Download - Reverse Engineering Slack
SLACK: A Lesson in not Slacking Off
Vision
•We're on a mission to make your working life simpler, more pleasant, and more productive
Daily 4 Million Active Users
77 out of Top 100 Fortune Companies
60000 Teams
Who?Stewart Butterfield
Daniel Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian entrepreneur and businessman
What?
Slack is a team communication application providing services such as real-time messaging, archiving, and search for modern teams.
Slack is a team communication application providing services such as real-time messaging, archiving, and to search for modern teams. It offers one-on-one messaging, private groups, persistent chat rooms, and direct
messaging as well as group chats organized by topic.
Funding
Founded : January 1, 2009
When?
$539.95M in 9 Rounds from 26 Investors
Why?
A New Way to connect Teams.Stewart wanted to replace traditional email, impromptu
meetings.
Who are Slack’s Ideal Customers
• Large Teams that rely on Email, IRC and other traditional strategies to communicate.
• A team of people who are willing to pay for better design and integrations that Slack raises over competitors.
First Prototype
“When Stewart pulled back the curtain and shared their early prototype on day one, it looked like a hacked together version of IRC in the browser. Barebones and stark.”
-Andrew Wilkinson (Metalabs)
Early Design Iterations
First Customers1. First Customer was themselves. They used it as a company.2. They cajoled their friends Cozy into trying Slack.3. Then came Rdio, A Bigger Team with 120 employees.
“Suddenly we saw what the product looked like from the perspective of a much larger team, and it was pretty gnarly.”-Stewart Butterfield
They went on to improve their product with this customer feedback.
• In April 2013, they launched their Beta release (Without calling it Beta) with an impressive Press Blitz.• 8000 customers requested invites on first day.• By target time this number grew to 15000
How did the application scale?
People talked about the product and brought more people in.
Challenges to Scaling
• Slack had to convince TEAMS not individuals.• Somewhere between 20 to 30% came from some other centralized
group-messaging system like HipChat, Campfire, or IRC.• Slack build tools to explain what Slack was to these individuals.
• Other 70% were using traditional tools like ad-hoc email lists, mailing lists, Facebook groups or Hangouts
• It was harder with this group because they did not know they had a problem
Tech Stack
• Amazon (CloudFront, CloudSearch, EMR, Route 53, Web Services)• Android Studio• Apache (HTTP Server, Kafka, Solr, Spark, Web Server)• Babel, Brandfolder, Bugsnag, Burp Suite, Casper Suite, Chef, DigiCert, Electron, Fastly, Git, HackerOne,
JavaScript, Jenkins, MySQL, Node.js, Objective-C, OneLogin, PagerDuty, PHP, Redis, Smarty, Socket, Xcode, and Zeplin.
• Marketing: AdRoll, Convertro, MailChimp, SendGrid• Sales and Support: Cnflx, Front, Typeform, Zendesk• Analytics: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Presto• HR: AngelList Jobs, Culture Amp, Greenhouse, Namely• Productivity: ProductBoard, Quadro, Zoom, Slack (go figure!)
Design
Slack vs HipChat
• Slack made an enterprise solution Sexy for the First time. (Popping colors and loading gifs filled the screen.
• It brought in bubbly smileys and made them the norm.
Slack Pricing“A Brilliant Plan that focuses on
FOMO of teams”
Now valued at $ 3.8MHoping to reach $ 5 M validation this year
Major Investors:• Accel Partners• Andreessen Horowitz• Biz Stone• Funders Club• Jeff Weiner
What they did Right
• The Timing. It was a time when emails where boring everyone. It helped.
• FounderStewart was co-founder of Flickr and this helped bring the press
when they needed it.
From a time when Slack was Down.
SlackHQ send out personalised messages to al it’s outraged customers.And it worked.
Competitors
Where they are going?• Building a Complete Communication Platform that expands
integrations with strong ties with Developers.
