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This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyo

This is one of those recent tech success stories that just leave me scratching my head. I simply can't understand the value Slack is bringing and why would anyone pay for an absolutely metoo product. They are either deviously smart or the market is in full bubble mode.

ryandrake 8y ago
After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply: 1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors. 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. 3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR. 4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.
- addicted 8y ago
  Facebook and Instagram make money and have lots of data. I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot. Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work. I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.
- phailhaus 8y ago
  > 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.
- bumholio 8y ago
  I can understand Facebook and Instagram, they can make money by using strong network effects. It's essentially the same thing Microsoft did, monetize a common platform and exploit the lock in effect. But Slack largely lacks that. A startup might setup a free Slack instance, then run into its limitations and pay for extra service. But aside from some institutional inertia, nothing stops a company from switching. You don't need Slack to reach your public, unlike say Facebook. It's a chat tool, an average one, and you can easily migrate out of it. As a repository for essential business knowledge, Slack is not a good solution and could even be harmful compared to things like a wiki or documents stored in a revision control system. And as a pure SaaS offering, there is no way in hell Slack is worth $7 billion. You can replicate its functionality for less than $100 million, and get native, fast apps. There must be something else, but I just don't see it.

ryandrake 8y ago

After Facebook and Instagram I pretty much gave up and stopped trying to figure it out. Maybe I’m a dinosaur but I don’t get the appeal of most software products that have come out in the last decade. It seems the formula is simply: 1. Spend investor money faster than your competitors. 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. 3. Load up on hype, marketing. And buzz/PR. 4. Once you have a critical mass of users, lock them in.

addicted 8y ago
Facebook and Instagram make money and have lots of data. I thought the $100bn valuation for them was low and turns out that was right because they had acquired all this data for free. Data which at the time no one valued (and even today don’t value enough) but was worth a lot. Slack has lots of data, but if they try to monetize it, I suspect they will lose a lot of their users (the data they have is what people would consider private, while the whole point of the data shared on Facebook/instagram is to make it public). And I suspect their avenues for making money are closing out. O365 users get Teams for free, and it’s only a matter of time before Google includes something equivalent in Google Apps for Work. I suspect Slack’s best bets for justifying their valuation is hoping Google buys them out or includes Slack in a Apps for Work tier, or if they’re really lucky, Amazon decides they truly want to make a play for the enterprise communications market and buy Slack as the centerpiece for that.
phailhaus 8y ago
> 2. Don’t worry about the product quality, just make sure it has chat and that the chat is incompatible with the 200 other chat apps out there. You are fooling yourself here. For all the snarky hate Slack gets around here, it's far better designed than any chat app I've had to use so far. It's for work, it doesn't have to be compatible with other chat apps (in fact, that would be a security issue). Searching through your history Just Works, integrations Just Work, and user-friendly features like reactions make it more fun to use (and prevent cluttering up chats with unnecessary chatter). The fact that Slack was able to destroy its established competitors should give you a hint that they're doing something right. People like using slack. My friends have made their own workspaces with it just to keep in touch, because it's so well designed.
bumholio 8y ago
I can understand Facebook and Instagram, they can make money by using strong network effects. It's essentially the same thing Microsoft did, monetize a common platform and exploit the lock in effect. But Slack largely lacks that. A startup might setup a free Slack instance, then run into its limitations and pay for extra service. But aside from some institutional inertia, nothing stops a company from switching. You don't need Slack to reach your public, unlike say Facebook. It's a chat tool, an average one, and you can easily migrate out of it. As a repository for essential business knowledge, Slack is not a good solution and could even be harmful compared to things like a wiki or documents stored in a revision control system. And as a pure SaaS offering, there is no way in hell Slack is worth $7 billion. You can replicate its functionality for less than $100 million, and get native, fast apps. There must be something else, but I just don't see it.