Back after 2 years: from building Atlassian apps for clients to shipping our own
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Hi everyone, I'm Vitalii, founder of Varbintech. For 4+ years, my team and I have built Atlassian Marketplace apps for clients across Europe, the US, and Australia.
I've been quiet here for about two years. Now we're building our own Forge app for Confluence (Jira support is on our radar), designed to handle large amounts of table data and connect to external APIs.
The biggest mindset shift so far: on client projects, the spec was given (in most cases). Now I have to decide what NOT to build, and that's harder than the code.
For anyone who has built a product inside someone else's ecosystem (e.g. Microsoft, Atlassian, Shopify, Salesforce, etc.), what do you wish you had validated before writing the first line of code?
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Welcome back, Vitalii! My answer to your question comes from a product that died of it: validate that your access to the platform is official and documented, not just working. My first music app generated songs through an unofficial wrapper around another company's model, which had no public API, only a curated partner program. When the wrapper broke, the app broke, and there was nobody to call. The rebuild has a rule at the top of the project: no unofficial APIs, ever, and a second engine from another company behind the first. Forge is official, so you are past the worst version of this, but I would still check what you rely on that the platform only tolerates rather than documents.
Thanks, George, for the details and sorry about the music app.
You're right that Atlassian Forge itself is official. For us, the risk sits on the other side: the external APIs we pull data from. We've already researched that and found a solution.
The bigger unknown for me is the first release. We've built many Marketplace apps for clients, but this will be the first under our own name. Atlassian doesn't yet know us as a vendor, so we may face deeper checks during review. Hopefully it goes smoothly.
Have you been through a marketplace or app store review as a new vendor? Is there anything you wish you'd prepared earlier?
@vitalii_rybka Yes, App Store and Google Play, and the thing I would prepare earliest is the reviewer's account. The reviewers need a way in that does not depend on our email, so they get dedicated accounts, and those accounts must show what a new user sees: the paywall and the free credits the store notes promise, nothing unlocked, because exercising the purchase flow is most of what review checks. The trap is that the accounts are shared and get used up, so I read both balances before every submission; once a reviewer account had dropped to 4 credits, not enough for one song. The other one: write review notes that say exactly where each paid or unusual feature is, so nobody has to hunt for it.
Super useful, thanks, George!
Dedicated reviewer setup + notes pointing to every unusual feature. Both will go into our checklist for the Atlassian submission.
Welcome back to Product Hunt! I'd check what happens to your users if the platform changes the rules. I learned that as a user: a browser I relied on every day was shut down, and I ended up building my own replacement. On what not to build, my rule is simple. I don't build anything I wouldn't use myself, because then I can't tell what customers actually need.
Thanks, Hisashi! Platform rule changes are a real part of our world. Atlassian changes things fairly often: we've helped clients move from Server and Data Center to Cloud apps on Connect, and now to Forge. Forge looks like the long-term direction, and Atlassian keeps investing heavily in its ecosystem and events, which gives us some confidence.
I like your "would I use it myself" rule. For us, working with large amounts of table data in Confluence is a real lifesaver. The catch in B2B is that the admin who approves an app and the team using it daily often want different things, so we test with both.
Which browser was it? Curious what you built to replace it.