Learning from the first 1,000 Slack invites
16 observations from the first 1,000 Slack invites. What seemed to work? Who had we invited? The lies that hindsight tells us.
Below is a document from a time machine. In September, 2013, I wrote and shared the document with the Slack team to summarize what I thought we’d learned up to then. It appears almost entirely verbatim and was titled 1,000 Slack Invites.
To include some context, we’d just done Slack’s preview release about a month before, on August 14. It had gone well — 8,000 people signed up the first day when our PR hit, 16,000 had signed up by the end of that first week.
So we had a small success, an indication of interest, and a backlog of folks we had to invite to try Slack. Then we started inviting them.
As we started to get feedback from those invitees trying Slack, we started to see some early patterns. I was the person inviting people in and talking with customers, so I thought it should fall to me to summarize and share the things I noticed. That prompted the writing of this document.
The last thing I’ll note for context is that the document below continues our perpetual quest to find the right way to answer a key question: So, what is Slack? We had taken a shot with our single-page website, choosing one main headline: Be less busy. But we’d also hedged our bets and included many of our other positioning options as sub sections on the page. So we remained open and curious about what really worked.
Okay, enough preamble. Warm up the time machine.
1,000 Slack Invites
September, 2013
For the last ~3 weeks we’ve been doing manual and automated invitations for teams to create their own Slack account from the list of people who have signed up once we announced our preview release on August 14. In that time we have invited just under 1,000 teams and I wanted to share some of the things I’ve noticed going through all those signups.
I’m drawing the observations below mostly from:
Viewing the data people entered in the feedback form, especially the What makes you interested in Slack? free-form answers,
Visiting the company websites of the teams they work with,
Reading the explicit feedback they have provided to us in replies to their invitations or welcome emails and
Watching what happens once they act on the invitation.
2 caveats to frame the observations, one general and one specific:
Generally, what people say and what they do are almost never the same. Often what they say and what they do can be quite different, so we need to both listen to what they say (or read what they type) and watch what they do (usage stats).
Specifically, in combing through the signups, I'm being a total anglophile with regard to who I invite. If I infer they aren’t English speakers, I don't send them an invite because we're looking for user feedback, which is hard enough to get without also having to make sense of information through a language barrier.
Observations from 1,000 Slack invitations
1. Replacement for email is an immensely powerful promise to make and position to take in the market. People love it. It touches a very sensitive place in a very good way. My only concern is that it's a negative position – it's against something instead of standing for something. It may be that it will work just fine that way and people will fill in the blank of what it's for with their own hope. For example, this description:
"I run our customer support organization and have about 65 people in three states. I feel like I spend all my time hawking over my inbox. We also have a hard time because our front line people often miss messages that are critical or just don't read them.
I just said yesterday to one of my team members - "What if we just got rid of email all together for support".
I would love a way to combine email, project, and group notification across multiple geographies into one place!"
2. Search and archive are powerful as well, though not as prevalent as No Email in people’s reactions. My sense is these benefits are more appealing to (1) power users who have reached a level of maturity with their tools and want something better or (2) technical users who understand how the tools could be working so much better for them.
3. All your tools in one place is very popular. Bringing together the tools, collecting the data, replacing less-satisfactory systems are all mentioned occasionally and when they are mentioned they are the driving motivation for people to try Slack.
4. Real-time messaging is less mentioned and either assumed or not interesting enough to merit mention as part of our positioning and messaging.
5. Cloud-based tools are not just for geeks. The penetration of cloud-based tools has happened across industries and stages of the adoption curve led by consumer-oriented / consumer-like applications like Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Podio and Box.
6. 'I like playing with new things!’ Many people who signed up just want to stay up to date on the latest tools to try them. The sense I get is that they want to feel privileged and have access, then brag about having access. Tons of people put ‘want to try it’ or simply 'curious' in the form.
8. Healthcare and defence have popped up as recurring industries wanting to try Slack. In particular, healthcare software providers. We don’t tend to pay a lot of attention to these parts of the software industry, focusing instead on startups, consumer internet companies and apps. But it’s these big companies that have huge markets to address, especially with changing western demographics.
9. Remote / mobile teams in low-tech industries with a coordinating head office signed up to try Slack for their workforce management / communication: pest control, field surveyors, etc. As an example, Paul Davis Restoration & Remodeling (pdrvirginia.com) have a mobile workforce they need to coordinate and a head office who needs to maintain communication. Inviting a few of them in is an experiment to see if they use Slack as their new form of basic communication – replacing email and SMS.
10. Media and creative agencies have signed up in good numbers. They like to feel ahead of the game on new workflow tools and to show them to their clients. Slack will work well for them for internal communication but my sense is they’re going to want it to also work for external communications with freelancers or other agency / partner teams and then for end clients. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
11. Google Wave gets occasional mentions that stand out in the free form input – people who mentioned it thought Slack sounded like Wave and they wanted Wave back. All the Wave mentions have been very positive.
12. So much work is knowledge work today. It’s amazing to be reminded of how many people's work is now computer based, even if they're in the business of Dicing Blades and Fine Grinding Plates (http://www.iti-abrasives.com) all the design, engineering, communication and workflow happens at the workstation.
13. People mention Hipchat more than Campfire, and those two are the top team communication tools.
14. Skype dominates both Hipchat and Campfire with around 20x as many mentions. (This may be because we mention Skype specifically in the previous question on the survey, but we also mention Hipchat and Campfire in brackets.)
15. Our competitive landscape is email, then Skype. From reading people’s input my sense is Slack competes with #1 email and #2 Skype in organizations and everything else is small in comparison. There are a few mentions of Microsoft Lync but that's the only other product. Hardly a mention of FlowDock.
16. On bullshit: after looking at a few thousand website homepages, I can say that many are lacquered with bullshit – expensive, grammatically correct, seemingly innocuous bullshit. For example, read this homepage and tell me what this company does: http://www.oliverwyman.com
They're a large company with offices all around the world but I couldn't really tell what they do. Let's never be like that.
How hindsight tells lies
So what’s to be made of these sixteen observations, staring at out from over 12 years ago?
There’s lots to note and it’s all very early on. Some of the observations continue to be valid. Some fade away. Skype vanishes yet we never really create a large market for Slack in healthcare or defence.
But I think the most important thing to note is that we know how this story ends, or at least progresses. Slack goes on to find its customers, launch a product, build its business, debut on the NYSE, and sell to Salesforce for billions. It’s indisputably an amazing rocket ship ride.
So it’s a challenge to engage in what Coleridge called the “willing suspension of disbelief.” But I’d ask you to.
Please ignore what you know is coming for Slack. Push your perspective back to September, 2013, when Slack still has $0 revenue. Place yourself in that janky brick-walled office with the 3 of us who made up Slack Vancouver, washing our dishes in the bathroom since, once the hot water arrived.
We had tasted a very small sample of the exhilaration of customers demand with our preview release. People had shown us the thing we were offering could be compelling. The team had some track record of prior success. But we didn’t really have much to go on but faith — not any model of causation, not any correlation to what we intended. We had signals, hints, a scent we felt like we could follow that led to customers experiencing a problem we felt we could solve.
That’s what I think we can find in these 16 observations, and why I wanted to share the document in its original, time-machined state. For authenticity, sure. But moreso, to show how little we knew, how much we were just like thousands of failed startups. And to show where the scent of success started.
And let’s acknowledge it: the survivorship bias is real. Most startups fail, and there were so many ways we could have failed. That would have been the most likely outcome. Then I wouldn’t be here typing to you and you wouldn’t care about this story. Failure really is the normal outcome for a startup. Slack is an exception that found some success.
Sure, we can look back on the time of September, 2013, and a summary of our first 1,000 invites, and find the scent of success. We can trace that scent to a $27.7-billion exit and the story almost writes itself. We can ease ourselves into a resulting fallacy. But please don’t let that hindsight lie to you. That’s as if we looked at a morning weather forecast with 1% chance of rain and dressed for a downpour.
At the time of our first 1,000 invites, we had no clue where we were headed. We had to believe in a vague story that certainly wasn’t true yet. We had to be brave and afraid at once. We did have some belief. With our first 1,000 invites, we started to have some evidence. It felt good.
Now we needed to push on that evidence and see how far it would take us.
Up next:
Slack starts to take off. “Please sit next to the money,” says my wife. The polite struggle for control. I get hired, fired, not hired, then — what?
Google Wave! Hah!