“The other 80% is people posting about that article. In fact, by Butterfield’s estimation, that’s only about 20% of the recipe for media success. Most importantly, getting the story out doesn’t end when an article is published. But don't leave it to two weeks beforehand and throw something together. It can be personalities on your team, impressive customers you already have in the bag, prestigious investors, etc.
Work closely with your PR firm to find your hook. Itmustbe your primary concern, starting months beforehand and continuing for weeks afterward. The big lesson here:Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when you launch. On the first day, 8,000 people did just that and two weeks later, that number had grown to 15,000. use whatever you've got going for you), they welcomed people to request an invitation to try Slack. Instead, with help from an impressive press blitz (based largely on the team's prior experience - i.e. “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. We would say, ‘Oh, that great idea isn’t so great after all.' We amplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams,” Butterfield says.īy summer, they had polished Slack into something they were ready to share more widely, and they announced their preview release in August 2013 (just seven months after they started). “The pattern was to share Slack with progressively larger groups. Suddenly we saw what the product looked like from the perspective of a much larger team, and it was pretty gnarly.Īrmed with these observations, the Slack squad made a number of changes to the product -then started the process all over again. 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.”
Messages going upwards in skype timelane software#
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.
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