Opinion: Slack owes its impressive $4b valuation to these 10 hacks

Slack, a business communications app, was an accidental discovery. The company’s co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his team were working on a game app when they realized the difficulties in communicating within the organization and that there were opportunities to streamline it.

Today, if you head over to Google Trends and check the interest over time for the keyword “Slack,” you’ll find that it is increasing and growing. In such a small amount of time, how did Slack make it possible?

Interest over time for the search term Slack as shown on Google Trends.

Personal branding

Butterfield has been a well-known figure in the industry. He was the co-founder of Flickr, and he become even more famous after its acquisition by Yahoo. Everyone wanted to know what his next move would be, and even before he started Slack he already had a good follower base. So when he co-founded the company, many of his old fans followed him right to his next adventure.

If you or one of your startup’s founding partners is well-known, you’ll need less marketing efforts to convince people to try your product. This is surely one factor that helped Slack.

Perfect timing

The increase in our dependence on the internet for work and everything else meant that the number of emails being sent and received increased as well. This didn’t help make sense of our work but only served to increase our “inbox phobias.”

Slack found a perfect opportunity to help people reduce their email load and to find a better medium to communicate and manage projects.

Their timing for pitching an alternative to email, which was quick, reliable, and useful, was perfect.

When you enter the market with a reliable product while others are lagging, you will have the first mover advantage.

What made the app even more seamless to use was that it wasn’t built to replace any project management platform like TeamWork, Asana, or Trello, as it offers integrations with many of them.

This was a smart way to ensure that people didn’t see the app as a competitor, but rather an “enabler.”

UI/UX

The makers of the app have been focused on ensuring smooth communications through the look and feel of its website and apps. Their primary motive has been to make the product so intuitive that their users can use it without any guide or a product tutorial.

Freemium model

Minimal features

Word-of-mouth marketing

User feedback

Twitter

Referral loop

Integrations