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Slack makes a ton of money and it is unimaginable to me (and many others) that it's not going to be a massive force. It has been a revelation to literally every

Slack makes a ton of money and it is unimaginable to me (and many others) that it's not going to be a massive force. It has been a revelation to literally every entrepreneur I know - and I'm from Virginia not SV (although I recently moved to NYC - same deal). Now that it has established itself beyond almost any doubt, its INVESTORS have established an $80M bet around those who make the company a core component of their strategy. Slack, which has very low burn, seems to have contributed to this fund but we can safely assume it was a small amount (if at all). This is a sign of strength. We're still creating transformational companies with real revenue models, and these companies often facilitate other great companies. Tech is strong - valuations may be wrong one way or another, but tech is a great place to deploy capital.

michael_fine 11y ago
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
- burkestar 11y ago
  I think comparing feature for feature isn't the right way to understand why Slack is a disruptive innovation. Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.
  - mariusmg 11y ago
    You definetly work in PR. You have the quality of taking something trivial and describing it as if it is a big deal.
- johnmaguire2013 11y ago
  The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
  - fludlight 11y ago
    > a giant log for everything in your company The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
    - mh- 11y ago
      big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements. there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this. https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en
  - halostatue 11y ago
    I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
    - Ayaz 11y ago
      Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.
      - halostatue 11y ago
- tomasien 11y ago
  Hipchat is awful and Slack is phenomenal. I mean I know that probably isn't what you want to hear but it's so hard to describe it any other way. UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.
  - Hupriene 11y ago
    At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else. EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
    - Shog9 11y ago
      Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough. Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
  - ssmoot 11y ago
    Once you add history to Slack, it's performance is just awful. One of the worst performing apps I use. It can take over a second to switch rooms. If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there. Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately. At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?
- 33degrees 11y ago
  As someone who has used both, I really prefer Slack; it feels like a more polished product
- Fishkins 11y ago
  For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used. [0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now. [1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
  - vacri 11y ago
    For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded. A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications. Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
    - endymi0n 11y ago
      Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.
- ladzoppelin 11y ago
  Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.
studentrob 11y ago
With free self-hosted open source alternatives like Rocket Chat and Mattermost entering the scene, along with easy internal installation from Sandstorm, does a new business really need Slack?
- notatoad 11y ago
  It does if there's a whole ecosystem of bots and services built on top of slack that don't run on the alternatives.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    For sure! I wonder which services people love in Slack that aren't available in Rocket Chat. So far in this thread there aren't many details. Bots are mentioned, and that's available in Rocket Chat too via Hubot.
- robzyb 11y ago
  > does a new business really need Slack? How many man-hours am I going to spend fracking around Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Sandstorm? I think I'd much prefer just paying Slack to worry about that for my hypothetical new business with 10 employees. 6.67 * 10 * 12 = $800/annum. Peanuts. Especially compared to the value of my time or my employees time.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    Less than 30 minutes for your tech team. 1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io https://install.sandstorm.io | bash) 2) Install Rocket Chat (one click) 3) Set up a domain. Done Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
    - nkozyra 11y ago
      This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.

michael_fine 11y ago

Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.

burkestar 11y ago
I think comparing feature for feature isn't the right way to understand why Slack is a disruptive innovation. Often it's an innovation along some other dimension - process, business model, etc. In this case it's Slack's business model and "platform" strategy. Other tools like HipChat were just that, a tool. Slack is a platform in the sense that it enables businesses and developers to leverage and extend the platform, thereby adding additional value to the platform. This leads to so-called "Network Effects" where as more apps are built on the platform, the more valuable the platform and the more likely others will want to build on that platform, etc. in a virtuous cycle.
- mariusmg 11y ago
  You definetly work in PR. You have the quality of taking something trivial and describing it as if it is a big deal.
johnmaguire2013 11y ago
The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
- fludlight 11y ago
  > a giant log for everything in your company The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
  - mh- 11y ago
    big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements. there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this. https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en https://support.google.com/vault/answer/2462365?hl=en
- halostatue 11y ago
  I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangouts was used by everyone else).
  - Ayaz 11y ago
    Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.
    - halostatue 11y ago
tomasien 11y ago
Hipchat is awful and Slack is phenomenal. I mean I know that probably isn't what you want to hear but it's so hard to describe it any other way. UX/integrations/apps/speed/etc might all be the answer but it was visceral for me.
- Hupriene 11y ago
  At least on Windows slack has pretty terrible performance. I wish i could go back to hipchat. I regularly experience perceptible lag when typing, which doesn't happen anywhere else. EDIT: This is a fairly recent problem. A month or two ago, I had never experienced this.
  - Shog9 11y ago
    Not recent. May have gotten worse, but last I tried it was heavier than hangouts; yeah, text chat chewing up more cpu than streaming video. Pretty rough. Folks on Macs had no idea what I was complaining about though. Go fig.
- ssmoot 11y ago
  Once you add history to Slack, it's performance is just awful. One of the worst performing apps I use. It can take over a second to switch rooms. If I have to cycle through 4 rooms to get to the conversation I want, it can take seconds just to Option+UpArrow there. Plus I can't manually reorder rooms as I like. I don't get why everyone talks about the Slack UX. Slack has snippets. Which I find mostly useless. Especially since they kill performance. But HipChat lets you reorder rooms as you see fit. Which is something I actually used and miss desperately. At least Slack has finally gotten rid of the useless Channel vs Group distinction?
33degrees 11y ago
As someone who has used both, I really prefer Slack; it feels like a more polished product
Fishkins 11y ago
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's way better than any comparable product I've used. [0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't give them any credit for having it now. [1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app would never give a notification.
- vacri 11y ago
  For me, one of the reasons why I don't like Slack is that in moving to Slack from Hipchat, I lost configurability in notifications. Slack chat window notifications are terrible. They consume immense amounts of space, and yet aren't clearly colour-coded for relevance. Hipchat notifications were tight and concise, and could be clearly colour-coded. A pattern I have seen in Slack that never happened in Hipchat is "Let's put notifications into the channel" > "ugh, this channel is impossible to talk in because of the notifications! let's create a new channel with no notifications". Kind've kills the point of notifications. Aside: does 'notifications' need to become 'n10ns'?
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?
  - endymi0n 11y ago
    Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.
ladzoppelin 11y ago
Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.

studentrob 11y ago

With free self-hosted open source alternatives like Rocket Chat and Mattermost entering the scene, along with easy internal installation from Sandstorm, does a new business really need Slack?

notatoad 11y ago
It does if there's a whole ecosystem of bots and services built on top of slack that don't run on the alternatives.
- studentrob 11y ago
  For sure! I wonder which services people love in Slack that aren't available in Rocket Chat. So far in this thread there aren't many details. Bots are mentioned, and that's available in Rocket Chat too via Hubot.
robzyb 11y ago
> does a new business really need Slack? How many man-hours am I going to spend fracking around Rocket Chat, Mattermost, and Sandstorm? I think I'd much prefer just paying Slack to worry about that for my hypothetical new business with 10 employees. 6.67 * 10 * 12 = $800/annum. Peanuts. Especially compared to the value of my time or my employees time.
- studentrob 11y ago
  Less than 30 minutes for your tech team. 1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io https://install.sandstorm.io | bash) 2) Install Rocket Chat (one click) 3) Set up a domain. Done Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
  - nkozyra 11y ago
    This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.