Slack might be the greatest example of Product led growth
My friend works at a company where they were still using email for their day to day communication, and where suffering from huge communication gaps. (Emails getting missed, important messages getting lost in the thread, no transparency). I suggested them to try out the free version of Slack, and they are instantly hooked. They will soon be moving to a paid version as now all their communcation channels — the off topic groups on whatsapp, customer service messages from intercom, clients, are now connected to Slack. If companies are still using emails for internal communication, they are stuck in the stone age.
In my current company, we are using an Indian copycat of Slack. (I am not going to share the name, because no matter how bad it is, it is made in India, and I have immense respect for the people who built it).I have been using slack since my college days, where I built a bot for my project, and then in the next two companies I worked for. I can’t even tell you how much I hate the current product, and we have a dedicated channel for abusing the current platform with 100+ people who have used Slack before.
What Makes Slack so great?
Slack’s attention to detail and understanding of its users. The user flows are so extremely well defined. Let me give some examples
I want to share a spotify song with my fellow workers, here is what happens -
Slack
I can play the song inside slack itself. No need to open the link, go to spotify and play it.
Current Platform
I need to leave the platform and play the song. Annoying.
Code Sharing
Slack
All you need to do is press ``` and it gets converted to a code block.
Current Platform
It is a three step process. Choose chat tools -> code snippet -> paste -> confirm
These are two flows I use on an everyday basis. Tell me why I wouldn’t miss slack?
Search Capability
Let’s see the search capability difference -
Slack -
Slack creates a User’s work graph- someone you interact with more, you have a higher affinity, and that’s how they define a message’s priority score in a search.
And this is how it looks in my current platform -
It doesn’t even searches for files! And you cannot even search for messages from multiple people. Extremely limited.
Read about Search at Slack here.
Slack is Hip
My current platform feels really really enterprise with the fonts and the UI/UX. Slack, on the other hand, give a unique feeling of being in a startup kind of environment, even when you are working at a big company. I am not sure about how many people actually feel this way though :)
All in all, my current platform get the job done, but I miss using Slack everyday.
