4 ms·

Stewart Butterfield and Slack

64 points by replicatorblog 12y ago

kylelibra 12y ago
I didn't realize he was also a co-founder of Flickr. Interesting article. Anyone know how Slack's MAU compares to Hipchat's?
rkuykendall-com 12y ago
I think this article completely misses the value of Slack. It's IRC made easy. Very easy, and that makes it very valuable. It's like the iPod, which did everything MP3 players already did, but without being a pain in the ass.
- thinkingkong 12y ago
  Except it's not an article about how amazing Slack is. It's an article on Slack's founder - Stewart. You're coming at the "value add" from a very technical perspective. Which is fine, but it doesn't add weight to the argument. Do you think that a significant percentage of Slacks user base even really know it's based on IRC? Not too many of them are firing up irssi, pining for a better web based IRC client. Indeed irccloud has been around longer than slack and has nowhere near the adoption. The product is solid. The brand is great. Nobody* gives a shit about the protocol sitting behind the glossy surface. *Nobody meaning a significant percentage of paying customers.
- dakotasmith 12y ago
  I think the value of Slack is in how platform agnostic the whole experience is. I have use it on a Nexus 5, iPhone 5c, iPad, in a browser (both IE and Chrome on Windows) and as a native OS X application. All work exactly the same way, and all have the same feature set. Push notifications let conversations happen in real-time. You can turn off Jira, Github, Trello notifications and set up integrations in Slack, create #firehose channel, and now you have corralled all those announcements into one spot. If only I could get the other members of my team to use it, I could maybe talk about its chat features.
- mountaineer 12y ago
  couldn't you say the same thing about hipchat, hall, etc?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
danso 12y ago
> “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do. Oy, hurts to read this. I've been a satisfied Flickr-Pro customer for about five years now, and I'm happy to see the recent cosmetic improvements it's had in the last year...but it sorely needed someone with Butterfield's "mundane" vision to really get the logistics and details right...there was no reason for it to take a backseat to Instagram (though really, it's hard to beat the overall social package that Facebook brings to photos)...The fact that I'm OK with Flickr even though much of its functionality/structure has remained virtually unchanged since 2009 goes to show how fairly solid it is/was.
jonas21 12y ago
> At $7 per user per month, the paid version of Slack is expensive. Really? $7 per user per month sounds very cheap for business software, considering how much you're already paying that user in salary and benefits.
- fps 12y ago
  compared to the other software out there that does the same thing, it's very expensive: - Hipchat: $2/user/month - Campfire: $1/user/month - Flowdock: $3/user/month - IRCCloud: $5/user/month I've trialed slack, and it's Hipchat (or IRC) with a point and click configurable hubot. The price goes up as you add more features/integrations to the bot. I didn't really see any other important or useful features that hipchat doesn't already have, certainly not worth the added expense.
  - harryh 12y ago
    Every time I see Foursquare's monthly bill for Slack I think of some quote (possibly from pg?) about how to price enterprise software. He said that you know you have the right price when customers complain about it....but still pay. Then I show my grudging respect the slack team. I don't like their pricing. But I'm still paying.
nobodysfool 12y ago
One thing that Stewart Butterfield did that changed the web was www.the5k.org. http://www.the5k.org/about.php http://www.the5k.org/about.php They made people rethink what can be done with the web, and it brought out a lot of creativity. For example: My favorite was the 2001 entry "fully functional 5k calendar". https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.the5k.org/502/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.th... What was great about these is that they had functionality. It was the start of client side web-apps. I think without that contest website, a lot of these great creators wouldn't have gotten the recognition that they have now.
dharma1 12y ago
We use IRC at work (and I've been using it since mid 90s) but I think there's definitely a demand for a more modern, friendly web based group chat app. Using hipchat with my startups at the moment and that's working pretty nicely. Flowdock also looks great and I want them to succeed since they are Finnish! Slack looks alright and I've been using it for a couple of days now - but agree with the commenters below, I can't see much difference between it and hipchat or Flowdock

I didn't realize he was also a co-founder of Flickr. Interesting article. Anyone know how Slack's MAU compares to Hipchat's?

rkuykendall-com 12y ago

I think this article completely misses the value of Slack. It's IRC made easy. Very easy, and that makes it very valuable. It's like the iPod, which did everything MP3 players already did, but without being a pain in the ass.

thinkingkong 12y ago
Except it's not an article about how amazing Slack is. It's an article on Slack's founder - Stewart. You're coming at the "value add" from a very technical perspective. Which is fine, but it doesn't add weight to the argument. Do you think that a significant percentage of Slacks user base even really know it's based on IRC? Not too many of them are firing up irssi, pining for a better web based IRC client. Indeed irccloud has been around longer than slack and has nowhere near the adoption. The product is solid. The brand is great. Nobody* gives a shit about the protocol sitting behind the glossy surface. *Nobody meaning a significant percentage of paying customers.
dakotasmith 12y ago
I think the value of Slack is in how platform agnostic the whole experience is. I have use it on a Nexus 5, iPhone 5c, iPad, in a browser (both IE and Chrome on Windows) and as a native OS X application. All work exactly the same way, and all have the same feature set. Push notifications let conversations happen in real-time. You can turn off Jira, Github, Trello notifications and set up integrations in Slack, create #firehose channel, and now you have corralled all those announcements into one spot. If only I could get the other members of my team to use it, I could maybe talk about its chat features.
mountaineer 12y ago
couldn't you say the same thing about hipchat, hall, etc?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

danso 12y ago

> “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, deals just weren’t happening. All his advisers and investors told him to go for it. It was hard to know what to do. Oy, hurts to read this. I've been a satisfied Flickr-Pro customer for about five years now, and I'm happy to see the recent cosmetic improvements it's had in the last year...but it sorely needed someone with Butterfield's "mundane" vision to really get the logistics and details right...there was no reason for it to take a backseat to Instagram (though really, it's hard to beat the overall social package that Facebook brings to photos)...The fact that I'm OK with Flickr even though much of its functionality/structure has remained virtually unchanged since 2009 goes to show how fairly solid it is/was.

jonas21 12y ago

> At $7 per user per month, the paid version of Slack is expensive. Really? $7 per user per month sounds very cheap for business software, considering how much you're already paying that user in salary and benefits.

fps 12y ago
compared to the other software out there that does the same thing, it's very expensive: - Hipchat: $2/user/month - Campfire: $1/user/month - Flowdock: $3/user/month - IRCCloud: $5/user/month I've trialed slack, and it's Hipchat (or IRC) with a point and click configurable hubot. The price goes up as you add more features/integrations to the bot. I didn't really see any other important or useful features that hipchat doesn't already have, certainly not worth the added expense.
- harryh 12y ago
  Every time I see Foursquare's monthly bill for Slack I think of some quote (possibly from pg?) about how to price enterprise software. He said that you know you have the right price when customers complain about it....but still pay. Then I show my grudging respect the slack team. I don't like their pricing. But I'm still paying.

nobodysfool 12y ago

One thing that Stewart Butterfield did that changed the web was www.the5k.org. http://www.the5k.org/about.php http://www.the5k.org/about.php They made people rethink what can be done with the web, and it brought out a lot of creativity. For example: My favorite was the 2001 entry "fully functional 5k calendar". https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.the5k.org/502/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021027194935/http://entries.th... What was great about these is that they had functionality. It was the start of client side web-apps. I think without that contest website, a lot of these great creators wouldn't have gotten the recognition that they have now.

dharma1 12y ago

We use IRC at work (and I've been using it since mid 90s) but I think there's definitely a demand for a more modern, friendly web based group chat app. Using hipchat with my startups at the moment and that's working pretty nicely. Flowdock also looks great and I want them to succeed since they are Finnish! Slack looks alright and I've been using it for a couple of days now - but agree with the commenters below, I can't see much difference between it and hipchat or Flowdock