
From 0 to $1B – Slack's Founder Shares Their Launch Strategy - zt
http://firstround.com/article/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Shares-Their-Epic-Launch-Strategy
======
calinet6
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.

~~~
jbattle
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.

~~~
calinet6
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.

~~~
brandnewlow
Translation:

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.

~~~
dasil003
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.

------
beering
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?

~~~
nissimk
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.

~~~
calinet6
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.

------
shenoyroopesh
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.

~~~
1stranger
Slack is an "experience"? You're outta your mind. It's a freaking chat app.

~~~
shenoyroopesh
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.

------
whichfawkes
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.

~~~
ddebernardy
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.)

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
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.

~~~
jtwebman
And all of them save employee time which is your businesses biggest asset.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
Unless everyone is using a separate application.

------
elvis635
I've never understood why slack is so famous and got so much traction when
other alternatives existed way before it, like hipchat

~~~
bostonvaulter2
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.

~~~
djloche
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.

------
logicuce
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.

~~~
mahyarm
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.

~~~
logicuce
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.

------
mgr86
Everytime I see something about Slack i immediately think of SlackWare.

~~~
lanstein
Especially since I always called Slackware 'Slack'

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

------
serve_yay
So, you should start out by having your well-connected friends in the SF tech
scene use your product and give you lots of free feedback.

Sounds good to me!

------
wallflower
> 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.

------
chambo622
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.

~~~
chermanowicz
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](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/535281662196977664)

~~~
chambo622
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

------
Emphaticdotco
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/](http://www.emphatic.co/blog/switching-costs-marketing/)

------
beat
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.

~~~
calinet6
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.

~~~
beat
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?

------
c3
Step 1: Be Stewart Butterfield.

~~~
coralreef
Being Stewart Butterfield didn't do much when he lost a bunch of money making
an online game.

~~~
Q6T46nT668w6i3m
Step 2: Make a consumer web app.

~~~
networkguy
I'll modify that slightly,

Step 2: Take your internal messaging app and make it a commercial product.

~~~
markhelo
Isnt there a Step 1.5 - Make your own internal messaging app then?

------
shocks
I really hate these "Tweet your selection" widget things.

------
bedhead
I think Slack is kinda neat but stopped using it. Do any non-tech startups use
it? I get the feeling that its usage outside SV is verrrry small.

------
jhwhite
Sounds like they just had a solid product management plan, even if it might
have been informal.

------
pkaye
I though it was $1B is sales. Instead it is just valuation.

~~~
antidaily
You did??

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

------
curiously
pretty much any failed startup used the same launch strategy

