![]() They used it with a small group of front-end developers for a while but then it spread to the whole engineering group and then to all 120 people in the company,” Butterfield says. “Rdio, in particular, was much bigger than us. Immediately, the Slack team learned that their product functioned very differently as team size increased. “We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way.” There was Cozy, which sells rental management software for landlords and tenants, and the music service Rdio. “We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback,” Butterfield recalls. Still, they knew that they represented just one team dynamic of a nearly infinite set by May of that year, they were ready for more users. (“Never mind the part where we first tried to make a web-based massively multiplayer game and failed,” Butterfield quips - another story for another article.) And by March 2013, he and his team had enough to work with that they were using the product themselves. Slack started working on the app at the end of 2012. 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. In this exclusive interview, Butterfield - previously one of the founders of Flickr- reveals how the company’s go-to-market strategy worked like gangbusters. (In fact, they hit those user numbers without a CMO.) So how did the company not only launch with enviable momentum, but so quickly win users' hearts? 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. And yet Slack hasn’t run any big integrated marketing campaigns - they don't have an elaborate email strategy or buy million-dollar billboards. These tweets are real, and they're the stuff of founders’ dreams. But have you visited its Twitter Wall of Love? And you may have read 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. You’ve probably heard about Slack’s exponential growth. ![]() This crisis, Butterfield writes, “has created an opportunity for us and others to become more agile, to take on changes that once seemed daunting, to reimagine organizational culture…and to reposition for future growth.“HELL YEAH WE'RE USING AT WORK I. Organizations of all kinds had to transform the way they worked, all at once. New customers wanted comprehensive proposals immediately. Slack’s engineers ensured that its systems were operational 99.9% of the time in a period of soaring demand.Ĭustomers with 1,000 or 10,000 Slack users suddenly wanted to expand to 50,000. Marketing developed a public service ad for television committing to help any groups that were working on a Covid-19 response. Interviews with job candidates and the employee onboarding process were moved online. The company’s customer success and experience teams delivered nearly round-the-clock support free, both to existing customers and to newcomers who needed help getting set up with the product. And never did it move with more speed and clarity of focus than in March 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis brought on two challenges: dramatically increasing customer demand and an extremely abrupt transition to working remotely. But it hasn’t lost its start-up mentality. Slack was launched in 2014, went public in 2019, and is now a global operation with more than 2,000 employees and 100,000-plus customers.
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