
Slack Platform Launch - thejosh
http://slackhq.com/post/134878632730/launch-platform
======
cromwellian
Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or
failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block
or cut them off for any reason.

Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff
that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth
millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot
because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.

~~~
oskarth
While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely
missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience,
especially for non-technical people.

Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their
own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke.

Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as
IRCCloud, but (a) it costs money for individuals (b) it's frankly not as good,
UX-wise. Hence not as popular.

~~~
wh-uws
THANK YOU. This is why slack is winning. They took many of the concepts of
what makes irc great abd put a much better user experience on top.

Why is that so hard for people to understand?

This happens over and over again.

\- Google wasn't the first search engine. \- Facebook wasn't the first social
network. \- Microsoft didn't build the first operating system.

They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts of users.

~~~
babuskov
I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's the truth.

Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are
programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging
can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works.

To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to
build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in
beautiful, easy to use package. Slack is the iPhone in its area.

~~~
cromwellian
Think of it this way. Did the Web Browser need to be a proprietary closed
protocol in order for the massive improvement over Gopher/WAIS or other end
user hypertext information systems back then?

No, Netscape/Mozilla didn't need to "own" HTTP and HTML completely, and turn
the Web into a giant App Store in order to innovate in the Browser client,
neither did Google, Apple, or MS. At various points, proprietary extensions
were tried, and either failed, or got standardized when they became popular or
proven their need.

All Praise to Slack's UI, I love all the flourishes, like auto-detection of
paste of code bits and offering to create snippets. I get it, I really do.

I just don't think we need another messaging platform owned by a single
company.

~~~
sly010
Actually, many features of the modern web (DOM, XmlHttpRequest, box-sizing:
border-box) were implemented by IE first.

Unfortunately it's not in the best interest of anyone capable of engineering
open/distributed platforms to actually do so. Why would they? It's way easier
and more profitable to create something on your own terms, something you can
control. I would risk that it's better for the customer.

People are flocking from WordPress to SquareSpace, from self hosted SMTP
servers to Google, from private hosting to cloud hosting.

Is this a good thing in the long term? I don't think so either, but doing it
any other way would be heroism and we are short on heroes.

------
abrkn
Every program attempts to expand until it has an app store. Those programs
which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

~~~
chadillac83
Abrkn's law was born.

~~~
mattdeboard
Brekken's Law (assuming that's his surname from the email in his profile).
It's a snowclone of Zawinski's law of software development[1]:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which
cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

It really is true. My previous employer had a dream of turning their extremely
specific web app into a platform, with an app store and everything. I assume
that being a platform means big bucks, idk.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_la...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment)

~~~
isolate
It's a snarky observation that hides an important insight: email is the most
important thing that the internet does.

------
chuhnk
I feel like the world has lost it's mind slightly. When a 2 year old startup
launches an $80m fund. I mean I understand they want to be a platform and can
see the strength in funding projects that will empower a platform model but
still. This is the point at which I think we're really in a boom heading in
that bubble direction, and I was never one to fall in to the trap of calling
it a bubble before. Love slack, love the platform play, but my God this is
getting crazy.

~~~
tomasien
Slack makes a ton of money and it is unimaginable to me (and many others) that
it's not going to be a massive force. It has been a revelation to literally
every entrepreneur I know - and I'm from Virginia not SV (although I recently
moved to NYC - same deal).

Now that it has established itself beyond almost any doubt, its INVESTORS have
established an $80M bet around those who make the company a core component of
their strategy. Slack, which has very low burn, seems to have contributed to
this fund but we can safely assume it was a small amount (if at all).

This is a sign of strength. We're still creating transformational companies
with real revenue models, and these companies often facilitate other great
companies. Tech is strong - valuations may be wrong one way or another, but
tech is a great place to deploy capital.

~~~
michael_fine
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very
similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.

~~~
Fishkins
For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat,
notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I
sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get
notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are
configurable to the degree I desire.

Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just
always works how I want. I don't know if I'd call it a "revelation", but it's
way better than any comparable product I've used.

[0] - I think HipChat recently added support for more granular notification
settings, but I don't use it anymore. Also, it took over 3 years of this being
their 1st or 2nd most requested feature before they addressed it, so I don't
give them any credit for having it now.

[1] - They might get an email depending on their settings, but the HipChat app
would never give a notification.

~~~
stephengillie
Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every
single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen.

Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you
get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no
notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the
option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?

~~~
hpoydar
Agreed. I wrote a blog post outlining a way to get around this.
([https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/slack-is-
too-...](https://medium.com/building-things-people-want/slack-is-too-
noisy-1b318a2a6c02)) The gist: turn off all notifications then flip them back
on by channel. Still doesn't address de-coupling of pop-ups and sound, though.

~~~
tobrepeels
Loved the article. check out www.spacechatapp.com would love to pick your
brains on how to filter through the noise. we're building it.

~~~
hokkos
Your site shows cloudflare errors.

------
thatindiandude
I don't think it's reasonable to say we're in a bubble because of a $80M fund
around developing for a new platform. Few companies truly become platforms,
and it's a misnomer to call it a bubble if this only happens to one company.
It takes a lot of money or momentum to develop one. Facebook had by far the
most compelling one in the last ten years, and the obvious incentive there was
it's >300M users at the time. The case is less compelling for a B2B platform
like Slack, but it makes sense as many of these investors also invest in B2B
startups that can gain huge visibility through the Slack platform.

By having six investors in the fund, each fund can mitigate risk of Slack's
platform not getting traction while lowering the barrier for developers to
enter. This slideshow by A16Z outlines why the venture capitalists (including
some on the list of Slack fund contributors) are tightening their belts around
investing and telling companies like Slack to generate reliable business
models rather than IPO prematurely.

This premature IPO behavior was the reason for the last bubble, and I think
this investment fund is proof that we are NOT in a bubble. The new strategy
for these investment funds is to allow their startups to generate revenue on a
much more stable basis without the need to go public (and get cash for equity)
for this to happen. Most B2B companies would eventually benefit from a
recurring-fees model built around the Slack platform, and this enables
smaller, fledging companies to scale much more quickly towards long-term
cashflow positivity.

In all, the kings of tech companies are those that find some sort of platform
or natural monopoly. Slack may be next in line to follow Airbnb, Uber,
Twitter, Facebook, and Google respectively. Overall, by allowing a method to
build these platforms while not going public, investors increase returns for
their companies in the short AND LONG term while maintaining a course of
innovation!

~~~
btown
A good comparison that hasn't been mentioned much in this thread is
Salesforce's Salesforce1 Fund, which launched with $100M in 2014 to encourage
people to build around the B2B app-creation platform it had launched a year
earlier [0]. As the parent post mentions, it's important to make the case
"compelling" for building best-in-class integrations with a relatively-
recently-launched platform (whether or not that platform is sponsored by a
historically huge corporation or not).

It's an interesting point that bringing multiple sources of external capital
to bear on an ecosystem via a multi-sponsor fund, rather than into the
business itself via an IPO, allows the business to grow at a natural rate, and
avoids Slack contributing to a "bubble" in which companies race to go public
to launch their own platforms. I think we've learned from the last time around
that the public markets aren't the best place to manage expectations in
technology.

As for why the sponsors made this investment, there's a very good case to be
made that (a) efficient free-form communication within agile teams at small
and large companies is a pattern as crucial to developing modern businesses as
a CRM, and (b) Slack is perfectly poised to capture and _hold_ this new market
in the same way that Salesforce was. Certainly worth a $13mm commitment that's
diversified amongst companies whose teams could still pivot should Slack not
work out.

[0] [https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-
releases...](https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-
releases/2014/09/140908.jsp)

------
nubela
Please guys, no. Don't build your startup on top of another platform. Remember
Facebook? Remember Twitter? That 80M is a farce by the VCs that actually re-
contributes back into Slack, not so much for you.

~~~
robryan
It depends, if having a slack integration will benefit your business and
theirs and they are willing to help fund it, seems like a win win.

Of course you are correct that you would never want to bet your business on
their platform.

~~~
msoad
Until they are in your business also...

------
adamseabrook
No need to build your entire startup on Slack but a solid integration can
drive serious initial revenue for your startup especially if you do not get a
lot of direct traffic. "One click install" is what helped Woocommerce and
others get massive growth on the back of Wordpress through top exposure in the
plugin directory.

Slack is still very much at the bottom of the growth curve. I have seen
electrical contractors who need a way to chat with onsite workers at various
projects switch from using WhatsApp/SMS to Slack. If one click job scheduling
apps start appearing in the Slack App Store they will be quickly adopted by
these businesses. I would be surprised if Slack or something like it has not
completely wiped out internal email in 5 years.

~~~
gkop
I too am bullish on Slack and am with you right until "wiped out email." I've
heard this said about Slack before and don't get it. Asana is a real email
killer in that it's both realtime (instant) and structured (i.e. it wholly
replaces email _threads_ ). On a meta level, why is it that it's so important
for Slack's marketing that they "replace email"? Why isn't it enough for them
to "go beyond email" (which is totally realistic and _honest_ and still a
potentially huge business)?

~~~
stanleydrew
I don't know whether it's important for Slack's marketing to claim they are
replacing email.

What I can tell you is that it factually has wiped out internal email for our
team at Charge.

And I think that's pretty common for most teams that have used it. Why write a
slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

~~~
Xylakant
> Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

Because email is threaded conversations, while slack is not. I can write 5
different emails and respond to each thread individually, but I can't do that
in slack: I can write 5 messages, but my peer(s) can't answer each one
individually - they can just write 5 messages and I have to figure out what
they respond to.

Email has the added benefit of working nicely when you're on a connection
that's not always available (mobile, traveling, etc.) I can write the message
and have it sent later, download all messages and read (and answer) them
without a connection. Slack (and other chat applications) just falls flat on
it's face when the connection drops from time to time.

Now, all of that might be properties that you don't need because you're never
traveling and always on the same schedule, so that you're able to answer
questions in real time - but don't assume that's true for everyone.

~~~
jchoong
We have a prototype threading implementation for Slack. Drop a line to <hn
username> @gmail.com if interested to test.

------
jaksmit
Kind of funny for people to say that a new startup launching a fund means
there's a bubble. That's exactly what Twilio have been doing even since 2010:
[https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-
som...](https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-some-
investment-dollars/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-
lau...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-launch-a-
micro-fund-fund-for-european-startups/) [http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-
launches-50-million-deve...](http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-
launches-50-million-development-fund/)

------
martin-adams
So if I build something on top of this that actually turns out to be popular
and turns a good profit, what is to protect me from Slack then building it in
the core product that cutting me out or shutting me down?

Not much I guess. Twitpic anyone? [1].

1\. [https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-
down/](https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/)

------
pkrumins
Does anyone know how you can apply for a Slack Fund grant?

I'd love to create a Browserling integration. Browserling
(www.browserling.com) is a live interactive cross-browser testing service and
this integration would let you embed a live browser directly in Slack.

Use case: Let's say a user reports a bug in IE10 on Windows 7 in your webapp.
You just use `/browserling windows7 ie10 URL` command in Slack and that will
embed a real interactive IE 10 on Win7 that runs your webapp at `URL` directly
in Slack.

~~~
nithinr6
You can email them slackfund@slack.com

~~~
truediger10
Have you or anyone you know gotten a response? Do you know what exactly you
should send them?

------
altonzheng
Slack is great and all, but I personally don't feel like it's revolutionary.
It's just an iterative improvement over a chat client, nothing groundbreaking
there.

~~~
cookiecaper
As in most other popular things, there's little actual substance undergirding
Slack. Slack lives off hot air. Lucky for them, I suppose.

------
fideloper
2 points:

1\. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here
citing fee alternatives).

From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay.

Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent
rolling your own.

2\. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!

~~~
chlestakoff
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are
basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine
and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?

~~~
jzelinskie
There's a pretty good talk on "chatops" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically,
it provides a dialog around a "shared command-line" where developers from
learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to
distributed companies.

However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the
repository for the bot "tame"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it
to be useful, which means having lots of secrets exposed to the bot.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw)

~~~
lotyrin
Give the bot runtime (not in the repository, environment variable or
something) credentials for a secret storage tool of some kind, where it can
then fetch credentials for whatever it's allowed to do.

~~~
endymi0n
Securing the bot itseld is definitely a larger challenge, but a heavily
shielded box and tools like Vault can go a long way. It's actually not much
different to securing other solutions to the problem like Capistrano or Chef,
and definitely still better than giving root SSH access to your developers.

------
raymondgh
That's 80M against the commoditization of hosted chat. Smart way to put up
barriers to entry.

------
spdustin
Their dev blog post [0] mentions an AWS Lambda Blueprint to go along with a
chatbot framework (BotKit) and an "Add to Slack" workflow. This (AWS Lambda)
is a smart move; it reduces the friction of writing a quick integration with
Slack considerably, making it almost a commodity-level feature. This bet on
AWS Lambda will likely be a big deal for general AWS Lambda adoption, given
how insanely popular Slack integrations are.

[0]: [https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-
platform-1147...](https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-
platform-114754258b91#.jp25qhvsl)

------
anonfunction
Really like the announcement of botkit[1], I was just looking at adding a vote
bot to our slack and only found a really old example that ended up not
working.

1\. [https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/](https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/)

~~~
sciurus
I hope that the official blessings of botkit doesn't negatively impact other
bot frameworks that user the Slack APIs. Lita
([https://www.lita.io/](https://www.lita.io/)) is an _excellent_ way to write
Slack bots in Ruby. It supports other chat services and protocols too, so your
bots don't lock you in to Slack.

~~~
Perceptes
Author of Lita here. Lita's Slack adapter isn't going anywhere. :}

------
chopete
It is yammer all over again
[http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png](http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png)

I can't help but post this based on my experience pitching to vendors to join
an app store.

Slack CEO: Yammer made $1.2B. We need to make $12B. For that I need to make a
hit song with 10,000 background dancers with me on the stage.

Board: How much can you pay each dancer?.

CEO: $10/hr

Board: Ok. Announce an App Store.

You are already a hero and there are hundreds of them to jump on stage to
dance with you in that 5 minute song.

CEO: Now you are talking!

~~~
Freak_NL
We were looking at a company communication channel to replace Yammer and
Google Chat a while back, and briefly played with Slack. In the end trading in
one cloud service for another seemed unwise.

Because we already used self-hosted GitLab when they announced the inclusion
of MatterMost (FOSS self-hosted alternative to Slack) we simply activated that
and have been quite satisfied with it.

------
brightball
I summarize Slack this way generally:

\- If you've never used Hipchat, Slack is completely revolutionary. \- If
you've used Hipchat, Slack is still cool...and then you see the price
comparison and ponder...WHY?

~~~
tootie
My company has both! Why buy one when you have two for twice the price!

------
asbromberg
Interesting, could this be the beginning of something like WeChat for
businesses, where every business function you think of can just be completed
on Slack? I doubt there's anything about the U.S. market that makes these non-
open / corporation controlled platforms undesirable (as some other comments
suggest); after all, Windows dominates the business landscape. Its just a
question of whether Slack can go from convincing start ups x,y and z to use
these apps, to convincing Fortune 500 companies to take the plunge.

------
kriro
I've never used slack and don't know what types of apps they want to integrate
but it seems like a disruption of a nice chunk of a market that ERP vendors
have ventured into (the job productivity/project management etc. branch). That
sounds good because quite frankly often the stuff ERP vendors offer in that
space is somewhat lackluster "well we have to be in this area" material.

I think the slack platform could eventually branch out into more traditional
ERP areas (accounting, production etc.) and it could be an interesting
potential shift from "everything from one hand" to "let's configure our ERP
from different services"

Building a platform like this is nontrivial and there's tons of problems ahead
but I like the general idea.

------
thallukrish
I feel an App ecosystem definitely helps to expand the functions. However I
also feel it is opposite of a nimble app which does one thing clean. In
general we have always had this conflict and it is difficult to choose to stay
lean and simple especially when you decide to grow and scale to engulf
everything. Its almost like 'Let me grab as much as I can before some one
comes' sort of thinking. Only the market can prove if this is the right
thinking in the long run. But when you see it in the short span, you do not
have much choice.

------
ihuman
How does BotKit compare to slack-client[1]?

[1] [https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-
client](https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-client)

------
hayksaakian
Can someone who uses slack comment on the value over skype for example?

It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I
wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.

~~~
bossx
In the 90s Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was extremely popular, you connect to a
public server, and join a #channel and chat with people, send files, share
links etc. There were thousands of ways to extend IRC, through custom clients,
bots, scripts.

Slack builds upon a lot of core concepts that IRC had but differs in a few
ways. 1) Simplicity, you can get up and running in a few minutes and have your
whole team connected. 2) Managed hosting, maintenance and client updates 3)
Excellent UX, features are intuitive and new features are introduced with
guidance 4) Cross platform support and fast mobile clients 5) Integrations,
being able to push and pull data across you apps from the place your entire
team can communicate is incredibly powerful. The discoverability and ease of
deployment (some can be deployed in a few minutes).

I think they have a great position in the SMB market. Surprisingly some
enterprise organizations still use IRC internally due to the control they have
over server/data etc. There is probably an opportunity for Slack to develop an
on-premise solution for enterprise.

~~~
distances
I was a bit hesitant first when our company first started using Flowdock (a
Slack competitor), but it turned out to be just great. For example: flows (or
chat rooms) with inbox for integrations to e-mail, GitHub, CI and so on --
discussion can be directly related to a certain item, such as a failed build!

And of course, discussion threads. This is something Slack still doesn't have,
and is a one of the reasons to stay with Flowdock instead. Everyone knows what
happens with IRC channels when there's hundreds of people and multiple
simultaneous discussions. Good luck trying to follow the conversation if you
weren't following it realtime.

That said, it sadly seems that Slack will eat the whole pie, and it is
probably the most future-proof choice at the moment.

------
bhuga
Does anyone know if this comes with an initiative to fill in the gaps in
Slack's administrative API so addons can be created around that, too? I'm
working with SlimerJS to audit message retention and a few other settings.

Slack has a great core experience and I understand why it's doing so well. But
it's weird to see an $80m fund to invest particularly in Slack addons when a
lot of existing features don't yet have API support.

------
mark_l_watson
I used Slack for a few months this year. A customer didn't use email,
preferring Slack. Slack is an awesome platform, but I missed the asynchrony of
email. When I code I like to have 30 to 40 minute uninterrupted work periods
and I found an always on Slack took me out of the flow. Using Slack with
specified "turn it off" quiet times would solve that issue however.

~~~
gkop
Just keep it open in a tab of the same browser window where you check HN ;)
(and don't enable the desktop notifications, of course)

------
adoming3
The fund is a great play for Slack to become the next enterprise app store. A
welcome alternate to the Salesforce AppExchange IMO.

~~~
vessenes
Interesting idea. I love the thought of integrating everything over to a text
chat interface as opposed to salesforce's godawful web UI.

I really like! I'm imagining, say accounting integrations which are
cryptographically signed by the accounting software and go into a channel.

I bet I'll be paying for an enterprise inside-the-firewall version of slack in
the next few years, or wrestling with some competitor that's not quite as
good, one way or the other.

------
dblock
Slack team did a great job with this.

Here's a fresh integration with Slack Button in Ruby,
[https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server](https://github.com/dblock/slack-
bot-server) serving a "Hello World" bot. Hope it helps someone.

------
mikemockup
Nice move by Slack and great opportunity for slackbot developers. We discover
zero interfaces and just launched analytics bot –
[http://www.brobot.io](http://www.brobot.io) You can use it with Google
Analytics, Mixpanel, New Relic.

------
nikon
Wonder if their stack is still PHP/MySQL etc?[0]

[0]
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217)

~~~
creullin
Indeed they do
[https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888)

------
jim-greer
In this thread: a lot of people who haven't used Slack attacking it...

------
djhn
Evernote had a developer conference. They wanted an ecosystem, and kind of had
a platform. They bought sucessful apps.

Past tense! Much better/realistic parallel, than Facebook F8.

------
tangled_zans
I've never used Slack, but people keep saying that it's good because of the
apps. What sort of apps are those?

~~~
drinchev
They are pretty much integrations. Access APIs of different platforms and
manipulate / gather data.

------
JohnDoe365
I definitely witter a new IT bubble

------
viach
Looks like SHOW HN will be crowded more than often after this weekend.

------
BrainInAJar
Christ, they just don't get it... What we need isn't "apps for Slack" what we
need is onprem Slack. Because sending confidential information to "the cloud"
is all kinds of stupid and potentially violates a bunch of laws

~~~
morbidkk
folks at atlassian (hipchat) are already doing this...it depends which markets
one pursuing...slack and hipchat are totally on different scale. Atlassian
even didn't make hipchat user numbers public during IPO proceedings

------
ossreality
I'm sorry, I've scoffed at other valuations and investments, but I'm just
completely beside myself. Why does a chat room need "apps"?

It's kind of weird actually. There's two sorts of people that defend these
announcements, I've found:

The first thinks that they are going to build an "amazing" platform some day
and that they'll follow this model for "growing revenue". So of course they
defend it.

And then there's the second group that has some "great idea" who plans to
build on Slack's platform. Personally, I look forward to 2 years of stories
about how Slack was unfair to them, or changed the rules on them, or broke an
API. Or didn't review fast enough, or any of the other complaints that pop up
monthly about other closed platforms.

~~~
tomasien
Have you ever even USED Slack? The apps are amazing, it's 50% of why people
use Slack. There have been apps since I've known about it which has been
almost since it launched.

~~~
jmspring
50% that's a stretch.

Useful, yes, 1/2 of interactions, questionable.

~~~
jsmeaton
Parent didn't say 50% of interactions were integrations, just that the
integrations are 50% of the reason people _use_ Slack and I agree. There are
other somewhat comparable products that are a lot cheaper, yet don't deliver
the same value with regards to integrations.

------
beyondcompute
Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Something that's in the middle between a bug and a missing feature (imho) is
that Slack's failure to support Github-style markdown.

GitHub does a great job with markdown, especially with programming-language-
specific highlighting. And even things like strike-though text and URL's,
which aren't specific to software development.

It's one of the few aspects of Slack that has me open to alternative services.

