From 0 to $1B – Slack's Founder Shares Their Launch Strategy

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 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.

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.

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.

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/