Slack

“Slack, as you probably have noticed, or maybe not has really gone for parody on the mobile app to an extreme. It's like one of the things that I disagreed with. I felt it should be more of an alert inbox and not something that was like fully fleshed out.”

“That's like the interesting sort of tension between product and design is like, you know, subtlety is beautiful, but the point at which subtlety becomes invisibility is like something to keep your eye out for.”

“Games are basically onboarding experiences forever until the game is over, because you're always learning something new.”

“The other thing that we did was we added in some segmentation and onboarding in order to give our sales team better and better data because then they would often go into sort of the C-suite of this larger company and be able to say, oh, hey, you know, we'd lik…”

“And so while at Slack, she ran their growth team as director of product and took the company from 500,000 daily active users to over five million.”

“Cause what you're looking for is what is this core loop that people are going to come in and do over and over and over again. And it's probably just two or three features. You're going to need more to sell into enterprises and things like that. But ultimately …”

“Look at FlowDoc and look at HipChat and, like, there aren't any features that are different. And in fact, both of those products had more features and they had things like replies that we would consistently hear from people.”

“Definitely ignoring everything else that's happening is the best thing to do. Competition can be very distracting and it's easy to look at someone else and sort of assume that, like, they're more successful than you are, or that the flow that you went through …”

“I created a product process out of this with my team as well, where when we were probably 30 people on the growth team, one of the really difficult things about always working on onboarding is that you need to constantly put yourself in the mind of someone who…”

“Products are a whole experience that include Sales. They definitely include your support team. They include the language on your website, and that's how real people experience them.”

“I think that something like Slack is going to emerge for pink and blue collar workers.”

“We've kept our board very small. It's very open, ah, the board meeting, by the time we have a board meeting, everybody knows roughly what's going on. We're texting beforehand using Slack, ah, you know, all the rest”

“Slack got there actually pretty quickly, and they're not quite a public company yet, but as we all know, they've filed for their direct listing quite soon, and they got there in just under three years.”

“Early days we had an accounts team and the accounts team would work out of Zendesk, not Salesforce. So it was almost like an extension of customer support and they would talk to a dentist office and the CIO of a fortune 100 company in the same day.”

“What we decided to do was completely shift the SMB team upmarket turn them into a mid-market organization. Work super closely with our counterparts in the product growth team and the marketing team to figure out how do we systematically build the kinds of ques…”

“So today we have, we count IBM as our largest customer with close to a 130,000 daily active users.”

“Ah, Oracle is a customer that's reaching about 90,000 active users.”

“So the reason why sticks are so effective is twofold. One, you're catching users in a very high intent state. They want to add that file or read that article. You're catching them during the state of urgency. And the second thing is, it doesn't require any add…”

“If you look at Slack, and I recognize they're not a public company, but we've included them because they're imminently, ah, they will be, ah, they got to a hundred million of ARR from one million in three years, which is just incredible. I think that's probabl…”

“Certainly a slack or a Peloton or a DocuSign or a box will probably benefit from this.”

“Slack will come out to 80 cents per user per day or something like that, and if you're spending 50% of your time on internal communication and this has a real impact on that, who cares? Like set the thermostat half a degree warmer or cooler depending where you…”

“I do think for some customers, we're pushing them three or six months down the road. For others, it's like three or five years down the road of digital transformation.”

“When you cancel, like actually cancel a paid plan, which historically has been, you know, very, very low. So we have excellent retention. We do ask you why, and when we see COVID pandemic, you know lockdown, any of those things in the response, we just write t…”

“Oracle had through acquisitions maybe a thousand or 2000 people using Slack, and in 15 months we took it to a 100,000 people wall to wall.”

“Teams, which is the real alternative in some sense, although I think it's much more of a competitor to Zoom or other voice and video calling services than it is a Slack.”

“It's limited to 5000 people per instance and critically only 200 channels. And if you want to add a 201st channel, you have to hard delete one of them without the whole history.”

“Let's focus on people's comprehension. Let's focus on whether they want to do this thing or not, and less on the friction. You can make it trivially easy and remove every bit of friction from some process, adding an app to a channel in Slack. Let's say, but if…”

“At peak, it's like 1.6 million transactions a second or something like that. I could look in the background while we're talking here. it's huge. There's tens of thousands of servers.”

“You know, we spend, as a multiple of what we would sell Slack to ourselves, obviously we get Slack for free, but we spend about two X that on a work day. And I'm thinking of things that are like basically company-wide. We also spend about two X that on Zoom be…”

“An ongoing challenge for us, maybe not right this quarter, but kind of historically and when things resume normalcy, that there is no line item that we're replacing in people's budgets. Typically there is no other, you know, like what I said in the, it's still…”

“I mean, the Salesforce HVS is a, you know, one of 20 plus SKUs, right? And they've got Tableau to digest. Now they've got Slack to digest. It's going to be hard for them to, and they got a hundred million dollar deals they're out there doing with their other p…”

“Slack. We know the majority of the revenue is they crossed a billion hub spots at a billion, right? As they crossed a billion, more than half their revenue became enterprise.”

“35 X revenue multiple paid for what is a fantastic business by one of the leaders of cloud with Salesforce really showing that this was the second largest enterprise software acquisition in history after only IBM's purchase a red hat, but also the largest mult…”

“I don't think pre-seed actually exists anymore, bluntly, for the majority well, not for the majority, but for a lot of founders, whereby if you come out of a top Facebook, Twitter, Datadog, Slack, you name it, you can raise, you know, three to five on 20 like …”

“Microsoft had the relationships with the CIOs, and people were, companies were wall-to-wall Microsoft, that their product didn't even have to be as good as Slack. They could still go win so many customers, and they didn't say, oh, wow, there's this new PLG thi…”

“Big tech, you know, that Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Meta you know, Slack all of these companies are kind of targeting over the next couple months, but by April, they will all be back.”

“First is we actually put a button in every page of our dashboard. It's called the feedback button. It's on the bottom left side. And any user of the system can hit that button and give us a suggestion that basically captures the context of what they're doing i…”

“We have automated feeds that go from that into Slack, that go from Slack to our support, and we're trying to respond within seconds and either bring them back to our community for community help, or just reply right away with the solution.”

“Everyone tries to take shortcuts in community and buy a piece of software and tell people to sign up for a website or join a circle or a Facebook group. That certainly doesn't seem to work, right? Or join our Slack channel that no one moderates. You gotta go a…”

“We've added features for group chat that make it possible for a company to not, if they want, use Slack, because we think we have a better approach for direct messaging in particular, where Slack is pretty weak.”

“We went with monthly active users, which by the way is how Slack got started, But after the Salesforce acquisition, they nixed it. And so now you have to pay up front for the year and the kind of Salesforce more traditional sales model.”

“Literally every ticket pushes to my phone. And when I say ticket, it's like, we open up a Slack room with every customer. Every message in any customer Slack channel pushes to my phone. So I will jump on the phone at midnight and start helping someone debug an…”

“CIOs, small businesses do not have unlimited money. There's a fixed amount, and if you disrupt something, if you do something better than Salesforce or Zoom or HubSpot or Slack or even UiPath, if you do something that is 10 times better, you will get money, bu…”

“For us, for the first five years, one of our, like, core product principles is nobody wants another inbox to check. Like you already have Slack, you have iMessages, you have email, like, when does Loom reach a threshold of being another inbox, and even if we c…”

“That's why Slack is owned by Salesforce now, because, like, Teams is free and the Microsoft bundle.”

“Slack did its first price increase in history at eight months ago. I did a blog post. Every single leader in SAS that hadn't done a price increase did it. HubSpot did too.”

“Slack and zoom never raised prices for years. Slack was disruptive in the early days because it implemented what it called the fair billing policy. And if you didn't use seats, they didn't charge you for them.”

“I don't want to go to, honestly, I don't want to go to Slack. It's a tax on my time. It used to be wonderful and there's no knock on Slack. It's a great business, but it's become another browser or another app I have to do.”

“For years, like large enterprises have had a lot of different opportunity and choice when it comes to collaboration and productivity platforms, but typically Only two of them people really want to use, and that's Google Workspace and Slack.”

“You can see the horrible things that Microsoft did to Slack before we bought it. And yeah, that was pretty bad and they were running their playbook and did a lot of dark stuff. And it's all got in a written up in an EU complaint, but Slack made before we bough…”

“And my vision is if you're in Slack, you are in Tableau and you are in Salesforce.”

“We changed our distribution model for Slack last year. Nobody really saw that, which is that we allow all of our sales force to sell it, get quota credit for it, to basically made a peer product with the rest of our products. And it was A huge supercharge for …”

“The crash here of being taken down actually didn't really matter. What mattered is the reputational hit and damage that Slack took on, where we had to spend the next three years convincing enterprises that we were, in fact, enterprise ready, despite what had h…”

“Four years later, we won Uber back. This is a big moment for us. It took time, but we earned it when Slack was ready, when the product had matured, when the infrastructure could handle the scale, and when we were ready to staff them, and the timing aligned for…”

“We did this at Slack, Webflow, OpenAI, and I know many other greats have done it like Calendly, New Relic, and Airtable.”

“At Slack, we took our largest customers, and we assigned non-sales DRIs, directly responsible individuals, to be in charge of each customer. So our VP of engineering, Michael Lopp, was in charge of VMware. Our CTO, Alan, was in charge of Nike, and so on. And a…”

“We did this at Slack. We put every single employee on a bonus plan, and we tied it to ARR and customer adoption.”

“Across both the technical and non-technical org, one of the favorite use cases is the Slack channel that we spun up, and what this Slack channel does is employees can go in, ask questions. Claude is on the back end and uses to go search over our internal knowl…”

“So with OpenAI, with Slack, many other, Airtable, Figma, New Relic, there's tons of companies out there that all started with this model of full salary, and it's a, you know, a normal living salary like you would give to any other product manager, marketer, en…”

“I think Teams is a severely inferior product to Slack. I still think Slack is a world-class product, but you could argue that we did not win in the large enterprise and Microsoft won because of their distribution power.”

“So we made Slack the front door. Slack comes in, tick it out. Claude does the triaging. So Claude actually co-work now does a lot of this. And that's changed for us probably in the last week since I made these slides, but co-work can check your emails and can …”

“Nobody, nobody gets any Slack messages from me anymore, right? It's quiet because I can get, you know, I can get all the answers to my questions now that I couldn't get before.”