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Totally, the lack of self-hosting/open platform with Slack just might be their mis-step that cuts off their growth.

I though their growth was just fine. I think the fact that you do not need to host it yourself is a force and it also lets them concentrate on exactly one product. I can imagine that providing a supported on premises platform must increase your support team size considerably.

From what we've seen at Mattermost (open source Slack-alternative, https://mattermost.com/) supporting on-premises deployments with an open source community is actually pretty awesome.

We have over a thousand people on our forums helping each other out, people are building installers for Mattermost in Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Docker, etc. (just web search to find them).

We're also getting help writing and updating our deployment docs (https://docs.mattermost.com/).

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