From Zero to Billion: Slack Creator Shares Success Story

“Dear SlackHQ , I love you. Your Dan.

You've probably heard about the amazing growth of Slack . You may have read that the intracorporate communication platform (which is only 2 years old) has already been actively used by more than 30,000 teams and is valued at $ 1 billion. But have you seen all these Slack messages on Twitter?
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All these tweets are real, and all the leaders dream of this. Slack did not conduct large integrated marketing campaigns - they do not have an elaborate email marketing strategy, and they did not buy advertising billboards for millions of dollars (In fact, they managed to reach such a number of users without having an employee as a marketing director).

How did the company manage to launch a product that caused such an enviable resonance, and quickly win the hearts of users? When Slack founder Stewart Butterfield talks about the company's success, she always mentions in her speech that she put her customer reviews at the forefront of the product.

In this exclusive interview, Butterfield (formerly one of the founders of Flickr) said that the market entry strategy was successful, fast and active. Here he explains how important it is to focus on the unique features of the project (and why you can omit the rest), and shares tips on how to become indispensable to your clients.

Slack started working on the application at the end of 2012 (“Forget about the case when we tried to make a big multiplayer game and failed,” Butterfield grins. “This is a different story for another article.”). By March 2013, the project was so ready that the developers started using it themselves. They knew that they represented only one team, whereas in the future there could be thousands of them, but by May of that year they were ready to receive a much larger number of users.

“We begged and begged our friends, as well as other companies, to use the application and evaluate our product,” Butterfield recalls. “Some 6-10 companies agreed to do this.” These companies include the Rdio music service and the Cozy project, which provides software for managing rental housing.

Literally at the same second, the Slack team learned that with an increase in the group size, the product starts to show itself from a completely different side. “Rdio was much bigger than us. First, Slack started using their front-end development team, then the entire team of engineers, and then all of the company's 120 employees, ”Butterfield says.

Suddenly, we saw our product through the eyes of a much larger team — it looked rather crooked.

Taking into account what he saw, the Slack team made several modifications, and then continued the observation.

"We offered to use Slack to more and more numerous teams, and then stated:" This great idea was not so great. " We tried to multiply the amount of feedback we received, increasing the number of participating teams, ”Butterfield replies.

By the summer, Slack had become something worthwhile — something that could be shared with the world. In August 2013 (7 months after launch), the company announced a pre-release.

“In fact, it was our beta release, but we didn’t want to call it beta, because then people would think that the service would be unreliable,” Butterfield says. The team conducted a lightning blitz campaign in the press (based on the past experience of the project - they tried to use everything they had at their disposal) and encouraged the audience to request invitations to Slack. On the very first day, the service added 8,000 new users. After two weeks, their number increased to 15,000.

From this you can learn a lesson: when starting a project, you should not underestimate the power of traditional media. A couple of months before and for several weeks after the start, attracting customers should be your main goal. Pull the strings that you have. Work closely with those who organize your PR campaign, employees of your company, important customers who use your product, influential investors, and so on — look for ways to “hook” on these new users. Do not think that you can cope with such an important task in haste in two weeks.

But telling the world about yourself is not enough. As Butterfield considered, the article’s output is only 20% of the success in the media sphere: “The remaining 80% are reposts on social networks. Personally, I never read news sites, because of the overwhelming amount of information on them, but I always pay attention to what my friends share. ”

Social networks have made the distribution of information much easier, so whatever the media coverage, use it, share the news in many different communities again and again. Interact with interesting groups (give priority to well-known people with a large number of subscribers) so that as many people as possible know about you. Do not be afraid to repeat - so you only become entrenched in the minds of future users.

Show customers why they need your product.

From Slack's early experience, it’s worth borrowing something else: no matter how you call your beta release, at this stage you have to release the product and show it to the public - this is a very important phase in the development of the project. After that, squeeze out from the users all the feedback that you can receive.

Slack was in the beta test for 6 months (this is quite a long period of time for a startup), and the development team used this time to the maximum. They did not have a specially developed strategy or a specific schedule. “By the August 2013 announcement, we were able to collect a small amount of feedback. Slack is a rather complex product, and we worked only 7 months, ”explains Butterfield.

The company, whose success largely depended on the emphasis on quality and speed of response, took 6 months to understand what needs to be learned from the next wave of users. In many ways, the closed beta testing of Slack was no different from what it has long been decided to do in business.

We began to invite teams in groups, and looked at the results. Then we made a few changes again and watched what worked ... then made a few more changes ...

The biggest difficulty the company faced was selling its product to entire teams. “Making an excellent product that will convince one person to start using it is a challenge,” Butterfield says. - Take, for example, Dropbox. Their user tries to work with the application on a pair of devices, and if he has to like it, then he decides to spend a couple of dollars on it a month. We need to convince in this whole teams that are all different from each other. "

Teams that use Slack are becoming more and more: individual workers, groups, and then entire companies. At this stage, Butterfield was constantly faced with one problem. When a team selects a tool for communication, everyone has a say, and this increases the risk of failure. “If one startup engineer, having tried Slack, declares that he hates him and will not use it, then for us it means the end. This team will no longer consider our product, ”Butterfield said.

Therefore, much of the effort during the Slack beta test was aimed at reducing this risk. “We created training materials to explain to users what Slack is: what it is for, how it works, what needs to be done. Similar funds were created for managers - we wanted to give them the tools to convince team members, ”Butterfield noted.

Such training tools helped users understand the work of Slack, while at the same time revealing the possibilities of a relatively new market. “Somewhere 20-30% of our users have come from other group instant messengers, such as HipChat, Campfire or IRC,” Butterfield says. - When we asked the remaining 70-80% what they used before the appearance of Slack, we were told: "Nothing." Obviously, they used “something”, they simply did not regard it as a category of software. ”

When Butterfield went into what was called “nothing,” it turned out to be a heterogeneous mixture of “something”: “People used email and mailing lists, some team members used Hangouts or SMS. There were also groups that used Skype chat rooms and even private communities on Facebook and Google+. ”

Butterfield made it his goal to show customers a specialized category of applications and tell them that there is a much more convenient way to organize communication. He wanted to show that Slack is the best solution. He quickly realized that a simple enumeration of the merits of the product does not cope with this task.

If you create a team of marketers, it becomes obvious that you need to decide which CRM system to prefer. There are plenty of such systems. If you are engaged in software development, then you absolutely need to choose the source control method. This is also not a problem. If you are an innovator and start working in an emerging market, then you need to make a significant part of the effort to determine the product category.

Positioning the project as a product for teams, and not for entire companies, leads to some positive points - this may be useful for other corporate startups.

“The words team and company can be synonymous if we are talking about small organizations. But the situation takes a completely different turn when we talk about companies that employ 15,000 people. For example, Adobe has nine paid Slack teams, ”he says. This turned out to be a useful loophole. Employees do not need to go through a long process of negotiating software purchases with IT directors and management. "Middle managers can simply say that" this thing looks cool, let's try it in our team. " If they like the product, they can buy it themselves, ”Butterfield said.

This bottom-up approach was a key factor in the success of Slack.

“We made the Slack adaptation very simple. We didn’t have to convince the entire company and provide arguments for decision-making at the executive committee level, ”Butterfield says. After a couple of years, security checks and the creation of terms of use have become the norm. “At the very beginning, we managed to get around this, which gave us a great advantage.”

Unburdened, Butterfield and his co-founders got the opportunity to spend their 6 months of closed beta testing to educate their customers so that a much larger audience would realize its importance by the release of the product. Butterfield recalls: “From August 2013 to February 2014, more than 15,000 authorizations were completed (their number grew over time), and we gradually improved the new user experience, trying to extract maximum benefit from this process, without spending any extra effort.

Learn to listen actively

Although the Slack system gave customers a lot of information, the development team itself recognized even more. Butterfield and his co-founders eagerly researched user reviews, and believes that this is a big part of the company's success. From the very beginning, Slack reviews all requests to the support service and makes sure that users can reply to any e-mail they receive. This helps improve service and retain customers. They listened to their ever-growing flock of users and responded according to the situation.

“Sometimes you get feedback that goes against your concept,” Butterfield says. - This is a consequence of the fact that you are moving in a direction that is initially incomprehensible to people. We identified a key audience for which we make our product, and, at that time, we considered our customers as testers. We paid special attention to the teams that we knew should use Slack successfully. ”

When key users said something wasn’t working, we fixed it. Immediately.

For example, take Rdio, one of the biggest beta test companies. “In Slack, you create channels to discuss various topics. Small groups managed the channels and navigated through them quite easily, but in large teams, where each participant could create a channel, people (especially new employees) found it difficult to determine which channels to join, ”explains Butterfield.

Having identified the problem, the Slack team quickly made small changes that had a serious effect. Fields with description and number of participants appeared in the channel list. “This is a fairly simple example of the changes that had to be made, but such things did not allow some teams to use Slack effectively. The feedback from beta testers really helps to identify flaws in product design, ”said Butterfield.

Even a year after the official launch, the company continues to be sensitive to user comments. “We collect feedback from all sources wherever possible. We have a “Help” button for contacting tech support, says Butterfield. The team also monitors all (both good and bad) comments on Twitter. - If we sum up all together, then in a month there are about 8,000 applications in Zendesk and 10,000 comments on Twitter. We answer all. ”

Many consider customer service a heavy burden, but Butterfield calls it one of the greatest assets of Slack - for a long time he personally “fought” with half the messages from users. “At first I was in charge of the lion’s share of comments on Twitter, and Ali Reil (Ali Rayl), our head of quality and support, was managed with requests for Zendesk. At the start, we delegated the tasks of quality control and user support to the customer service quality group. These guys sort out customer reviews and pass on recommendations to the right people who fix bugs. ”

When Slack became available to the general public, three people were already in this group. Since then, the company has continued to invest in this area. Today, customer support has 18 people, 6 of whom work with Twitter a total of 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“We are doing a bet on Twitter. If someone really liked our product, then the rumor about us will reach only a small group of people. If someone writes a tweet about us, then hundreds, if not thousands of potential users, will immediately see it. Remember those fan messages on the Wall of Love? Not everything started so rosy. In fact, many of these messages were first “problems” that had to be solved. ”

Every user contact is a marketing opportunity.

First-class customer service increases the chance that your users will recommend you to their friends. User feedback should be processed and taken into account, in whatever form they received. “We are scrupulously reviewing all the messages: we are fastidiously reviewing, storing, recording and collecting all the data that people send us,” says Butterfield.

The company always sees how many users are asked to enter a particular function, or how many of them want to get a new kind of integration. “Of course, the mean numbers reflect important things: user statistics and sales, which will always be the main metrics, but every day your users share a huge amount of quality data. Many companies do not know how to work with such data, or forget to use it. ”

Not surprisingly, the leaders of Slack, a project that works to resolve communication problems, share feedback with the internal team responsible for the company's mission. Tweets and support requests can be searched, and they are stored in separate Slack channels. The support team knows that they have a direct line to communicate with the development team.

“When they find something like a very good idea (or a really good idea that is easy to implement), they place it in a channel where we discuss new features. This is a constant and daily work. Only today, 50 messages have already been posted there, ”Butterfield notes.

Know your magic metrics and what they measure in reality

Prior to the creation of Slack, Stuart Butterfield was a co-founder of Flickr, where he acted as a development consultant and also led the development at the largest firm in Vancouver. It can be found on Twitter under the nickname stewart .

Quality feedback is displayed in Slack in the first place. The company spends a lot of time making sure their metrics match the data coming from the Twitter feed. Butterfield expressed his opinion as a leader: “There are industry-standard indicators - no doubt. But only you can define “magic metrics” that show who actually uses your product and what needs to be done so that these people continue to use it. ”

For Slack, that number is 2000, which means 2000 messages. “Based on which companies remained with us, we decided that any team that exchanged 2,000 messages fully tested Slack,” Butterfield says. - For a team of 50 people, the exchange of such a number of useful messages lasts about 10 hours. A typical team of 10 people will spend about a week on this. Amazingly, having exchanged such a number of messages, 93% of customers continue to use Slack, despite other factors. ”

The mechanics of working with Slack are as follows: a person enters his mail and receives an email with a link. After navigating through it, he fills out a simple form and presses the "Accept" button to create his team. Of course, then you need to invite team members and start using the software. Ideally, you will need to configure integration with other applications, such as Asana, Dropbox or MailChimp.

Most of the clients who filled out the form and clicked the “Accept” button (this is more than 90%) never invite other people or use the software.

The figure is disheartening. Of the approximately 220,000 commands created in Slack, only 30,000 function. “However, since one active team consists of 8 or 9 people, it turns out that approximately 250,000 users use the application daily. We have much more daily users than created teams. We lost a lot of customers, but we eagerly cling to those who stayed, ”Butterfield explains.

Perhaps you have not yet found the parameter that would correlate with the growth of the company, but your strategy for entering the market should take into account resources and time for its definition. “Need to figure out what your conversion rate means in your case?” And hold? What does activation mean? For each business, these metrics will differ due to the characteristics of the product and the people who use it, ”Butterfield notes.

Once you have determined the magic numbers, you can begin to look for new ways to influence customers to achieve these indicators: they can be email reminders or offers to use new functions. Since Slack knows that 2000 is a golden number, the company can look for ways to make customers overcome this bar.

Focus on what sets your company apart

At the heart of all qualitative and quantitative feedback is the product. To make it the best in what it was created for, you need to know its main differences and unique features. “All of the founders passed the stage when everyone wanted to do something differently because of his ego. We set a rather high level of quality and will be upset if we do not reach it, ”exclaims Butterfield.

When the product first began to take on its normal appearance, Butterfield and the team returned again and again to the notorious post of Paul Buchheit. "If your product is great, it doesn’t have to be good." Known as one of the creators of Gmail, Bakhit put forward a simple thesis: “If you do a couple of things incredibly well, then everything else is absolutely unimportant.” If you look at the first incarnation of Gmail, you will see that it lacked many features, but users were still so impressed with the searchable interface, related conversations and, at that time, the unimaginable size of disk space in one gigabyte that they did not notice the disadvantages product.

Backheit's words resonated in Butterfield and his team.

We do not smooth corners and try to focus on the things that are most important for the concept of our product.

Here are the three most important features of Slack:

Search: As in the case of Gmail Buckheit, the Slack team understood that the value of their product was the ability to quickly search for relevant information. “People need to feel confident while reading a document or participating in a conversation, and don’t have to worry about storing files — they need to give people the opportunity to find what they may need later,” says Butterfield. Google has set the bar so high that people now expect similar results from other services - their disappointment can be a fatal mistake.

Synchronization: “In other messengers we were crazy about the difficulty of“ returning to the discussion ”when changing the device, for example, when you left your laptop and connected from the phone, says Butterfield. - Slack from the beginning supported the "synchronization of the cursor position." Slack knows where you’ve stopped at each conversation and synchronizes the position of the cursor in real time. This feature gave a real advantage in the market and allowed to stand out against the background of well-known competitors.

Simple file sharing: The company paid special attention to the "hot" keys and the intuitive user interface of the application, which people use for several hours a day. Thanks to this, Slack has the ability to quickly insert an image and transfer the file using the drag-and-drop function.

Butterfield notes that the interface may not contain check-boxes or any new concepts, moreover, you do not have to enter the functions that, according to users, are needed in a ready-made solution. But when developing a market entry strategy, it is important to create a product that you think is different from competitors and can cause changes in the life of your target audience.

“We argued a lot when choosing these three points in which we want to succeed,” Butterfield says. - At the heart of Slack are these three values. It may sound trivial, but by limiting the number of tasks, it is easier to solve problems and make a profit. This will help you to take the lead, because you become the best in what your users value so much. ”