One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups. I was at a startup, we used a

One thing that can’t hurt is that Stewart Butterfield is well connected, and got all his friends to push Slack at their startups. I was at a startup, we used a mix of Hipchat (business types) and IRC (developers). A marketing/social media guy who was buddies with Stewart joined and insisted we should all switch to this, and there we were, dogfooding Slack (this was closed beta days). Hard to beat free user acquisition.