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

I find it's closer to the norm that a company doesn't begin the product design process correctly, and shifts to a period of quality-impacting chaotic whitewater where the product is considered 'sellable' and it becomes more of a marketing and sales game to make the company successful.

Slack, at least during its rise to fame, had not yet hired a sales or marketing team. I think they have remarkable product focus, and it's a testament to how unbalanced business thinking generally is in the spectrum. I think the status quo is a little too far past "the product won't sell itself," and Slack is a good example of a company balanced more toward the quality side of the equation. To me, that's the core reason for their success so far, and it's surprising that more companies haven't dawned on this way of operating (well, not surprising when you consider mainstream American business ideas).

It does remain to be seen if they can keep up the solid quality as they grow. It requires an orchestration that is very deliberate and well intentioned, and if they came upon their initial strategy by luck, it won't last.

I've asked on social media, and got some shallow boilerplate responses, but nothing truly revealing. I'd love to know more as well.

Either they're not very transparent, or they're not valuing this component of the business enough...

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.

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.

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.

> I completely suck at typing on a mobile phone

So do I. That's why we still use Slack. But one of my co-founders is into sales and constantly on the go, and while travelling, sometimes the signal is flaky on his smart phone. Thats when he really cribs and tries to get us to go back to whatsapp :)

Of course, we won't move until whatsapp improves desktop experience and bridges at least some integrations, but I think it's highly possible for them to do it if they want to.

Agreed. I think my perspective on cost may be a little skewed because I'm using it for a University CS Club with over 100 members and we can't pay $500/month for it.

I have less incentive to introduce it for the startup I work with because those people are all comfortable with email, and busy with enough other things that I'm not going to see 'instant message like' responses anyway.

We used IRC at my former company (Simple) and it worked well. This is notable because most of the company is non-technical customer support.

I agree for external clients, they seem to be only targeting better communication within the company.

It seems like Slack highlights any mention of your handle regardless of whether its prepended by an "@".

It’s easy. Every user is a bouncer. They don’t need to configure anything. My former company did this and it worked well.

It’s this attitude that enables businesses to accumulate an unwieldy number of services!

My company subscribes to Google Apps, HipChat, Slack, Yammer, Zoom, … The costs accumulate.

This is the ticket.

Slack is operating on three principles.

One, that their product actually has value commensurate with its price. That's a remarkable tenet for any product, and it keeps them honest.

Two, demanding a high value for a product influences customers' perception of that product. By not discounting or downplaying the value at all, Slack builds on the psychological worm that you're getting what you pay for. This has been proven in (consumer) studies to make people like purchases more compared to items of the same price or free.

Finally, they assert that the market exists and their customers have the ability and desire to pay for a better product (ddebernardy's point).

All correct.

You seem to be presuming an enterprise-class user (indicated by language like "in comparison to salaries and the benefits", "you're not a qualified lead", etc).

On the consumer side, I would say that the jump from $5/mo per customer to $5/mo per user per customer would be pretty significant. The number of users in the organization enters the calculus directly in the latter case, whereas it did not before.

But in another sense, yes, the person who posted the comment you are responding to is probably not a good "qualified lead" for you, whatever it is that you do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's not just you, it's pretty much the standard semi-official shorthand for it.

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

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?

Step 2: Make a consumer web app.

This is the second failed game that he's been a part of that spawned a successful startup.

Step 2, make a failed game, pivot, succeed wildly :)

It's worked twice already!

I don't see why that's such a surprise. I thought the same for a split-second.