What's really behind Slack's crazy growth? | Hacker News Reader

What's really behind Slack's crazy growth?

10 pointsdgerhardt20 comments

Slack is a messaging app that is less than two years old and already worth north of $2B with over 500,000 users. Many people are calling it the fastest growing business application ever.

Slack CMO Bill Macaitis (formerly CMO at Zendesk) is interviewed on this podcast to go behind the scenes on Slack's explosive growth and talks about why they care so much about brand and NPS.

What do you think is behind such crazy growth? IM and chat has been around for ever and other services like Hipchat are very similar. What do you think Slack's secret sauce is? If Hipchat didn't sell to Atlassian in 2012, would they be valued at $2B?

Here's the link to the audio on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-slacks-explosive-growth/id963131164?i=338838103&mt=2

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I think it's because it is the only group chat product that teams/companies can reliably adopt. Many companies would like chat, and it's always been available, but the employees don't use it. Slack's onboarding process and interface make it really easy to get people addicted to it, and make it easy for it to grow inside a company.

Our company is a good example of that; we have a lot of habitual resistance to improving communication methods and now some of the more unlikely people are on it and loving it.

The unlimited free tier certainly helps. I know we would not be using it if we had to get everyone going on a free trial, and I think other companies are similar.

Finally, now that a lot of companies have used it and talk about it, word-of-mouth is carrying the company into its high valuations.

I don't think it's the "only group chat product that teams/companies can reliably adopt". There are others like Hipchat that are just as good. I'd be interested in knowing Hipchat's numbers...

Right, what I am saying is that Slack can be reliably adopted, whereas products like HipChat, while successful, meet more resistance and it feels a bit more random whether a team will actually use it well.

I don't really get why it's better than Hipchat, but all my clients have switched to it. At least one switched because Hipchat had a long period of downtime right at the peak of Slack hype. I wonder how many customers that drove away?

I know a few people who switched because of HipChat unreliability. But all seem to be adamant that Slack is actually a substantially better product too.

It's interesting that Yammer and Slack both exhibited many of the same "enterprise messaging rocketship" attributes. What's ironic is they are in similar spaces. While correlation/causation issues aside, it seems to me that at any point in time, there needs to be a hot, "innovative" enterprise startup that captures the minds of people and wallets. The same thing will happen when Slack exits. I think this logic also applies to consumer messaging startups too. Communication and collaboration are massive needs that will always be around and need addressing.

Edit: it's like a vacuum (as in, power vacuum) that needs to be filled by some entity to restore equilibrium to the world.

Enterprise salesmen.

Real capitalistic business deals are made on the golf course or at an expensive dinner paid by somebody else. Why target the users when you can target their bosses. Convince a corporate CEO to switch to Slack and you suddenly have thousands of users.

As much as we like to dream about it, the world does not run on merit. And politics can bury amazing products while proliferating shit. Read about Tesla, Turing and all the other guys that pulled us out of the mud. Innovation doesn't bring success. Being a ruthless greedy salesman does.

Isn't this completely opposite of how Slack actually grew in businesses? Everything I've ever read says they took a bottom-up approach by getting employees to adopt it outside of work.

Employees don't make decisions of choosing "what tool I would like to use", otherwise a ton of non-tech employees may even go as far as using things like Facebook chat.

The original OP actually provides the real answer (under the greying of the words).

CIOs/CTOs at bigger companies make the decisions that cost money (evaluate risk when depending on external communications tools), so with the right network and the right investors, Slacks high-level sales team managed to get the guys at the top to buy into their product and thus, even less than 1000 organizations gives them 500,000 paying customers per month.

At UC Berkeley I'm seeing a lot of student groups switching to Slack. For example, several CS classes (including one of the largest ones, Data Structures) are using Slack for internal communication. A lot of student clubs (including one I'm involved with) are using Slack now.

So the idea that Slack is only popular because of enterprise sales doesn't really hold water in my opinion. It really is a great product. All of these groups heard about Slack through word of mouth.

Good question. My department just switched to Slack for our chats and I really don't see what the big deal is. It's great, but I don't see why it stands out.

It is web IRC as far as I can tell... again, am I missing something?

Comparing slack to IRC is like comparing an mp3 player with the first iPod.

And the answer is "yes" you're missing a lot.

Funny analogy. Because most of the mp3 players I had before the iPod I actually preferred. I still miss my Rio Karma ;)

Well in that case, the IRC might be a better fit for you.

I've used both, I prefer IRC--but not strongly.

I like being able to use any client and not a web browser. Doing things like pulling in images/videos is cool, but most of our use of IRC is just communication & "logging" to a degree--bots reporting new deployments, for instance.

We use Glip at the office, because it has the chat rooms that Slack has as well as tasks, todo's, files, notes, etc... just seems more feature rich.

It's all in the polish. Little details matter.

While it seems to me that Slack and HipChat are similar (and they are), I now know more than 10 people at organizations that switched from HipChat to Slack, and they are all absolutely adamant that Slack is better, and a substantially different experience. I'd really like to work somewhere that uses Slack, as I don't really have a good way to try it out within my workflow.

I've been wondering about this myself. I don't really see anything that separates it from HipChat or even Glip (Which we are using)? Am I missing something?

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