The actual costs / complexity involved in building a similar product are magnitudes less than the high valuation would suggest.
So I'm not sure how much early success is really worth in this market.
Ui knowledge
Inertia
History.
The last is most important--if cultural knowledge over years gets embedded in slack, it will be easy to justify the modest ongoing costs.
1. A company-wide and approved solution (proprietary) that's very buggy.
2. A jabber server someone threw together so everyone could use their client or choice.
3. Google chat (through various clients).
4. MSN messenger / Skype.
And they all get used by different people for different things. It's very frustrating. Switching to a new thing would be a non-starter, probably (and we couldn't move to Slack anyway, but that's another issue).
Nothing excites me more than having to think about supporting yet another codebase deployed to non-technical people who will undoubtedly cause more bugs than thought possible and open more JIRA tickets about it with increasingly vague title names.
At some point Slack or [integration of choice] is cheaper than having an internal engineering team to write half-baked communication solutions.
The fact that they already have a popular competitor in the space (hipchat) would normally make such a high valuation seemingly more confusing, but if viewed using the force multiplier logic, maybe less so? There could be concern that having only a single frequently used tool would make it too easy for someone to "own" a startup's lifeblood, so better to have more than one. (similar to github and bitbucket?)
I guess the alternative is that slack has some investor specific info about their product pipline where they are pitching other companion tools that work well together, and/or compete more directly with other popular services. Like atlassian/jira or something.
I've been using Slack in a pretty casual way recently as my company switched to it. It seems, you know... fine. Like it has the same features that all the other messaging products have. What's the compelling feature of Slack?
I had a "this is what all the fuss is about?" reaction.
I actually seem to prefer the hipchat UI personally, and apparently so do many of my colleagues. The fact that hipchat is cheaper only made it clearer to us.
note: only using and comparing the osx desktop app for both services.
One key example is the multiple teams feature: the ability to have multiple accounts logged in at the same time, and the ability to easily swipe between them on iOS or toggle on desktop is a huge advantage.
A quick look at HipChat indicates this still isn't possible [1].
Considering more and more people wear different startup / company / organisation hats not having this feature is a great way to limit participation / growth in a communications platform.
That Slack had this feature at the outset for me meant I've already spread use of Slack to multiple orgs and participate in all of them at the same time.
[1] https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions/suggestio...
Not currently possible, but officially confirmed as being worked on.
"It’s official: Development is underway for multiple account support in the HipChat clients. Stay tuned because updates are just around the corner."
Nonsense. Slack is very beautiful with everything around the core feature, but the core feature is awful. The main chat window wastes incredible amounts of space, even in the compressed mode. The least visible items on the screen (apart from timestamps) are the chat messages from users - instead their names, icons, channel names, navigation elements are HUGE. Cute niceties like emotes are screwy due to the standard layout. We're using the Jira integration, and it wastes so much space that one entire page is taken up by a mere 3 Jira ticket updates. Stick it into 'compressed' mode and now every chat line starts at a different point, depending on the user name. Hipchat has none of the problems I've listed here, though it has it's own - generally they're issues outside the core feature.
For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
Well obviously we disagree on this point, as to me something being beautiful necessarily has to encompass the UX, and I think the Slack UX is great.
As a previous long-time Jira / Confluence user I also know about atrocious UX, and Atlassian delivers that in spades (along with appallingly slow page refreshes). If you've been sensitised to the kind of UX Atlassian delivers I'm really surprised you take issue with Slack, but each to their own.
> For people used to chat elsewhere, these issues are pretty obvious. But Slack seems to be marketing to people who've never used chat, so they get to set their expectations from scratch.
Our team are long-time IRC users and have used a lot of comms solutions over the years, and Slack is the first decent one we've come across.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Our team are also longterm IRC users (I get mocked for only being in half-a-dozen channels) and our Slack experiment lasted only one afternoon before everyone abandoned it. The only dev who was really fighting for Slack was wanting to use their IRC integration and bypass the UI completely.
So I'd obviously refute your assertion that savvy users dislike Slack and unsophisticated users like Slack.
Refute away, because that's not what I said. Your entire rebuttal to what I said has been a strawman, apart from 'we disagree'. I gave you some very concrete examples of my problems with the Slack interface, and you give me a vague dismissal about entirely different products.
But if you're right, it's no good and there's no switching costs, then I guess they'll die. Right?
I find it amusing whenever I drive by their Office Space bill board on the freeway and think to myself, "How many times will I have to send that memo through HipChat before the message gets through?"
It's also 3.5x more expensive. In absolute terms that's not much (<$400 a month), but no one could point to $400 of incremental value in it. If we fully embraced it and turned off emails for those teams, would we see it? Maybe, but we'd still need emails to deal with external vendors, and there's no way that we'd get non-developers to see it as an email replacement.
Slack is one of the first companies walking around with a billion dollar valuation that makes me go... "Yeah, maybe..." We use it. We love it. It's mature, well designed, gets improved constantly, and is used by more local businesses I know than not. It provides real, actual benefit to our small organization above and beyond what we pay for it.
Slack, to me, is a real product, with a real revenue stream and real value to teams. I really hope they never get bought and acquired or rolled in to a larger organization. The app is a constant joy to use - I can only say that about one other program I use daily.
For me, there is also a bunch of minor detail where Slack wins. Slack just looks better, behaves better with choppy connections, and has better code pasting support. It also does much better with automatic link extraction (HipChat's Linky is annoying and won't let you remove the automatic description). Lastly, Slack has integration playbooks that automatically uses APIs to configure stuff or (when that's not possible) gives you the recipe; for example, the Github and Zendesk integrations will automatically register the app and webhooks for you, almost no manual setup needed. HipChat is all manual.
And for the love of God, HipChat, fix your inane emojis. Immature 4Chan memes (trollface etc.) have no place in a business, not even among developers.
Oh, they do. E.g. to make fun of those trying to look sooo professional.