Translator: Zhang Chen @ Zhuan
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“Life is too short to do mediocre work, and it is definitely too short to build shitty things. The value of life, do not fall into mediocrity, do not drown in vulgar things.” — Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack
Take a look at Google Trends to see search Trends for the keyword “Slack” over time.
Slack’s search index on Google Trends
It’s still growing. How did Slack work in such a short time?
Let’s talk about the amazing hacking techniques that Slack used to grow until it became what it is now.
Here’s a chart of Slack’s DAILY Active Users
Photo credit: Business Insider
In fact, Slack was born by accident. Stewart Butterfield and his team were working on a gaming app called Glitch when they realised that communicating within an organisation was a huge challenge and a great opportunity to simplify it. So Slack was created.
There is no doubt that Slack has left users with a very clear position in mind — to define a new field and then claim leadership there. In addition, Slack has some unique ways to grow like a hacker, and we’ll discuss some of the main techniques today.
A personal brand
Stewart Butterfield has long been a famous figure. He was the co-founder of Flickr and became more famous after Yahoo bought him, and everyone wants to know what’s next for Stewart. Even before he started Slack, he had a good following. So it’s a safe bet that when he cofounded Slack, many fans will follow his next venture as if they were harking back to Flickr’s old days.
Stewart Butterfield. Photo credit: Flickr
One thing to mention here is that when you have a partner on your founding team with a smart and famous personality, you need less marketing to try to convince people to try your product, which is definitely a factor that helps Slack.
Also, as discussed in the Quora discussion about the importance of a startup’s personal brand, the mistake most people make with personal branding is because they think it’s not you or just a facade. Butterfield, however, is completely different:
“Look at Stewart Butterfield at Slack, an example of how to do personal branding well. Rarely have I seen a founder’s personal brand shine as brightly as his candor. He swears and he exaggerates, but it doesn’t change the image of who he is and how people see him.” – Ed Zitron
The best time
As people rely more and more on the Internet for work and other things, sending and processing email is consuming more and more time. However, this doesn’t make a lot of sense for our work and gives us inbox phobia
Most of our inboxes probably look something like this
Slack has found a great opportunity to help people reduce the burden of dealing with email, or find a better way to communicate or do project management than email. The timing is perfect to find a fast, reliable and useful alternative to email, and Slack has arguably entered the market at the perfect time. When you’re ahead of the competition and you go into a market with a solid product, you’re going to be ahead and have a first mover advantage.
Arguably, Rather than trying to replace existing project management tools such as Teamwork, Asana or Trello, Slack offers a way to integrate lots of such tools (not yet Teamwork). This is clever, so that other tool makers see Slack less as a competitor and more as a “facilitator”. If Slack had not emerged that way, its time to market would not have been so good. In other words, its product form would have been very different from what it is today.
Design and Experience
Slack has been very focused on making sure that the look and feel of its site and clients allow its users to communicate with each other. Their main motivation was to make the product intuitive enough that users could use it without any manuals or product tutorials. If you haven’t used Slack yet, you can try it out and find that you don’t need a detailed manual to use it like an expert.
How do you do that?
Stewart Butterfield hired MetaLab, a design firm run by Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew wrote a post about Slack design principles (or should we say design beliefs), and you can read Slack’s Secret Sauce here.
Some of MetaLab’s early iterations for Slack. Image credit: MetaLab.
Free mode
Price is undoubtedly the key for SAAS companies, and thanks to today’s technology, it’s much easier to offer trials or free features to users to grab their attention.
For many people, buying online has become less risky, and they want to see if the features of your product really meet their needs before they actually pay.
Slack’s free model makes it easy and convenient for users to try out its features without paying anything. Its pricing strategy is simple and straightforward.
The ‘Team Slack’ pricing strategy. Photo credit: Slack.com
As you can see, the free version is quite feature-rich, and unlike many other products that require you to enter your credit card information while trying it out, users can simply download and start using it.
Minimization function
When Slack started, it didn’t focus too much on features, they just wanted to build one or two main strengths and make them the best.
If you are part of any channel/team, you want to know what is happening within the team and the general state of things. You can tag any of your colleagues and tell them that, for some reason, a Slack notification creates a sense of urgency that is harder to ignore than an email reminder.
Word of mouth marketing
While it’s easy to get lost in the maze of online marketing techniques, Slack is an interesting testament to the fact that word of mouth still works. People still believe what others (such as their friends or colleagues) tell them.
Butterfield himself used to share plenty of Slack articles and news between social media channels and his immediate friends to see what they were thinking. Some of his friends are entrepreneurs who tried Slack at the start and helped it by word of mouth. As a result, the number of startups using Slack immediately began to grow. Many influential companies started using Slack and spread it by word of mouth, prompting others to try it.
The tweet, posted in August 2014 by Slack investor Marc Andreessen, shows the growth curve of Slack word of mouth.
Slack user Growth chart, courtesy of Marc Andreessen on Twitter
Source: Quartz
User feedback
Slack focuses on pulling marketing rather than pushing marketing strategies. It takes early customer reviews and feedback very seriously, so it does A lot of A/B testing and focused group surveys that help Slack do what people want.
Active listening is Slack’s core competency: it listens to customers about their products and tries to solve every problem they have.
Slack relies heavily on Twitter to interact with customers and fans. You can see this in the number of responses Slack gets on Twitter. In its early days, Slack understood the importance of customer engagement and wisely used Twitter as an alternative to YouTube to share stories about its users and companies.
Since joining in March 2013, Slack has interacted with users in a variety of ways. As of this writing, Slack has 147K tweets and 297K followers. Slack has always believed in word-of-mouth marketing, and in 2015 it created another Twitter account that gained a foothold by showering tweets from people who liked Slack and sent thank-you messages to Slack. To be sure, this created a huge buzz, and Slack benefited from it.
Recommendation propagation cycle
One of Slack’s differences is its recommendation spread rules; Anyone can create communities around their interests and invite people from all over the world. While many other services offer this opportunity, you have to follow a certain set of rules and regulations, and most of the time it’s not free. Slack has the advantage of building communities for free, having no complicated recommendation rules and being able to recommend to anyone. Every company that is moving from a home-built messaging channel to Slack is doing so because of Slack’s easy invites and chats.
Different user avatars, photo credit: Slack.com
Not only does Slack have different communities of interest (startups, music, design), but communities elsewhere are migrating to Slack, as TNW notes. For example, WordPress.org, the open-source software community for WordPress, has ditched the complex and unfriendly RIC channel and moved to Slack. The simplicity of distribution is an important advantage that has helped Slack grow its user base.
Integration technology
Have you noticed that Slack has the unique ability to easily integrate into any application, especially since these are the ones that startups use most often, so many startups find Slack to be exactly the tool they need to simplify communication within their organizations?
There are many categories of apps that can be integrated with Slack: analytics, sales, customer service, development tools, HUMAN resources, marketing, social media, and more.
Slack’s app directory, photo credit: Slack.com
Because Slack integrates well with any development tool to improve organizational productivity through collaboration, Make Slack one of the key tools for enabling DevOps (a collection of processes, methods, and systems for communicating, collaborating, and integrating software development, operations, and quality assurance).
When executed correctly, application integration can be one of the best growth hacking strategies for a company. For example, you can integrate Slack with Asana, an app designed to help teams keep track of their work. You can be quickly notified of tasks created, completed or commented on within Slack, making it easier to track the progress of any project within your organization.
These videos will give you a look at how some successful companies are using Slack for collaboration to grow their businesses.
Slack isn’t a boring chat tool, it’s SWAG!