How Slack started
Slack was named the fastest growing startup ever after reaching a $1 Billion valuation Only 8 months after going public. And that was without 1 penny of traditional advertising and without a chief marketing officer. Slack earned as much as 7% per week in its first year. And the success didn't just come out of thin air. Its CEO Stewart Butterfield is no startup newbie.
In 2004 He co-founded Flickr with his Zen wife at the time. And this was a time when, social media photo sharing was still in diapers. After selling Flickr to Yahoo in 2005, for a cool $35 Million.
He then founded Tinyspeck which was an independant gaming company. With Tinyspeck in 2011 he released a game called Glitch where players would battle each other through their religious factions. And in 2012 it actually shutdown because although there were some people who liked it It just didn't reach a big enough audience.
But, in the apparent failure there laid a possibility. While developing Glitch, the team also created their own messaging platform. Although it initially wasn't created to be sold. After Glitch failed, Slack was already running. The new software worked so well that in 2013 they started revamping it and then eventually using it for the whole company. By using it themselves they actually can see the wholes and flaws with their system Then they went to their friends in other companies and they started to beg them to begin using their messaging platform. and Slack began to grow exponentially through this feedback.
Today Slack has gone viral. It hosts 8 million daily active users and over 3 million paid users. They have a presence of 43% at Fortune 500 companies. And Slack is so focused on the user experience that they actually have a dedicated team for 24/7 Twitter support. And it works! Their Conversion Rate is 30% which is the highest among Freemium software.
And in 2018 Slack was valued at $7.1 Billion which they will re-invest in Artificial Intelligence and app development to give them their competitive edge.
And that's how Slack started!