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My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the e

My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase. It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.

enjo 7y ago
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
- davnicwil 7y ago
  No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
- fpvracing 7y ago
  I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
  - astrodust 7y ago
    This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
TallGuyShort 7y ago
I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet. They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
- davnicwil 7y ago
  Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack. Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
  - justin_RigD 7y ago
    We are all about Slackops! Trying to build a company around it https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd
    - davnicwil 7y ago
      I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).

enjo 7y ago

I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.

davnicwil 7y ago
No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
fpvracing 7y ago
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
- astrodust 7y ago
  This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

TallGuyShort 7y ago

I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet. They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...

davnicwil 7y ago
Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack. Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
- justin_RigD 7y ago
  We are all about Slackops! Trying to build a company around it https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd https://slack.com/apps/AAQ1WT8MD-rigd
  - davnicwil 7y ago
    I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).