Meet Julia Wester, CEO and co-founder of 55 Degrees, who's built a thriving business from within the Atlassian ecosystem over the past 13 years. In this episode of The Ecosystem Experience, we explore the realities of building a company when most of your revenue depends on someone else's platform... and why that's both the biggest opportunity and the greatest risk you'll ever take.
Julia takes us back to 2012 when she and her husband Daniel started after his 15 years building internal plugins at Turner Broadcasting. They weren't business people, but they knew Jira, Confluence, and the Atlassian ecosystem inside out. The marketplace handled payments, VAT, currency conversions, and all the complexity they didn't want to build themselves. It seemed like an easy, safer way to start. They had no idea how right that decision would be.
We discuss the uncomfortable truth every ecosystem partner faces: the platform could build your features tomorrow and you wouldn't know until your revenue drops. Julia's refreshingly honest about this dependency risk whilst being deeply grateful for what the Atlassian ecosystem has enabled. She shares how 55 Degrees is actively diversifying into Azure DevOps and other platforms, not just for growth, but for survival... because you can't have all your eggs in one basket when that basket belongs to someone else.
From acquiring their first app that already had ecosystem presence to learning that you can't just copy-paste solutions between platforms, Julia reveals the investment required to enter new ecosystems properly. We explore why platform-native development matters, how trust between partners and vendors is fragile (one social media leak can ruin it for everyone), and why vendors can't always communicate early... because not all partners have proven trustworthy with confidential information.
Julia pulls back the curtain on the reality of running an ecosystem business: herding squirrels from Slack and a dozen other places, managing teams across time zones, and relying on a heavily customised personal Trello board to "get her shit together" when everything else fails. She emphasises that whilst the commercial opportunities are real, the relationships and community connections are what make ecosystems truly special... even when you're celebrating Christmas together in Sweden.
Whether you're considering building in an ecosystem, already generating revenue from one, or managing partner relationships at a platform company, Julia offers hard-won wisdom on balancing dependency with opportunity, investing in ecosystem knowledge before rushing in, and why understanding the humans behind the business models matters just as much as the commercial metrics.