There's something much deeper going on here, and I don't think Butterfield or the media understands it.
What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch.
The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part.
Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often.
What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core.
This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.
I agree with most of what you've pointed out here. It seems that after you read, you realize that it's more of a story on execution and not the launch per se.
The way they were able to start small and rapidly iterate on what their customers needed 'now' is what kept users on the platform, and thus word began to travel amongst founders.
I don't know anything about Slack's design so maybe you are correct and there is some really special sauce powering their success.
HOWEVER - it does not strike me as remarkable that they are able to quickly iterate on a product that was only 7-9 months old (at the time of the anecdote) with (apparently) a relatively small group of internal and external stakeholders to be creating friction. It would be more remarkable if they had already lost the ability to iterate in such a short period of time.
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.
1. The Slack team didn't need to generate revenue at all for a solid year so they could ignore commercial considerations that would harm product development.
2. The Slack founders had the industry clout and interpersonal relationships to not just get beta users for their app, but to get the RIGHT beta users for their app, ones that would give valuable, relevant, on point feedback reflective of the concerns of a large valuable addressable audience.
This comment is so reductive, and the GP is so dismissive of Slack's accomplishment that it is actually making me angry. This is like all the kids in 2006 claiming they could build Basecamp in a weekend because it was a "simple" app.
What you're saying here is technically true, but these things are only 20% of the story. Most companies given these gifts (and let's face it #1 is pretty easy in today's fundraising environment) would not be able to create a product with the polish of Slack.
To paraphrase calinet6, it's not just the feedback, it's knowing what it means and using it to drive a cohesive UX vision. I've worked on some extremely talented teams, and I've created some great products, but let me tell you it's very very difficult to actually take a large amount of feedback and polish something so it works as well as Slack. It's difficult because if you pay attention to the wrong comments, or you come up with the wrong solution you end up off in the weeds with a product that can never regain its cohesion. Even if you have a strong visionary making all the calls, it becomes increasingly difficult for that one person to maintain the whole picture as the userbase and use cases grow. Even if you have all the right people and no poor decision makers, you still find things can get lost in the communication layers and you end up with a suboptimal product.
If you actually use Slack in anger with multiple teams and purposes and you pay attention to the UX, it is at a level of polish that is astounding. We've seen apps with this level of UX before, but they tend to me much simpler (eg. Instagram), there are also more complex apps with impressive aspects in their UX, but they reach anything approaching this level of cohesion (eg. Facebook). Slack is not just a story of good strategy and positioning, it's a story of phenomenal execution, and people who miss that are not going to take away the right lessons.
This really, really reads like an advertisement. It's not a short article, but the little useful information in it is buried amongst a lot of self-congratulatory quotes.
Slack is just one of many team chat apps. Maybe the secret to their traction is that they can get so many fluffy articles written about them?
It does read a bit like an advertisement, but I must admit that if I would write an article about Slack it might 'sound' similar.
For me, Slack has a quality similar to Trello and a few other products and devices I have: I 'enjoy' using it so much (and I'm not using that word lightly) that it makes me actively 'market' it despite the fact that I have no stake in Slack's success other than being able to use it with more clients/teams/friends. It's like finally I can use IRC with non-techies.
I truly think that's a testament to the quality of the product, because I haven't read many articles or advertorials about Slack. I just started using it and started convincing everyone around me to use it.
that said, if the intent of the article was journalism, toning it down would've probably still been a good idea.
That was one of the tidbits buried in the article:
The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.
Sounds like they don't spend that much money on advertising, but a bunch on PR and social media. And later they also point out how they use customer service as another marketing opportunity.
The reason they can get these articles is because people genuinely love the product in a way that very very few products ever achieve, especially business focused products.
I think everyone underestimates how much the slack team's game-dev experience with Glitch (even a failed one) would have impacted Slack's success.
There are tons of things that makes using Slack "an experience" - tiny bits of things that are not really "necessary" but just add that little bit of polish. This is gamification at it's best - when it stops being a excuse to add some points and silly badges and developers use real, practical things they generally use to build good games and apply it to non-game products.
The end result is an experience, as opposed to just "features". Hipchat doesn't get it. Neither does Hall or any other startup in this space.
Slack's only real threat, IMHO, is Whatsapp. Whatsapp has a brilliant mobile experience which works offline too - Slack is weak there and I don't know why they can't have a mobile app that works properly offline. With Whatsapp coming to desktop (although via a mobile go-through), whatsapp is suddenly a bit more usable for a team.
Now if they introduce a whatsapp API which works without having a phone number, it can rapidly make it an amazing alternative to Slack. Don't know if they will be going behind the B2B market though.
>Slack's only real threat, IMHO, is Whatsapp. Whatsapp has a brilliant mobile experience which works offline too - Slack is weak there and I don't know why they can't have a mobile app that works properly offline. With Whatsapp coming to desktop (although via a mobile go-through), whatsapp is suddenly a bit more usable for a team.
The main reason for me. For switching from Whatsapp to Slack was because I completely suck at typing on a mobile phone. I type 150 wpm on my mechanical keyboard but typing a single sentence without typos on my mobile phone? No can do.
I heard a lot about Slack from Reddit/HN. I gave it a try and haven't looked back since. I'm a student and we use it for a kind of personal facebook group. It's great. If you are in uni I highly suggest you try it out.
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.
You may be heard of Telegram — a Whatsapp alternative with great desktop clients. We integrated it with github and other services: http://telegram.jaconda.im
I think you're right that people underestimate the Glitch experience. The Slack developers have gone through an experience that almost no other startups have.
In games polish is extremely important, and the polish needs to be there from day one. It makes sense that a developer with game experience would produce a product with an extra shine to it.
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 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.
I like Slack, because I can rely on non-technical people to use it, but if I'm working with people who actually know what they're doing, I don't see the advantage over IRC.
For free, it's a great service. For $5/mo it's a great service...but for $5/mo/user, it's pretty pricey!
If you don't pay, it doesn't make a good replacement for email, because you don't get infinite scrollback.
Mm... If $5/month/user makes any difference to your bottom line in comparison to salaries and the benefits you are getting from the service, I suspect that you have a problem -- and one that has nothing to do with Slack. (As in, you've a serious sales or management problem in your organization, or you're not a qualified lead, e.g. you're a student or a non-profit.)
Imagine that an employee is costing you $X a year (that includes pay, but also things like health insurance, taxes, their computer/desk chair/etc etc etc).
If you use Slack, your employee now costs you $X + $60 a year. Usually in tech, X is a 6 digit number (or very high 5 digit number). If $60 makes such a difference in that balance, there are probably big things you should worry about.
Those numbers are not true for even half of the world. Also, I would want everybody in my org to be part of the same communication channel including every non tech folk.
You will definitely find folks for whom the $100/mo/user is not a big deal and Slack does have that plan with needed features. However if I am bootstrapping with a business with majority of non tech part time employees, its not a quick decision to commit to $8/mo/user.
For comparison, Google Apps provide their complete suite at $5/mo/user. Desk.com provides interfacing with customer starting at $3/mo/agent. With the value they provide I don't think twice before committing to it.
(btw, I could only see their cheapest plan at $8/mo/user paid monthly, where is $5/mo coming from?)
> (btw, I could only see their cheapest plan at $8/mo/user paid monthly, where is $5/mo coming from?)
I'm currently seeing $6.67/mo on an annualized basis, with no obvious means to get it monthly. Perhaps they just got caught red handed running an A/B test. ;-)
Whatever their price is, though, it matters little if an employee saves as little as an hour per month using the service.
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).
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.
I think your first paragraph is key though. I introduced Slack at a startup I'm working for, and I think the main reason we kept using it, and now use it for almost anything, was because the CEO and designer felt comfortable with it.
The same applies to Trello, in my experience. I've been able to convince all my clients, including the ones who will send me emails with attached .docx documents that contain low-res images for their gallery, and as a result I can basically live inside Trello.
Slack is getting close to playing a similar role, and the only reason it doesn't is that for the trickle of communication with many clients Trello is better.
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.
Echoing malnourish, touch base with them and highlight to them that your context is that of a university. I'd gather they'll give the service away to you for free, if only for the sake of making sure you're team members are familiar with -- and addicted to -- using it by the time you're done studying.
The Lite option is free and has no limit on number of users. We use the paid option for a team made up of our staff, but we also just launched a new team with the Lite option as a way to talk to the sellers in our marketplace. I just invited 700 people of those people in to Slack and plan to invite several thousand more.
The limitation is that the archive is limited to 10k messages. But there are plenty of use cases where that doesn't matter.
Oh, I'm sure if you can make IRC work, it might be enough. But aside from the fact that this can be a significant hurdle in many situations, Slack's integration with various tools is a significant advantage that IRC can't quite replace (easily).
For example, we've linked our various trello boards to their relevant channels, and as a result when I get into work (part-time) I can simply scroll through the 'front-end' channel and not only see the discussions between co-front-enders, but also see the updates on trello tickets in the same place, in the exact context of the conversations around it. That's become quite valuable to me.
I agree with you, actually. I just thought it was still sufficiently popular to get support, especially alongside a lot of other integrated services that I've never even heard of.
The advantage over IRC is centralised, searchable history, along with the fact that people don't need to be logged in all the time to be able to ping them. Sure, you could set up a bot with IRC, but then you have a separate interface for it and nobody uses it so all your discussions practically disappear forever, aside from their results in other systems.
EDIT: By the way - $5/mo/user is a tad less than what an on-site Exchange user costs, and is the same price as Office 365 Business Essentials (which basically gives you an email account and Lync). It's not overpriced, IMHO, given how useful it is.
Does this bouncer have a log search interface, or does finding something that someone said a while ago amount to opening up a terminal and grepping, and hoping that nobody loses their logs? What happens when someone new joins the company and wants to see whether there's been any discussion on <whatever>?
It's not exactly a slick system, though it probably works so long as everybody in the company is a Linux software developer.
Slack has an IRC gateway. [1] It works okay. My one gripe is that I can't figure out how to @mention my fellow Slack users via IRC, so I usually have the web interface open as well.
I hear you on the lack of infinite scrollback. They have to incentivize the upgrade somehow.
I have a small group of friends (just 6) that have been using IRC for years. We switched over to Slack purely because now I no longer have to manage/pay for a server.
Most of us use the IRC gateway and ignore the website, but we do use the Android app. Last I checked, IRC apps were pretty terrible.
Unless I'm missing some feature you're alluding to, Slack is a superset of IRC. It is objectively a mistake to use IRC instead of Slack (cost & "where is my data" aisde - only speaking of features)
In a few more words, the product appears to have been designed with user needs in focus more than the others, and the end product is closer to solving them. The article reveals some of the ways they've achieved that. Furthermore, it goes beyond simply meeting user needs into a superlative user experience that also exceeds expectations. It's not too complicated: a big part of their success is that they have created a better product in the eyes of users.
In my opinion the big difference was a usable free tier, and the recent move to easily support logging in to multiple teams at once. Also general quality.
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.
The team is great and clearly shows in the product they have built. However, at current pricing I would rate them expensive. Other enterprise offerings which go by per user pricing, like Google Apps, are much affordable for instance.
I hope with time their economics work out and they could offer more affordable plans.
The thing is, as far as firms go, $5/employee is nothing compared to how much an actual employee costs. It might as well be free if it makes communication better.
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.
and you are probably being downvoted for the kiddies that grew up with mac books pro that think it is beautiful to pay for an overpriced IRC server with a nice web interface. well, let me join a fellow slacker. let the downvotes rain :)
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.
> As it turns out, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield isn’t so sure himself. Speaking on stage at the Digital Life Design conference in Munich, Germany, Butterfield said he didn’t know why Slack had taken off while his last two startups had fizzled.
“I get in trouble with my PR team for saying this,” he said. “But I have no f___ idea.”
That being said, they respond to user feedback. For example, the mute a channel feature is very well designed. It took them a while to implement. It doesn't hide the channel in your list, it greys it out.
Demonstrating the broad appeal of Slack - my dad's medical practice has started using it. The current software ecosystem for collaboration tools in medicine is horribly bad and this can actually have tragic consequences. Slack would be wise to take a closer look at this market and see how they can optimize for the needs and requirements of physicians and nurses. Healthcare spending will only increase in the years to come and if they can demonstrate positive patient outcomes and get a few hospital CTOs on board this vertical could explode for them.
All I can say is be weary of HIPAA compliance. It's a pretty big concern because failure to comply can be very costly; I've heard from many in the health/medical field that they can't touch these kinds of tools until they get comfortable with HIPAA. It's not on the roadmap for Slack right now: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/535281662196977664
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
This article talks a lot about switching costs without naming it as such. But they're pretty key for getting B2B customers to try something new. You can definitely try to maximize them (if you're the incumbent that doesn't want to be displaced) or minimize them, as in Slack's case, with information. We just did a write-up on this topic: http://www.emphatic.co/blog/switching-costs-marketing/
So as a user of an engineer-oriented product, what kind of testing and validation process would you like to see? If the product makes your life as an engineer significantly easier (as Slack does), would you want to participate in a beta, even with warts? If not, what kind of testing would you want the product to go through?
I think this could be instructive for a lot of startups in the tools space. Clearly, Slack did something right.
Even before a beta, work with your prospective customers directly and closely. Determine what they really need and how you should really solve their problems before even presenting a product. If you don't do that before building a product, chances are you've built the wrong one, and a beta will only give you one or two degrees of course corrective ability from there.
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 3: Charge a couple of bucks per month for it and lose money for the first year but that's okay as long as we break even we will make money eventually right? I mean that's what investors want us to do right?
What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch.
The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part.
Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often.
What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core.
This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.