“So what’s the secret behind Slack? What did you guys do that was so special?” the voice crackled over my car’s Bluetooth, “I want you guys to do whatever you did for them.” I was on a call with a prospective client, the CEO of a successful SaaS app who wanted to hire us to redesign his product. I launched into a story that I’ve told hundreds of times.
I’ve been asked this question almost every day for the past year by clients, investors, and fellow designers trying to reverse engineer the secret behind Slack’s success. It seems like Slack is taking over the world these days, now sporting a mind-boggling $2.8 billion valuation, hundreds of thousands of users, and a break-neck growth rate.
Why ask me about Slack? I run a design agency called MetaLab. You may not have heard of us — we usually work behind the scenes — but I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve used something that we’ve designed.
In late 2013, Slack hired us to help them turn their early prototype into a polished product. We did the logo, the marketing site, and the web and mobile apps, all in just six weeks from start to finish. Apart from a few tweaks here and there, much of the product remains unchanged since the day we handed our designs off to the team at Slack.
When Stewart pulled back the curtain and shared the early Slack prototype on day one, it looked like a hacked together version of IRC in the browser.
In almost ten years of business, Slack is, without a doubt, our most successful project to date — and we’ve worked with some big names. It’s now valued at $2.8 billion, has over 200,000 paying users, and our favourite part: people can’t stop talking about its great design. But I wouldn’t have predicted that going into it.
In July 2013, I got an email from Stewart Butterfield. I recognized his name immediately. I was a big fan of Flickr, which he co-founded and sold to Yahoo, and we were both based in the Pacific Northwest. He had big news: he was shutting down Glitch, the game he’d started in 2009, and was working on something new. He wanted us to design his new team chat app.
I groaned to myself. We were avid users of Campfire, and had tested out the many copycat products that had come out over the years. I felt the problem had already been solved. It was a crowded market and knew it would be difficult to make his product stand out from the crowd. Regardless, I was excited to get a chance to work with Stewart, and thought it would be fun to solve some of the issues that we’d had with Campfire. We shook hands, kicked things off, and rolled up our sleeves.
When he pulled back the curtain and shared their early prototype on day one, it looked like a hacked together version of IRC in the browser. Barebones and stark. Just six weeks later, we had done some of the best work of our careers. So, how did we get from hacky browser IRC to the Slack we all know and love?
Some of our early design iterations (2013).
It looks different
It feels different
It sounds different
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