Butterfield: Slack wouldn't have grown without emotional product conveniences
Stewart Butterfield · Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield · Nov 20, 2025 · at 19:34
Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield reflects on what drove Slack's early bottom-up adoption across tech startups.
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“It wouldn't have grown the way it did without those little conveniences which caused people to form an emotional connection because a lot of our growth came from, you know, startup A uses Slack, and then someone leaves startup A for startup B, and startup B doesn't use Slack yet, and they would be like, oh my god, you guys, we really, this is so good, we gotta try it, and the spread was driven by that Cross-pollination, and people are really genuinely advocating for it.”
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