SC

Strategy Canon

Slack: sourced choices

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

  1. 2012Product · Origin Tiny Speck ran an extended IRC server with file sharing, simple search and a basic archive for its distributed Glitch team. SL20
  2. 2013Product · Channel navigation Channel descriptions and member counts added after Rdio's 120 employees could not tell which channels to join. SL7
  3. 2013Go_To_Market · Market education Material written for individuals and for team administrators to persuade their teams. SL7
  4. 2013Go_To_Market · Price Paid plan set at $9 per person a month, then $8. SL20
  5. 2013-01-08Product · Build start Eight people began work on Slack in Vancouver, reusing Glitch's Java game server as the message server. SL20
  6. 2013-05Go_To_Market · Friendly testers Six to ten friends' companies, including Cozy and Rdio, try the product and give feedback. SL7
  7. 2013-07-31Go_To_Market · Positioning memo Memo to the team: Slack defines a new market and sells organizational transformation, not software. SL8
  8. 2013-08-14Go_To_Market · Preview Invitation-only preview release; 8,000 requests on the first day and 15,000 within two weeks (SL7). SL8
  9. 2014-02-12Product · Free plan Free teams get every feature but only the most recent 10,000 messages; paid plans add full history, storage and integrations. SL9
  10. 2014-02-12Go_To_Market · Freemium launch Public launch with a free plan and paid tiers. SL9
  11. 2014-04Go_To_Market · Funding Social Capital writes a $25 million check after seeing beta engagement, conversion and monetization two to four times Yammer's. SL28
  12. 2015Product · Feedback tools An in-app feedback command and help button; tickets and tweets stored in searchable Slack channels and routed to product. SL7
  13. 2015Go_To_Market · Support at scale About 8,000 help tickets and 10,000 tweets a month, all answered. SL7
  14. 2015Go_To_Market · Team-level buying Nine separately paid teams at Adobe; managers expense Slack without CIO approval. SL7
  15. 2015-12-15Product · App Directory Public App Directory opens with 150 integrations. SL15
  16. 2015-12-15Go_To_Market · Developer fund $80 million Slack Fund with Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index, Kleiner Perkins, Spark and Social Capital. SL15
  17. 2016Go_To_Market · Direct sales Direct sales force and customer success added to self-service from 2016. SL2
  18. 2016-11-02Product · App Directory scale 750 apps listed with more than six million installations. SL17
  19. 2016-11-02Go_To_Market · Open letter Full-page letter to Microsoft on the Teams announcement. SL17
  20. 2017-01-31Product · Enterprise Grid Connects multiple workspaces in one network with security settings adjustable across them. SL18
  21. 2017-01-31Go_To_Market · Enterprise customer Capital One moves about 12,000 employees onto Enterprise Grid. SL19
  22. 2017-09Product · Shared channels Beta program for channels shared between organizations. SL2
  23. 2018-07-26Go_To_Market · Rival exit Atlassian discontinues Hipchat and Stride, Slack buys their intellectual property, Atlassian invests in Slack, and customers get a migration path. SL3
  24. 2019-01Product · Platform scale More than 1,500 apps listed, 500,000 registered developers and 450,000 apps or integrations used weekly. SL2
  25. 2019-01Go_To_Market · Paying base More than 88,000 Paid Customers and 500,000 free organizations; 575 customers above $100,000 bring about 40 percent of fiscal 2019 revenue. SL2
  26. 2019-06Product · Search Messages, application posts and file text are searchable; the archive grows more useful with use. SL2
  27. 2019-06Go_To_Market · Fair billing Paid customers are credited for contracted users who go unused (first disclosed in the prospectus). SL2
  28. 2019-10Product · Shared channel network More than 26,000 organizations connected by shared channels. SL21
  29. 2020Go_To_Market · Sale decision Salesforce offers $45 a share; the executives decide to accept. SL25
  30. 2020-01Product · Platform scale More than 2,000 listed apps and 620,000 integrations used in a typical week; Workflow Builder introduced in 2019. SL6
  31. 2020-01Product · Shared channel adoption More than 32,000 Paid Customers have adopted shared channels. SL6
  32. 2020-01Go_To_Market · Enterprise base 893 customers above $100,000 bring about 46 percent of revenue; net dollar retention 132 percent. SL6
  33. 2020-06-24Product · Slack Connect Up to 20 organizations can share a channel; free users get a 90-day trial. SL22
  34. 2020-07-22Go_To_Market · Competition complaint Complaint to the European Commission that Microsoft tied Teams to Office. SL23
  35. 2021-07-21Go_To_Market · Acquisition Salesforce completes the acquisition. SL4
  36. 2025-09-12Go_To_Market · Remedy Microsoft's commitments to sell suites without Teams become binding. SL5
  37. Product · Notification default Every message notifies by default for new accounts, adopted after early users complained of missing notifications. SL12