The main idea I took away from the group's presentation was that Slack revolves around team communication, and succeeds because of this focus.
Slack's main functionalities include real-time messaging, cross-platform syncing, and integration with other team-related tools. The developers focused on building team-related features on top of these core functions, adding useful features such as a powerful search (that can even search within files), functionality for different channels ("chat groups") within a team, and 90 integrated tools excluding user-made ones.
The success of Slack, as described by the presenting group, is largely attributed to the product targeting a specific need of teams everywhere - a need for good communication. In fact, the group's main message was to tell us to "build a good product, one that serves needs". This was emphasized by the quick growth of Slack's user base, which has hit over 500,000 regular users in 2 years.
As for commercial potential, the presenting group suggested Slack's main commercial potential lies within its freemium model and large user base, with the premium features being targeted at enterprises looking to add value to their organization. It may be worth noting that (from a little research) about 135,000 of the 500,000 users are paying users, adding up to $12 million in annual revenue.
These three factors put together effectively bring across the presenting group's message, that we should build a good product that serves people's needs. The features showed the ways in which Slack is focused, the point on success led in to the group's message, while the commercial potential showed the selling point and target audience of Slack. In other words, Slack's features were built for teams, it became popular because it fulfilled a need of teams, and it earns money by targeting professional teams.
To add on to the points the presenting group has mentioned, here are a few things that crossed my mind when thinking/reading up on Slack:
First, it is not perfect: it is slow (I share that particular pain point about the notifications with Joel) and we need to create new 'accounts' for each team we join - points mentioned by the team. To add my own opinion in, in general it feels like everything has more set-up and is more complicated. For example, compare WhatsApp to Slack - creating a new team chat? In Whatsapp, a tap, a scroll, another few taps and you're done. In Slack, you need to enter emails for a new team (by typing - not tapping!), wait until the people open the email and set up new accounts before you can actually get started. This feeling of complexity, in my opinion, permeates the entire app, making it unlikely for me to use it for prolonged periods. Although it seems useful for teams, going by my current usage I think I can still survive with just WhatsApp. That said, it is interesting and nice to know that an imperfect app like Slack can and is earning significant amounts - I suppose point 1 on this
list really applies.
Second, they have some very interesting business philosophies. They boast "
fair pricing", where a company purchasing 1000 users' worth of premium will only be charge based on the number of active users. Also, they allow non-profit organizations and educational institutions to enjoy significant discounts. Is it part of their marketing tactic, to make users feel more comfortable in purchasing, or maybe more trusting and loyal?
Lastly, since this is getting lengthy, I thought about the freemium model - does it really make sense for Slack to be freemium? Going by the statistics, about 3/4 of their user base are free users. Doesn't the free user base drain resources? Perhaps they are hoping the free users will eventually convert to paying users. However, the features offered by premium - which include improved security, greater retention of data (e.g. unlimited message history), and more responsive support - do not apply to casual (or less 'professional') people like us. Or maybe they just couldn't charge for the app itself like Things did, because after releasing it the base app for free, the freemium model has become a part of the users' mindsets, and charging for the app now would just create an uproar. I'm no expert, so here's a link on a more expert
source for debate.
Well, just some thoughts of mine. Hope they piqued your interest!
TL:DR: Slack is built for teams, filled a need, succeeded with freemium model. Slack may not be perfect but is still succeeding, the company has interesting business philosophies, and perhaps they could earn more without the freemium model.