

Slack Is Raising Another Round at Up to a $1B Valuation? - doppp
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23/slack-is-raising-another-round-at-up-to-a-1b-valuation/

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DigitalSea
Slack is pretty great, we use it where I work and for coordinating
communication between teams in different parts of the US, the UK, India and
Australia, it is fantastic. It is quite crazy to think what is essentially a
more modernised version of IRC is worth one billion dollars. Either way, I
think it is a highly deserved valuation for a tool that is undeniably a lot
less painful than Google Hangouts, Skype or Email. Great job Slack team.

It also seems besides creating an awesome communication platform, Slack have
discovered the secret to time travel. According to the article, _" has been
growing wildly since launching at the end of 2014"_ a product so successful it
launched in the future and is doing well in the present. Nice quality writing
from Techcrunch.

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zaphar
We just started using it at our company. We have a lot of remote workers.

I think part of _why_ it's so good is because it's "just" a modernized IRC. It
seems like most other other communication tools fail to deliver that feel of
community that IRC does and as a result fall short. Slack despite my initial
misgivings seems to be delivering though.

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thedufer
> I think part of why it's so good is because it's "just" a modernized IRC

In fact, the worst part about slack is the completely unnecessary attachments
UI. When I click on an attachment, just open it in a new tab and let my
browser handle it!

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chatmasta
Slack is a great case study in b2b apps. They built a product essentially used
like a consumer product, but for business purposes. The interface is targeted
at people, not businesses.

And yet they have ~15k customers [1], but massive investor hype and potential
valuations. The equivalent consumer app would require more on the order of 15
_million_ customers to achieve the same.

[1] Read it somewhere.

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rockshassa
last time I used it, Slack had a pretty bad design flaw. each organization has
a #general channel that cannot be unsubscribed from (aka, every person in the
company must be part of #general). it got very annoying when users spammed
(@channel) the entire channel. many devs on my team sent feedback to Slack
asking them for the ability to leave #general.

Their response was something like "we rely on everyone being in #general so
that we have a single place to deliver broadcast messages"

This leads me to believe that their underlying code does not really have a
concept of a user's 'organization', otherwise they could send based on that.
Separate those concerns!

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dmarg
Why is this such a big deal? You can turn off the notifications for the
#general channel. So why not just turn off the notifications for that channel
or use the "Only when mentioned or one of my Highlight Words is used
(default)" option?

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bvanvugt
We've been using Slack for quite a while now after trying HipChat, FlowDock,
etc, and love it.

The major selling point for us is it's incoming Webhook API.

We use it to communicate deployment status, major customer events, and general
fun & hilarity (/giphy).

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awakeasleep
At first I hated Slack. Jabber was definitely Good Enough. But I couldn't live
without it anymore. My tip: use it to it's full potential, you'll have to give
up on the IRC and Jabber bridges.

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j0k3r
Not really
[https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/525352862285430784](https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/525352862285430784)

« We can confirm that, as reported in TechCrunch earlier today, it is likely
that we will raise money "sometime in the next six years." »

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djloche
After trying and failing to get everyone to use use email/facebook/aim/google
hangouts for a community that I help manage, I moved everyone to Slack for
communication. Right now we're at the free tier, but if we ever make some
money - I think moving to the paid tier is something we will do.

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mahmoudimus
The github notifications for slack are _super_ verbose, compared to hipchat --
even with their compact mode option. Hard to know what was going on in the
channel.

We tried it out and unanimously decided to not migrate everyone from hipchat.

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doff
I really think that Slack's best quality is as an email killer. I get close to
zero emails from within my company. It's kind of shocking how much more
productive that makes me.

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dlevine
This is true. I have an email account that gets effectively zero email (other
than Slack notifications). Don't know if this makes me more productive - IM
seems like more of an interruption than email, but it's definitely
interesting.

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jbob2000
Ugh I really wish my team would start using slack, but they're way too
apathetic to try it.

~~~
caffeineninja
I suspect you may be my coworker.

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dubcanada
I wonder how much Hipchat got bought for, I believe Hipchat is more popular
then Slack?

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sandyarmstrong
The only advantage Hipchat has is that you can run it on your own servers.
Slack is so much better for users it's not even funny.

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adamnemecek
can you give me a short tl;du why it's so great?

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sandyarmstrong
Sure. The main thing is that Hipchat is just very buggy. It does not handle
disconnects or intermittent connectivity well, requiring a lot of app
restarts. My coworkers have been reporting a lot of issues with the mobile
apps simply not working. The desktop client has many operations that block the
UI thread for several seconds needlessly (like starting a private chat).

But those are just bugs. These are the features I really miss from Slack:

* Ability to select a recent message you sent and edit it to fix typos. Hipchat uses s/oldtext/newtext, but it does not work consistently, and is only designed to work on the most recently sent message.

* Github-style emoji, like :+1:. It's really weird have a different emoji set and syntax in Hipchat.

* Better per-channel notification preferences.

* Waaaaaaaay better integrations with other services.

* A more attractive UI, and other subjective things like that.

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findjashua
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly is better in channel notifications
and 3rd party integrations?

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sandyarmstrong
Well, Slack has per-channel notification settings, and HipChat does not. So
with HipChat I have to choose between more notification spam, insufficient
notifications, or not being in as many channels as I'd like.

I'm starting to forget what it is I preferred about the github integration in
slack as opposed to HipChat...it's been awhile now. But there are also just so
many URLs that do something useful in Slack but don't in HipChat (for example,
rdio).

Another annoying thing about the HipChat desktop client is modal dialogs where
there shouldn't be. If somebody pings me in a room I'm not in, a modal pops
up, which can be activated accidentally while I'm typing a message in another
room, causing me to lose the notification, or get immediately (well, with
annoying lag) sent to the channel that pinged me, interrupting the message I
was typing and destroying my flow.

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georgemcbay
Soon a billion dollars won't even be cool and the kids will laugh at Justin
Timberlake.

