Slack Is Raising Another Round at Up to a $1B Valuation? | Hacker News Reader

Slack Is Raising Another Round at Up to a $1B Valuation?

techcrunch.com

28 pointsdoppp26 comments

Slack is pretty great, we use it where I work and for coordinating communication between teams in different parts of the US, the UK, India and Australia, it is fantastic. It is quite crazy to think what is essentially a more modernised version of IRC is worth one billion dollars. Either way, I think it is a highly deserved valuation for a tool that is undeniably a lot less painful than Google Hangouts, Skype or Email. Great job Slack team.

It also seems besides creating an awesome communication platform, Slack have discovered the secret to time travel. According to the article, "has been growing wildly since launching at the end of 2014" a product so successful it launched in the future and is doing well in the present. Nice quality writing from Techcrunch.

We just started using it at our company. We have a lot of remote workers.

I think part of why it's so good is because it's "just" a modernized IRC. It seems like most other other communication tools fail to deliver that feel of community that IRC does and as a result fall short. Slack despite my initial misgivings seems to be delivering though.

> I think part of why it's so good is because it's "just" a modernized IRC

In fact, the worst part about slack is the completely unnecessary attachments UI. When I click on an attachment, just open it in a new tab and let my browser handle it!

Slack is a great case study in b2b apps. They built a product essentially used like a consumer product, but for business purposes. The interface is targeted at people, not businesses.

And yet they have ~15k customers [1], but massive investor hype and potential valuations. The equivalent consumer app would require more on the order of 15 million customers to achieve the same.

[1] Read it somewhere.

last time I used it, Slack had a pretty bad design flaw. each organization has a #general channel that cannot be unsubscribed from (aka, every person in the company must be part of #general). it got very annoying when users spammed (@channel) the entire channel. many devs on my team sent feedback to Slack asking them for the ability to leave #general.

Their response was something like "we rely on everyone being in #general so that we have a single place to deliver broadcast messages"

This leads me to believe that their underlying code does not really have a concept of a user's 'organization', otherwise they could send based on that. Separate those concerns!

Why is this such a big deal? You can turn off the notifications for the #general channel. So why not just turn off the notifications for that channel or use the "Only when mentioned or one of my Highlight Words is used (default)" option?

We used to have this problem, but I think Slack added a feature to fix this. Our general room is now locked so that people can't post into it, but everyone is still a member.

I feared this, but also figured if someone is spamming the channel, then it's time to talk to them about understanding how the product is meant to work and that spamming doesn't help anybody.

We've been using Slack for quite a while now after trying HipChat, FlowDock, etc, and love it.

The major selling point for us is it's incoming Webhook API.

We use it to communicate deployment status, major customer events, and general fun & hilarity (/giphy).

At first I hated Slack. Jabber was definitely Good Enough. But I couldn't live without it anymore. My tip: use it to it's full potential, you'll have to give up on the IRC and Jabber bridges.

Not really https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/525352862285430784

« We can confirm that, as reported in TechCrunch earlier today, it is likely that we will raise money "sometime in the next six years." »

After trying and failing to get everyone to use use email/facebook/aim/google hangouts for a community that I help manage, I moved everyone to Slack for communication. Right now we're at the free tier, but if we ever make some money - I think moving to the paid tier is something we will do.

The github notifications for slack are super verbose, compared to hipchat -- even with their compact mode option. Hard to know what was going on in the channel.

We tried it out and unanimously decided to not migrate everyone from hipchat.

I really think that Slack's best quality is as an email killer. I get close to zero emails from within my company. It's kind of shocking how much more productive that makes me.

This is true. I have an email account that gets effectively zero email (other than Slack notifications). Don't know if this makes me more productive - IM seems like more of an interruption than email, but it's definitely interesting.

That's the main benefit for us as well. I compare inboxes with friends who don't use Slack at their company and its a stark difference. They'll have tons of giant chain emails about pointless stuff.

Ugh I really wish my team would start using slack, but they're way too apathetic to try it.

I suspect you may be my coworker.

I wonder how much Hipchat got bought for, I believe Hipchat is more popular then Slack?

The only advantage Hipchat has is that you can run it on your own servers. Slack is so much better for users it's not even funny.

can you give me a short tl;du why it's so great?

Sure. The main thing is that Hipchat is just very buggy. It does not handle disconnects or intermittent connectivity well, requiring a lot of app restarts. My coworkers have been reporting a lot of issues with the mobile apps simply not working. The desktop client has many operations that block the UI thread for several seconds needlessly (like starting a private chat).

But those are just bugs. These are the features I really miss from Slack:

* Ability to select a recent message you sent and edit it to fix typos. Hipchat uses s/oldtext/newtext, but it does not work consistently, and is only designed to work on the most recently sent message.

* Github-style emoji, like :+1:. It's really weird have a different emoji set and syntax in Hipchat.

* Better per-channel notification preferences.

* Waaaaaaaay better integrations with other services.

* A more attractive UI, and other subjective things like that.

Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly is better in channel notifications and 3rd party integrations?

Well, Slack has per-channel notification settings, and HipChat does not. So with HipChat I have to choose between more notification spam, insufficient notifications, or not being in as many channels as I'd like.

I'm starting to forget what it is I preferred about the github integration in slack as opposed to HipChat...it's been awhile now. But there are also just so many URLs that do something useful in Slack but don't in HipChat (for example, rdio).

Another annoying thing about the HipChat desktop client is modal dialogs where there shouldn't be. If somebody pings me in a room I'm not in, a modal pops up, which can be activated accidentally while I'm typing a message in another room, causing me to lose the notification, or get immediately (well, with annoying lag) sent to the channel that pinged me, interrupting the message I was typing and destroying my flow.

Soon a billion dollars won't even be cool and the kids will laugh at Justin Timberlake.

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