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From 0 to $1B – Slack's Founder Shares Their Launch Strategy

• mgr86 12y ago
  Everytime I see something about Slack i immediately think of SlackWare.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • gcb0 12y ago
    and you are probably being downvoted for the kiddies that grew up with mac books pro that think it is beautiful to pay for an overpriced IRC server with a nice web interface. well, let me join a fellow slacker. let the downvotes rain :)
    • thecatspaw 12y ago
      its more than irc. as written in the article it also has great search and file sharing. what makes it for me is beeing able to read messages which have been sent when I was not offline (admitedly possible with a irc bouncer), and not having join and part messages the whole time.
      • gcb0 12y ago
        you never used any modern irc server then.
  • lanstein 12y ago
    Especially since I always called Slackware 'Slack'
    • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
      It's not just you, it's pretty much the standard semi-official shorthand for it.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• pkaye 12y ago
  I though it was $1B is sales. Instead it is just valuation.
  • antidaily 12y ago
    You did??
    • avinashv 12y ago
      I don't see why that's such a surprise. I thought the same for a split-second.
• logicuce 12y ago
  The team is great and clearly shows in the product they have built. However, at current pricing I would rate them expensive. Other enterprise offerings which go by per user pricing, like Google Apps, are much affordable for instance. I hope with time their economics work out and they could offer more affordable plans.
  • mahyarm 12y ago
    The thing is, as far as firms go, $5/employee is nothing compared to how much an actual employee costs. It might as well be free if it makes communication better.
    • IkmoIkmo 12y ago
      Agreed. And for startup teams where $50 a month for 5 friends is a lot, it's 'limited' free version isn't very limited at all.
    • logicuce 12y ago
      There are people for whom even $100/mo/user would not be a big deal but then there are bootstrapped businesses in 3rd world countries with lots of non tech part time employees (I want all of them on same communication medium). For them its not an easy decision. This is not to claim Slack is pricing it utterly wrong. Of course they have their target audience and should do things best for their business.
  • simonw 12y ago
    Being expensive is how they got to revenue that supports a billion dollar valuation in such a short time.
• beering 12y ago
  This really, really reads like an advertisement. It's not a short article, but the little useful information in it is buried amongst a lot of self-congratulatory quotes. Slack is just one of many team chat apps. Maybe the secret to their traction is that they can get so many fluffy articles written about them?
  • mercer 12y ago
    It does read a bit like an advertisement, but I must admit that if I would write an article about Slack it might 'sound' similar. For me, Slack has a quality similar to Trello and a few other products and devices I have: I 'enjoy' using it so much (and I'm not using that word lightly) that it makes me actively 'market' it despite the fact that I have no stake in Slack's success other than being able to use it with more clients/teams/friends. It's like finally I can use IRC with non-techies. I truly think that's a testament to the quality of the product, because I haven't read many articles or advertorials about Slack. I just started using it and started convincing everyone around me to use it. that said, if the intent of the article was journalism, toning it down would've probably still been a good idea.
  • nissimk 12y ago
    That was one of the tidbits buried in the article: The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together. Sounds like they don't spend that much money on advertising, but a bunch on PR and social media. And later they also point out how they use customer service as another marketing opportunity.
    • calinet6 12y ago
      An extremely unified, well-designed, and likable marketing story and brand really helps them. Again, I think the holistic quality at play throughout the organization is being greatly underplayed.
• whichfawkes 12y ago
  I like Slack, because I can rely on non-technical people to use it, but if I'm working with people who actually know what they're doing, I don't see the advantage over IRC. For free, it's a great service. For $5/mo it's a great service...but for $5/mo/user, it's pretty pricey! If you don't pay, it doesn't make a good replacement for email, because you don't get infinite scrollback.
  • vertex-four 12y ago
    The advantage over IRC is centralised, searchable history, along with the fact that people don't need to be logged in all the time to be able to ping them. Sure, you could set up a bot with IRC, but then you have a separate interface for it and nobody uses it so all your discussions practically disappear forever, aside from their results in other systems. EDIT: By the way - $5/mo/user is a tad less than what an on-site Exchange user costs, and is the same price as Office 365 Business Essentials (which basically gives you an email account and Lync). It's not overpriced, IMHO, given how useful it is.
    • Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
      It’s easy. Every user is a bouncer. They don’t need to configure anything. My former company did this and it worked well.
      • vertex-four 12y ago
        Does this bouncer have a log search interface, or does finding something that someone said a while ago amount to opening up a terminal and grepping, and hoping that nobody loses their logs? What happens when someone new joins the company and wants to see whether there's been any discussion on <whatever>? It's not exactly a slick system, though it probably works so long as everybody in the company is a Linux software developer.
        • Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
          No. It doesn’t. Search was performed by a web app or a bot. It was slick. My former employer was mostly customer support and everybody loved using IRC. Myself included.
• elvis635 12y ago
  I've never understood why slack is so famous and got so much traction when other alternatives existed way before it, like hipchat
  • calinet6 12y ago
    In a word, quality. In a few more words, the product appears to have been designed with user needs in focus more than the others, and the end product is closer to solving them. The article reveals some of the ways they've achieved that. Furthermore, it goes beyond simply meeting user needs into a superlative user experience that also exceeds expectations. It's not too complicated: a big part of their success is that they have created a better product in the eyes of users.
  • bostonvaulter2 12y ago
    In my opinion the big difference was a usable free tier, and the recent move to easily support logging in to multiple teams at once. Also general quality.
    • djloche 12y ago
      The big thing is that they let you use it for free, get hooked, and then when your team is all in on using it, paying the $60/user per year is worth the upgrade. They made their base product good enough that you don't need the full version... until you do. There were interviews from last year where he talked about slowly converting teams from free to paid. I use slack for a side project with 15 or so people involved and while we're using the free version, it is on the list of things to pay for once we have some sort of revenue.
  • thom 12y ago
    Right from the 'Atlassian' in the very top left corner, Hipchat is completely and utterly devoid of personality.
• c3 12y ago
  Step 1: Be Stewart Butterfield.
  • coralreef 12y ago
    Being Stewart Butterfield didn't do much when he lost a bunch of money making an online game.
    • Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago
      Step 2: Make a consumer web app.
      • curiously 12y ago
        Step 3: Charge a couple of bucks per month for it and lose money for the first year but that's okay as long as we break even we will make money eventually right? I mean that's what investors want us to do right?
      • networkguy 12y ago
        I'll modify that slightly, Step 2: Take your internal messaging app and make it a commercial product.
        • markhelo 12y ago
          Isnt there a Step 1.5 - Make your own internal messaging app then?
    • wiredfool 12y ago
      This is the second failed game that he's been a part of that spawned a successful startup.
    • c3 12y ago
      Step 2, make a failed game, pivot, succeed wildly :) It's worked twice already!
• jhwhite 12y ago
  Sounds like they just had a solid product management plan, even if it might have been informal.
• calinet6 12y ago
  There's something much deeper going on here, and I don't think Butterfield or the media understands it. What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch. The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part. Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often. What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core. This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.
  • tonster 12y ago
    I agree with most of what you've pointed out here. It seems that after you read, you realize that it's more of a story on execution and not the launch per se. The way they were able to start small and rapidly iterate on what their customers needed 'now' is what kept users on the platform, and thus word began to travel amongst founders.
  • jbattle 12y ago
    I don't know anything about Slack's design so maybe you are correct and there is some really special sauce powering their success. HOWEVER - it does not strike me as remarkable that they are able to quickly iterate on a product that was only 7-9 months old (at the time of the anecdote) with (apparently) a relatively small group of internal and external stakeholders to be creating friction. It would be more remarkable if they had already lost the ability to iterate in such a short period of time.
• curiously 12y ago
  pretty much any failed startup used the same launch strategy
• serve_yay 12y ago
  So, you should start out by having your well-connected friends in the SF tech scene use your product and give you lots of free feedback. Sounds good to me!
• wallflower 12y ago
  > As it turns out, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield isn’t so sure himself. Speaking on stage at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany, Butterfield said he didn’t know why Slack had taken off while his last two startups had fizzled. “I get in trouble with my PR team for saying this,” he said. “But I have no f___ idea.” That being said, they respond to user feedback. For example, the mute a channel feature is very well designed. It took them a while to implement. It doesn't hide the channel in your list, it greys it out.
• Emphaticdotco 12y ago
  This article talks a lot about switching costs without naming it as such. But they're pretty key for getting B2B customers to try something new. You can definitely try to maximize them (if you're the incumbent that doesn't want to be displaced) or minimize them, as in Slack's case, with information. We just did a write-up on this topic: http://www.emphatic.co/blog/switching-costs-marketing/ http://www.emphatic.co/blog/switching-costs-marketing/
• shocks 12y ago
  I really hate these "Tweet your selection" widget things.
• beat 12y ago
  So as a user of an engineer-oriented product, what kind of testing and validation process would you like to see? If the product makes your life as an engineer significantly easier (as Slack does), would you want to participate in a beta, even with warts? If not, what kind of testing would you want the product to go through? I think this could be instructive for a lot of startups in the tools space. Clearly, Slack did something right.
  • calinet6 12y ago
    Even before a beta, work with your prospective customers directly and closely. Determine what they really need and how you should really solve their problems before even presenting a product. If you don't do that before building a product, chances are you've built the wrong one, and a beta will only give you one or two degrees of course corrective ability from there.
    • beat 12y ago
      Thanks. I feel really good about the "solve their problem" part. The problem I'm trying to solve is engineers working on large, complex software systems who can't fix things because they don't have access to the information needed to fix it - it might be locked away in silos, or in opaque enterprise tools, or simply lost (you applied that patch - do you know what it looked like before you applied it?). I've worked in that field for 20+ years, and talked to literally hundreds of engineers about it. When I start hearing phrases like "holy grail", I'm pretty sure I'm solving a real problem. :) The trick, though, is the subtleties. The transition from "this is a great idea" to "eating my own dogfood" taught me tremendous things about the product. The transition to beta will teach me a lot more. What I want to do is make sure the data is as useful, well-structured, and accessible as possible. I don't think I can do that without real-world testing, but what testing approach is best? This is where Slack excels. Lots of companies make IM clients. Why is Slack so far-and-away better? What did they do so right?
• bedhead 12y ago
  I think Slack is kinda neat but stopped using it. Do any non-tech startups use it? I get the feeling that its usage outside SV is verrrry small.
• shenoyroopesh 12y ago
  I think everyone underestimates how much the slack team's game-dev experience with Glitch (even a failed one) would have impacted Slack's success. There are tons of things that makes using Slack "an experience" - tiny bits of things that are not really "necessary" but just add that little bit of polish. This is gamification at it's best - when it stops being a excuse to add some points and silly badges and developers use real, practical things they generally use to build good games and apply it to non-game products. The end result is an experience, as opposed to just "features". Hipchat doesn't get it. Neither does Hall or any other startup in this space. Slack's only real threat, IMHO, is Whatsapp. Whatsapp has a brilliant mobile experience which works offline too - Slack is weak there and I don't know why they can't have a mobile app that works properly offline. With Whatsapp coming to desktop (although via a mobile go-through), whatsapp is suddenly a bit more usable for a team. Now if they introduce a whatsapp API which works without having a phone number, it can rapidly make it an amazing alternative to Slack. Don't know if they will be going behind the B2B market though.
  • 1stranger 12y ago
    Slack is an "experience"? You're outta your mind. It's a freaking chat app.
    • ThomPete 12y ago
      I think you would be surprised how much little things matters. Thats also why not all games are equally addictive even though they are all "experiences". It's not what but how. That doesn't mean it's the only reason for it's success but it does have a very open ended architecture with so many customization possibilities that allows it to silence even the most critical technical people.
    • shenoyroopesh 12y ago
      Slack is definitely an experience, if you compare it with something like hipchat. A few of the small things I've noticed - - Sounds are just beautiful. The pings and the clings are selected very thoughtfully. Sound is the invisible thing that generally makes a good game, great. - The slack loading message - there are a bunch of different welcome messages that just bring a smile to your face. And they cycle through it, so you don't see the same message every time. - The loading animation is just beautiful. I saw an update where all they did was improve the resolution for this icon on retina display - The channels thing is awesome - it's like the IRCs. They even went ahead and added the "#" even though it's unnecessary. - The details - the colors chosen, the fonts, even the minimalistic design in general - it's just done very, very nicely. - The search is just awesome. You might go "meh" on this, but these are things that the competitors are ignoring. These are things that made me fall in love with Slack when we started using it an year back. Yes administration is simple, yes they have amazing documentation. Yes, they have segmented their users well. But I think the core product is just beautiful, and that gives them a huge leg-up over their competitors even without the other places they are doing well.
• chambo622 12y ago
  Demonstrating the broad appeal of Slack - my dad's medical practice has started using it. The current software ecosystem for collaboration tools in medicine is horribly bad and this can actually have tragic consequences. Slack would be wise to take a closer look at this market and see how they can optimize for the needs and requirements of physicians and nurses. Healthcare spending will only increase in the years to come and if they can demonstrate positive patient outcomes and get a few hospital CTOs on board this vertical could explode for them.
  • chermanowicz 12y ago
    All I can say is be weary of HIPAA compliance. It's a pretty big concern because failure to comply can be very costly; I've heard from many in the health/medical field that they can't touch these kinds of tools until they get comfortable with HIPAA. It's not on the roadmap for Slack right now: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/535281662196977664 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/535281662196977664
    • chambo622 12y ago
      Using Slack in a medical context doesn't automatically mean that HIPAA is being violated, but you're right, without compliance, its usage will be limited when discussing individual patients in unobfuscated detail. I hope Slack makes this a priority at some point as I truly believe that this market could be gigantic for them, but I understand that they might be better off targeting other verticals in the short term that don't have this kind of roadblock