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Comment by estomagordo | Hacker News Reader

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estomagordo

According to this site, Slack operated at a $138.9 MUSD loss last year.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012616/how-d....

And Slack themselves are expecting something similar for 2020.

https://slack.com/intl/en-nl/blog/news/slack-announces-recor....

People who actually know how to reason about business finances will elaborate, I'm sure.

What I'm wondering is, what are some realistic scenarios for how a new owner will pursue more aggressive revenue generation for Slack?

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Salesforce will have their sales teams push it alongside their other offerings, raise prices for those who want to use it, kill the free plan, and trim any fat (or strongly encourage cost savings measures, depending on how much autonomy Slack will continue to have post-acquisition) not needed to operate the product. I have no doubt they'll be able to make it profitable, even at the loss of market share (free users and price sensitive paying orgs).

I do not see them killing the free plan, even Salesforce knows better than that. I bet they'll run it very similarly to how they run Heroku, and the Slack integration will get better. But prices might go up too.

LOL, having worked with SF for the last two years I can completely see them killing the free plan. They care only about licensed seat count, at ALL COST!

Yeah they're like baby Oracle.

The founders came out of Oracle so it's the same playbook.

Killing the free plan seems asinine. What would Slack's brand and standing be if it weren't for the availability and ease of onboarding?

> What would Slack's brand and standing be if it weren't for the availability and ease of onboarding?

potentially, profitable.

What ease of onboarding? Slack has one tenth the daily active users of Microsoft Team. It has already lost on volume. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/technology/salesforce-sla...

I suppose the value of Slack is now that some of its customers are very committed, even if they're not many.

The cost of sales for Slack will be very low for Salesforce, because they’re already selling a ton of stuff to large customers. Their guys are already flying out to the customer, taking them out to dinner, getting their commission checks, etc. they’ll just ask “you want any Slack with that?” Imagine the economics of trying to sell lip balm door to door vs. just putting it in a pharmacy for people to buy when they’re buying other stuff.

This is how Microsoft makes so much money.

It's also why I don't trust sales figures on individual products from companies with a portfolio. Sales tend to get credited to products that the company wants to show as gaining traction while really the favored product was an add-on to a bundle of established products that had their license renewed.

absolutely. One thing that does temper this is that companies want to disproportionately reward the strategic businesses, so Microsoft will likely give higher commissions for selling Microsoft Teams than SQL Server. They have controls to prevent gaming that internally, although obviously not 100% effective.

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