Targeting the startup sector, which was more open to using such tools company-wide, rather than the enterprise, where Atlassian had already sold into most of the companies that would consider chat platforms at the time and where chat usage was largely confined to technical teams.
Yes, there was hype and marketing - otherwise nobody would have tried them in the first place. They beat HipChat because they offered a 3x better product with half the hassle. It takes both components to make a software hit in a market that isn't entirely blue ocean.
- Unreliable notifications. Sometimes it notified you about messages sometimes it didn't, no idea why.
- You could get a push-notification about a message, then open the app and have no clue who had messaged you or in which discussion/group.
- Emojis had really unintuitive shortcuts. I remember people used to send some kind of skeleton dancing all the time, because it's shortcut was a (Y) (which is commonly some affirmative/"yes" emoji like a thumbs up).
- Also it looks horrible.
The Android app issue -- and it also happened to another person on my team post acquisition when we were forced to move from Slack to Hipchat -- set up a 6 month long fight over keeping slack. I don't recall ever arguing about a chat app before but this was a dealbreaker.
As an aside, I'd like to see more tools with less predatory scaled pricing.
Slack just feels casual, like Trello or Google Docs.
Another lesson here is that no established product is too big to go up against. I often see people rejecting startup ideas because there is a single competitor offering the same service. Competition is not a reason to forego building a product. If anything, it's a positive signal that your product has a market.
You can make a solid business just by fixing existing products and/or offering the same service for cheaper because you have some efficiency that the incumbents do not. In fact, sometimes the incumbent has set their prices so high because they have no competition, and inflated their expenses so much that they couldn't match your prices even if they wanted to.
At the time we were using the rather obscure Flowdock[0]. Didn't feel like switching. Felt mostly the same. Before you know everybody was talking about Slack. Everybody understood the value of team chats. They made the competition irrelevant before anybody even cared to look for alternatives.
[0] have to mention the great support though, helped us a lot even as an unpaying customer
It's easy to underestimate how much UX matters, but it does, as long as the user has a say in the matter. Otherwise we'd all be swimming in Android phones.
Hipchap =chat Slack = integration of all other services, dropbox, chat, etc in one place
HipChat is actually the only exception, at most it's "adequate". However, with Atlassian introducing Stride as the successor if HipChat I'm curious to see whether they understand what made HipChat fail.