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1980 - usenet launches
a few million years bc - one dinosaur grunts to another
At the end of the day Slack is a SV unicorn that went public without turning any profit. I believe they marketed this in their S-1 as a "loss-making" company...who does the market think it is anyway trying to act rational.
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Might say the same about ICQ, Skype, Messenger, etc. All communications platforms so far have come and gone in vogue. I remember in 2005 when everyone in our office communicated over MS Messenger. Maybe Slack is to instant messaging as Facebook was to social networking and will get some longevity. But it's too early to tell yet.
The difference between chat and facebook is that with a team in chat, you can move it to anywhere (teams, irc, mattermost, zulip, whatsapp). With facebook, you can't move your friends, so you're stuck.
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Slack is different from those companies of yore. Back then, if you created a chat program and went to an investment bank, they'd laugh you out of the office, or advise that you take whatever acquisition offer you can get, because a chat program with tons of competitors isn't enough to build a profitable business on.
Skype got investment from VCs in 2003, 16 years ago. is that "yore" enough for you? https://www.vcgate.com/Bessemer_Venture_Partners.asp
Even so, Skype was a household name for video chat for years (despite it's sometime shoddy quality) until FaceTime, Gchat and others implemented video towards 2010.
What's Slack done that's different from other chat platforms available today? Stuff like Jira integration is of interest only to a small portion of its target market, and it's that exact market that will complain about the pricing, that it's non-federated, heavy on resources, intrusive in its tracking, etc.
I've long thought that they've essentially built beautiful native/mobile/web clients for IRC-type chats and provide hosting/IRCOp services. Charging per-seat to enterprise seems like a very, very lucrative proposition for this type of product/service.
There are a couple of eyebrow-raising financials:
1.) 100,000 paid users @ $6.67-$15/mo = $667k-1.5m MRR = $2m-$4.5m QRR
2.) 13m DAUs @ $0/mo (free tier)
3.) They lost $30m Q3 '18
4.) They lost $300m Q4 '19 due to 'stock based compensation' (which from my perspective should have been accrued Q4 '15 onwards)
And for all the above... a $5billion unicorn valuation considering chat is a solved problem?
Three major questions:
1. Has any other SaaS or company in human history ever had a 1:130 ratio of paid:free users with a hard cap of $15 on MRR?
2. Does quarterly losses between $30-$300m on $4.5m in revenue make sense considering the unit economics of cloud-based chats?
3. Does 100k paid subscribers seem a bit low for a 6 year old company?
Really weird situation from my "knows enough to be dangerous" perspective and I'm all ears because from my perspective:
1.) There's really not enough innovation or a big enough TAM (considering competitors) to drive a unicorn valuation
2.) Which shouldn't matter because this is still a potentially lucrative market
3.) And yet... they're losing money hand-over fist
Weird, weird weird. Feel free to share your thoughts, I just ask that you consider this message comes from a perspective of "confused guy trying to make sense of these crazy times"
Leaving aside the costs of their listing and related compensation (which are crazy high!) they made a $57m loss on $145m in revenue. Considering that they are a pure software company this is quite shocking and, to me, a sign not to touch them with a barge pole.
Where did you get that $57 million number? For its second fiscal quarter, Slack posted a loss of $364 million
364-307=57
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Gmail was not the first email program (which is what the OP asked about). Gmail came several decades after email was invented and already in widespread use. You may or may not realize this fact (depending on your age).
Yes and slack is not the first instant messaging program. /snarky quip about your age and IRC/ How many corporations use G suite for their email? How many roll their own email systems and use thunderbird? To the average user, email is a proprietary non-federated system filled with tracking.
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Work is a non-software company and we asked if we could use Slack and IT responded by saying that we already had Teams installed and included with O365.... therefore we should use that. That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there....
> That's what we've being doing except that no one chats on there ...Which serves as a demonstration that nobody needs chat. Isn't it great how that works?
As many times as I’ve hated on Slack on HN, my anger is at their bloat and sluggishness and low density UI to do basic text chat. At least I can do basic text chat in an IRC style channel in it.
Desktop Teams is a nightmare of mystery magic UI, I never have any clue where I am in it, where anything else is, how to get to or from stuff or what the chat is doing, it’s super unpleasant.
It’s basically a web browser to SharePoint but with no browser chrome or address bar or navigation hints or breadcrumbs, then the same into a Skype replacement, then a pile of chat channels which aren’t channels and have rolled up chat threads in a list in them, but all of this in one window so you can only do one thing in the UI at any time (I.e. NOT chat to someone and look up some documentation in another window because it only has one window) and Teams honking at you wherever you are with red blobs of attention grabbers and “people are trying to contact you in Teams” dark pattern Facebook bullshit where the mobile teams and desktop teams notify and then emails you.
It’s both completely overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.
Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s chief executive, said in an interview that it would take time for the market to understand his company since it had created a new category of software, unlike soda or cars We've had public business software companies for decades, they all created a new "category" of software, why does he think his is something new? Fundamentally speaking, how is Slack any different to the first email prog…
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Where did you get that $57 million number? For its second fiscal quarter, Slack posted a loss of $364 million
For its second fiscal quarter, Slack posted a loss of $364 million, [...] . That included $307 million in stock-based compensation and taxes related to the company’s direct listing. 364-307=57
I don't know enough about the Slack product or business model to comment authoritatively, but I'm really confused how they're losing money (and so much of it) and I sense a bit of "weirdness" around unit economics/user conversion/pricing. I've long thought that they've essentially built beautiful native/mobile/web clients for IRC-type chats and provide hosting/IRCOp services. Charging per-seat to enterprise seems lik…