This link has been bookmarked by 75 people . It was first bookmarked on 27 Jan 2015, by eterps.
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27 Feb 15
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25 Feb 15
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If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter.
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We don’t cut corners, and we try to focus on the few things that are most important to our product vision.
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20 Feb 15
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19 Feb 15
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16 Feb 15
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09 Feb 15
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prioritizing your product’s unique features (and why you can let go of the rest),
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“The pattern was to share Slack with progressively larger groups.
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nstead, with help from an impressive press blitz (based largely on the team's prior experience — i.e. use whatever you've got going for you)
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The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch
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It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward.
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Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook.
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t can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.
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Most importantly, getting the story out doesn’t end when an article is published.
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“The other 80% is people posting about that article.
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But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.”
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Social media has leveled the playing field, so whatever coverage you earn, run with it — give it new life by sharing it with your immediate and extended networks again and again.
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Wring every bit of feedback that you can from it.
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its laser focus on quality and responsiveness,
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The biggest challenge was learning how to sell a product to teams, not individuals.
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When it comes to selecting a team-collaboration tool, every member has a veto — multiplying the product's risk of rejection.
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“We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,”
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ammunition was equal parts product training and market education.
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So Butterfield made it a goal to teach customers that this is indeed a product category — one they’re already filling poorly — priming Slack as a better solution.
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He learned pretty quickly that the app's laundry list of benefits wasn't going to land sales on its own.
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If you’re building a sales team for your startup, you know you will absolutely make a decision about what CRM to use.
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Positioning a product for teams rather than entire companies does come with some positives though — which could be relevant for other enterprise startups.
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They didn't have to go through the long process of gaining buy-in from CIOs or other top management
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Mid-level managers could say, ‘This thing sounds cool, let’s try it out for our team.’ If they liked it, it was affordable enough to just expense it.”
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bottoms-up approach was a key factor in Slack’s early enterprise success.
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“We made it very simple to adopt Slack. We didn’t have to convert the whole company and facilitate committee-level decisions,”
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A couple of years in, they’ve matured to the point that security audit reviews and marked-up terms of service are becoming the norm. “But at the beginning, we bypassed all that, and it was a big advantage.
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incrementally improved the new-user experience until we felt like we had gotten all the low-hanging fruit.
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Make Active Listening Your Core Competency
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Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback
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From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service.
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we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully
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he Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact:
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Beta-tester feedback is crucial to finding those little oversights in a product design.
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Where some people might see a huge customer-service burden, Butterfield sees one of Slack’s greatest assets — so much so that he fielded half of these messages himself for a long time.
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Pretty early on, we combined quality assurance and customer support into one group that we called customer experience.
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Today, customer support alone has 18 people with an overlapping group of 6 working on Twitter 24/7.
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Twitter is increasingly a channel for customer feedback, and it was a game-changer for Slack.
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“We bet heavily on Twitter. Even if someone is incredibly enthusiastic about a product, literal word of mouth will only get to a handful of people — but if someone tweets about us, it can be seen by hundreds, even thousands.”
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Of course hard numbers tell an important story; user stats and sales numbers will always be key metrics. But every day, your users are sharing a huge amount of qualitative data, too — and a lot of companies either don't know how or forget to act on it.
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sharing feedback with the right internal team at Slack mission critical.
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But at the end of the day, only you can really determine your company's magic numbers — the numbers that shed light on who is really using your product (and how you can get them to keep using it).
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For Slack, the number is 2,000 — 2,000 messages.
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You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean?
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Amplify What Makes Your Company Special
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Buchheit has a simple thesis: If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter
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We had a lot of conversations about choosing the three things we'd try to be extremely, surprisingly good at,
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Suddenly you're ahead of the game because you're the best at the things that really impact your users.
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08 Feb 15
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Butterfield says. Instead, with help from an impressive press blitz (based largely on the team's prior experience — i.e. use whatever you've got going for you), they welcomed people to request an invitation to try Slack. On the first day, 8,000 people did just that; and two weeks later, that number had grown to 15,000.
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“The other 80% is people posting about that article. I almost never go to news sites — it’s overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.”
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The biggest challenge was learning how to sell a product to teams, not individuals. “For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it,” Butterfield says. Take Dropbox, for example: A person tries it on a couple of devices, likes it, and commits to spending a few bucks a month for it. “We have to convince a team, and no two teams are alike.”
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Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spent minimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,” Butterfield says.
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Slack is blazing trails in a relatively new arena, so that ammunition was equal parts product training and market education. “Somewhere between 20 to 30% of our users — and this is just an estimate — come from some other centralized group-messaging system like HipChat, Campfire, or IRC,” Butterfield says. “When we asked the other 70 to 80% what they were using for internal communication, they said, ‘Nothing.’ But obviously they were using something. They just weren’t thinking of this as a category of software.”
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If you’re innovating in a nascent market, the push for recognition of your product category needs to be a major chunk of your go-to-market strategy.
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07 Feb 15
Jordan GoldmanYou’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read about how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. But have you visited its …
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the importance of prioritizing your product’s unique features
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We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback
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We amplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams
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just seven months after they started
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Instead, with help from an impressive press blitz
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Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward
-
Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook
-
But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together
-
The other 80% is people posting about that article. I almost never go to news sites — it’s overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing
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Engage with interested parties in your networks (prioritizing those with lots of followers and known influence) to broaden your reach. Don't worry about repetition. It will only help you stay top of mind for prospective users
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The biggest challenge was learning how to sell a product to teams, not individuals.
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But there was one thing Butterfield ran into pretty consistently. When it comes to selecting a team-collaboration tool, every member has a veto — multiplying the product's risk of rejection. “If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, ‘I hate it. I am not going to use this,’ that’s it for us. We won’t get evaluated.”
Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spent minimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,” Butterfield says.
-
Beta-tester feedback is crucial to finding those little oversights in a product design.
-
We bet heavily on Twitter. Even if someone is incredibly enthusiastic about a product, literal word of mouth will only get to a handful of people — but if someone tweets about us, it can be seen by hundreds, even thousands.”
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“Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you.”
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The company keeps track of how many people are asking for a certain feature, or how many want a new kind of integration.
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“Whenever they hear something new that seems like it’s actually a really good idea — or it’s a pretty good idea but it’s very easy for us to implement — it gets posted to a channel where we discuss new features
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the numbers that shed light on who is really using your product (and how you can get them to keep using it).
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We have more daily active users than teams that were ever created. So we lose a bunch, but the ones that we get to really try it out stick with it.
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“You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it’s going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it,”
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06 Feb 15
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When it comes to selecting a team-collaboration tool, every member has a veto — multiplying the product's risk of rejection. “If one engineer at a startup tries Slack and says, ‘I hate it. I am not going to use this,’ that’s it for us. We won’t get evaluated.”
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Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spent minimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,” Butterfield says.
-
If you’re innovating in a nascent market, the push for recognition of your product category needs to be a major chunk of your go-to-market strategy.
-
“Mid-level managers could say, ‘This thing sounds cool, let’s try it out for our team.’ If they liked it, it was affordable enough to just expense it.”
In the end, that bottoms-up approach was a key factor in Slack’s early enterprise success.
“We made it very simple to adopt Slack. We didn’t have to convert the whole company and facilitate committee-level decisions,” Butterfield says.
-
From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received
-
the Slack team quickly identified small changes that had a big impact
-
Right now, you may not have an off-the-shelf metric that accurately captures your company’s growth, but part of your go-to-market strategy absolutely has to be establishing this criteria. “You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it’s going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it,” Butterfield says.
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Butterfield and his co-founders returned again and again to Paul Buchheit’s now-famous blog post, “If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good.” Known as one of the creators of Gmail, Buchheit has a simple thesis: If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter.
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“We had a lot of conversations about choosing the three things we'd try to be extremely, surprisingly good at,” Butterfield says. “And ultimately we developed Slack around really valuing those three things. It can sound simple, but narrowing the field can make big challenges and big gains for your company feel manageable. Suddenly you're ahead of the game because you're the best at the things that really impact your users.”
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05 Feb 15
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03 Feb 15
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02 Feb 15
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01 Feb 15
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Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.
-
getting the story out doesn’t end when an article is published. In fact, by Butterfield’s estimation, that’s only about 20% of the recipe for media success. “The other 80% is people posting about that article. I almost never go to news sites — it’s overwhelming how much content is out there. But I will pay attention to what my friends are picking up and sharing.”
-
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Maddy WoodYou’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read about how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. But have you visited its …
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Antony MayfieldA great example of a customer-led company.
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If there’s one theme that emerges when founder Stewart Butterfield talks about Slack's success, it’s that the company made customer feedback the epicenter of its efforts.
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“That was essentially our beta release, but we didn't want to call it a beta because then people would think that the service would be flaky or unreliable,” Butterfield says. Instead, with help from an impressive press blitz (based largely on the team's prior experience — i.e. use whatever you've got going for you), they welcomed people to request an invitation to try Slack. On the first day, 8,000 people did just that; and two weeks later, that number had grown to 15,000.
-
The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together.
-
Now, a year after Slack’s public launch, that reverence for user feedback is part of the company’s DNA. “We will take user feedback any way we can get it. In the app, we include a command that people can use to send us feedback. We have a help button that people can use to submit support tickets,” says Butterfield. They've got eyes all over Twitter for comments good and bad. “If you put that all together, we probably get 8,000 Zendesk help tickets and 10,000 tweets per month, and we respond to all of them.”
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Where some people might see a huge customer-service burden, Butterfield sees one of Slack’s greatest assets — so much so that he fielded half of these messages himself for a long time. “Especially in the beginning, I handled the lion’s share of Twitter, and Ali Rayl, our Director of Quality and Support, handled the Zendesk tickets. Pretty early on, we combined quality assurance and customer support into one group that we called customer experience. They do everything from parsing customer feedback and routing it to the right people to fixing bugs themselves.”
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For Slack, the number is 2,000 — 2,000 messages. “Based on experience of which companies stuck with us and which didn't, we decided that any team that has exchanged 2,000 messages in its history has tried Slack — really tried it,” Butterfield says. “For a team around 50 people that means about 10 hours’ worth of messages. For a typical team of 10 people, that’s maybe a week’s worth of messages. But it hit us that, regardless of any other factor, after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack today.”
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Right now, you may not have an off-the-shelf metric that accurately captures your company’s growth, but part of your go-to-market strategy absolutely has to be establishing this criteria. “You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it’s going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it,” Butterfield says.
-
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Ryan JohnsonYou’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. And you may have read about how the internal-communication platform — now just two years old — is already used by more than 30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. But have you visited its …
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31 Jan 15
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If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter. And, if you look at the first generations of Gmail, Butterfield says, it was in fact missing a lot of features. Still, users were so impressed by the searchable interface, threaded conversations, and the then-unimaginable one gig of storage, that they weren’t fazed by what the product didn’t have.
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30 Jan 15
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29 Jan 15
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28 Jan 15
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Serizawa HakaseFrom 0 to $1B – Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy http://t.co/wMfnA3DIEv
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Patrick TabatcherLots of good tips on what made Slack a successful launch.
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Most importantly, getting the story out doesn’t end when an article is published. In fact, by Butterfield’s estimation, that’s only about 20% of the recipe for media success. “The other 80% is people posting about that article.
-
“For most companies, the hard thing is making the product work well enough to convince a single person at a time to switch to it,”
-
“We bet heavily on Twitter. Even if someone is incredibly enthusiastic about a product, literal word of mouth will only get to a handful of people — but if someone tweets about us, it can be seen by hundreds, even thousands.”
-
“Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond on the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you.”
-
If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter. And, if you look at the first generations of Gmail, Butterfield says, it was in fact missing a lot of features. Still, users were so impressed by the searchable interface, threaded conversations, and the then-unimaginable one gig of storage, that they weren’t fazed by what the product didn’t have.
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Slack knows where every person in every conversation leaves off, and it syncs to their cursor position in real time. This has given them real competitive bite in a market that already had well-known players.
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-
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The biggest challenge was learning how to sell a product to teams, not individuals.
-
If you’re innovating in a nascent market, the push for recognition of your product category needs to be a major chunk of your go-to-market strategy
-
-
-
In this exclusive interview, Butterfield — previously one of the founders of Flickr — reveals how the company’s go-to-market strategy worked like gangbusters. Here, he explains the importance of prioritizing your product’s unique features (and why you can let go of the rest), and shares tips for becoming essential to your customers right away.
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The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward.
-
Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together
-
-
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30,000 teams and valued at over $1 billion. But have you visited its Twitter Wall of Love?
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Stewart Butterfield talks about Slack's success, it’s that the company made customer feedback the epicenter of its efforts.
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Here, he explains the importance of prioritizing your product’s unique features (and why you can let go of the rest), and shares tips for becoming essential to your customers right away.
-
-
“That was essentially our beta release, but we didn't want to call it a beta because then people would think that the service would be flaky or unreliable,” Butterfield says.
-
Pull the strings you have. Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook.
-
-
-
The big lesson here: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. It must be your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward.
-
-
27 Jan 15
-
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Given this pattern, much of Slack’s beta period was spent minimizing that risk. “We created materials to explain Slack to individuals — what it was for, how it worked, what you’re supposed to do — but we also built resources for team administrators. We wanted to give them ammunition to help convince the team,” Butterfield says.
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When Butterfield digs into the “nothing” those companies are using, it’s usually a smorgasbord of something: “It’s a lot of ad hoc emails and mailing lists. Some people on the team might use Hangouts, some use SMS. We see groups that use Skype chat, or even private Facebook groups and Google+ pages.
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So Butterfield made it a goal to teach customers that this is indeed a product category — one they’re already filling poorly — priming Slack as a better solution. He learned pretty quickly that the app's laundry list of benefits wasn't going to land sales on its own.
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voracious readers of user feedback
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From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service.
-
We have a help button that people can use to submit support tickets
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If you put that all together, we probably get 8,000 Zendesk help tickets and 10,000 tweets per month, and we respond to all of them.
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Someone enters their email address and receives an email with a link. From there, they complete a simple form and hit submit to start their team. Of course, for Slack to work, users need to invite other team members and start using the software, and ideally even set up some integrations with other apps like Asana, Dropbox or MailChimp.
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Most people who fill out the form and hit submit — more than 90% — never invite anyone or start using the software.
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If you do a few things incredibly well, the rest doesn’t really matter.
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Search
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“leave-state synchronization.”
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Simple file-sharing: From the ability to quickly paste images to the ease of dragging-and-dropping files
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