 with ~$3M initial funding from the founder. In 2023, Kagi raised $670K from Kagi users in its first external fundraise, followed by $1.88M raised in 2024, again from our users, bringing the number of users-investors to 93.
Kagi launched in June 2022 and we maintain a public page tracking real-time Kagi growth and usage statistics at kagi.com/stats.
In early 2024, Kagi became a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC).
