SC

Strategy Canon

HipChat: sourced choices

26 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2009Product · Founding team Pete Curley, Garret Heaton and Chris Rivers, who had built the calendar startup HipCal (bought by Plaxo in 2006) and then worked on Plaxo Pulse, founded HipChat. HC5
  2. 2010-01Product · Desktop client and private beta Chat rooms through an Adobe AIR desktop client; nearly 500 companies signed up during the private beta and exchanged over 100,000 messages. HC4
  3. 2010-01Product · Launch before mobile Launched publicly before the planned mobile apps, SMS and API because uptake came without them. HC4
  4. 2010-01Go_To_Market · Trial and team-size plans A 30-day free trial, then paid plans from $9 a month for 12 members to $99 a month for 100; many beta companies had converted to paying. HC4
  5. 2010-01Go_To_Market · Bottom-up positioning A former colleague described HipChat at launch as consumer-app polish applied to business chat, meant to spread through enthusiastic team members rather than sales cycles. HC6
  6. 2010-09Product · Guest access Guest links let people outside the company join a group chat and read the history from the time they were invited; a paid feature, as was voice and video. HC5
  7. 2010-09Product · Searchable archive Web and desktop clients, file sharing, notifications and a searchable web archive; no company email address required. HC5
  8. 2010-09Go_To_Market · Bootstrapped funding The company had raised $100,000 and reported thousands of customer companies and over a million messages. HC5
  9. 2012-03Product · Persistent history across clients Persistent rooms stored full conversation history so newcomers could catch up; access from browsers, desktop apps, any XMPP client, iPhone, iPad and Android apps and SMS. HC1
  10. 2012-03Product · Atlassian integrations Integrations posting Jira, Confluence, Fisheye and Crucible notifications into rooms were released with the acquisition, beside Bitbucket and Bamboo integrations and an API. HC1
  11. 2012-03Go_To_Market · Per-user price $2 per user per month after a 30-day trial; more than 1,200 organisations, many already among Atlassian's 18,000 enterprise customers. HC1
  12. 2012-03Go_To_Market · Acquisition Atlassian acquired HipChat on undisclosed terms; its president said none of Atlassian's tools had a real-time component. HC7
  13. 2013-03Product · Native desktop apps A native Mac app, with Linux and Windows apps planned. HC8
  14. 2013-03Go_To_Market · Five-user free tier Free with every feature for up to five users and $2 per person from the sixth; 3,500 paying customers in February 2013. HC8
  15. 2014-05Go_To_Market · Free for unlimited users Free for any number of users with 5 GB of files and the last 25,000 messages searchable; video calls and screen sharing in HipChat Plus at $2 per user. HC9
  16. 2015-01Product · Self-managed edition HipChat Server, a virtual machine run on the customer's network with its identity management; about 4,000 companies ran it during the beta. HC10
  17. 2015-01Go_To_Market · Collaboration business unit A new Collaboration business unit planned to triple the HipChat team within a year and hoped chat users would adopt Jira and Confluence. HC10
  18. 2015-01Go_To_Market · Server pricing HipChat Server plans started at $10 a year for up to 10 users. HC10
  19. 2015-05Go_To_Market · Hall acquisition Atlassian bought Hall and moved its users to HipChat to reach non-technical teams; non-technical use of HipChat had risen by more than 50 percent in six months. HC11
  20. 2015-11Product · In-conversation apps HipChat Connect let outside developers build apps that ran inside HipChat on desktop and mobile; Meekan, New Relic, PagerDuty, StatusPage.io and Zendesk built early versions. HC12
  21. 2015-11Go_To_Market · Marketplace distribution Connect apps were sold through the Atlassian Marketplace, which held about 2,000 add-ons and had passed $100 million in sales. HC12
  22. 2017-06Product · Clustered edition HipChat Data Center supported up to 20,000 named users and 10,000 concurrent users, with SAML 2.0 and customer-managed data stores. HC15
  23. 2017-09Product · Stride rebuild Stride was built as a new product joining chat with voice and video meetings, rather than as an update to HipChat. HC16
  24. 2017-09Go_To_Market · Stride pricing Stride was free for unlimited users with the last 25,000 messages and 5 GB; Standard at $3 per user a month added guest access and screen sharing. HC16
  25. 2018-07Product · Discontinuation Stride, HipChat Cloud, HipChat Server and HipChat Data Center were discontinued; Slack acquired the intellectual property of Stride and HipChat Cloud. HC18
  26. 2018-07Go_To_Market · Sale to Slack Slack paid what Butterfield called a nominal amount over three years; Atlassian made an equity investment in Slack. HC19