Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Slack S-1

sec.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 469 posts

Re: Slack S-1

#241

Post by BoorishBears »

xfitm3 wrote: post #114
noxToken wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Slack any different than any other instant messaging application? Hangouts, Jabber, Discord, Rocket Chat, and even WebEx or GoToMeeting - you can disable notifications, completely ignore, or even sign out of all of these applications. I'm not saying that Slack are the good guys, but if your managers are forcing you to have all notifications on at all times and using @channel for every message, then it really i…

Slack is not flexible or customizable - when basic features like muting someone are requested you're told that you are using Slack wrong. The notion of a one size fits all solution is flawed.

Your told that because it’s true.

If someone is sending you messages that are so useless you need to mute them, either your organization is seriously disfunctional or you shouldn’t be in Slack.

Re: Slack S-1

#242

Post by deathanatos »

techntoke wrote: post #183
aiCeivi9 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is good enough that it got cloned by Mattermost. No one recreates shitty software.

You mean Slack cloned IRC with markup and pictures

And history. And search. And attachments. And video calls. And a decent experience for non-power-users. And a decent integration/API story. And multi-person DMs. All of which are immensely useful features.

I get that HN likes to think "it's just chat", but a decent chat application (having used gChat, Slack, IRC, AIM, …) is way more nuanced than that.

Re: Slack S-1

#243

Post by tomstoms »

smolder wrote: post #201
ec109685 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why? Their revenue is growing faster and they aren’t running out of money.

At that scale, I suspect there are some ~$10k engineering-time efforts that could save them $1m a year in costs, if they already have the people on staff with the expertise. In my limited experience, a lot of opportunities like that get missed because: - an optimization is considered lower priority than feature work and bugs, so never gets staffed - it's considered risky even when it's not - it's difficult to quantif…

Also, buying cpu power is a lot easier than recruiting devs.

Re: Slack S-1

#244

Post by charlesju »

maxxxxx wrote: post #33
neom wrote: post #11

"Our revenue was $105.2 million, $220.5 million, and $400.6 million in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively, representing annual growth of 110% and 82%, respectively. Our growth is global with international revenue representing 34%, 34%, and 36% of total revenue in fiscal years 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. We continue to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity. As a re…

It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.

Let me let you in on a little secret. Slack makes TONS of money. Take that as a truth and then think about why they're still reporting they're losing money..

Re: Slack S-1

#245

Post by puranjay »

raldi wrote: post #227
moreira wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app? I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M activ…

You say "chat app" like that means it's easy. How is running a chat app any easier than, say, running Facebook?

My pet peeve with HN. People here boil everything down to a trivial engineering problem. That Slack is "just a chat app" is grossly underselling all the other parts of the business - sales, marketing, design, product - that makes it tick.

Re: Slack S-1

#246

Post by robhunter »

Naga wrote: post #182
robhunter wrote: post #150

I think historical accounting practices and standards are not great at evaluating SaaS businesses. We came up with the concept of depreciation/amortization as a way to better match up expenses with revenues in a given time frame. I think we need a similar mechanism for allocating sales & marketing costs. My company spends about $1,000/year on Slack. We likely will in perpetuity, as long as we/Slack exists. Slack spen…

I don't think that Slack's business model is that different from other companies, from a marketing perspective. Sure, they acquired you as a customer in 2014 and don't need to spend anymore on marketing, but other companies spend huge amounts for marketing in the first few years and then spend less over time (think: you picked a detergent brand and keep using it without further marketing, for example). I actually thi…

Well, I think it relates to historical churn though - B2C churn in general is significantly higher than B2B (see Blue Apron). The switching costs on detergent brands are essentially 0. For us to switch from Slack now would be a fairly major headache.

Re: Slack S-1

#247

Post by robhunter »

ummonk wrote: post #205
robhunter wrote: post #150

I think historical accounting practices and standards are not great at evaluating SaaS businesses. We came up with the concept of depreciation/amortization as a way to better match up expenses with revenues in a given time frame. I think we need a similar mechanism for allocating sales & marketing costs. My company spends about $1,000/year on Slack. We likely will in perpetuity, as long as we/Slack exists. Slack spen…

Not sure what you mean. LTV/CAC is a common metric in SaaS for sales efficiency.

Obviously, but do you see that anywhere in their S-1? Or in all of the comments on here referencing that they are unprofitable?

Re: Slack S-1

#248

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

zedpm wrote: post #135
tw04 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be curious if it's remotely sustainable. We started on Slack ~3 years ago. We're now moving (albeit slowly) to Teams. 18 months from now Slack will be gone entirely. I can't believe we're the only ones. And unlike Dropbox vs. Ondrive, Slack isn't markedly better in any area than Teams from my testing.

Oh no, turn back while you still can. My team is in full revolt due to a company-wide migration from Slack to Teams. Teams is worse in almost every way. We're seeing lots of missing functionality, bizarre UI bugs, random crashes, extremely slow sync, you name it. Teams is in no way a viable replacement for Slack unless your use case is one or two plaintext messages per day.

As a drop-in replacement for Slack (or our dearly departed friend Hipchat), Teams is a poor choice. It makes more sense when used organization-wide -- for meetings, sharing/accessing documents, and so on. The chat portion works usually but it's probably its weakest point.

The bugs do need mentioned though. It constantly crashes for me, constantly loses sync, will just straight-up freeze for no discernible reason, will decide it doesn't really feel like actually sending my messages, and so on. It does not at all feel like a mature product.

Our team dropped HipChat and has moved to Teams along with the rest of the org. Our dev team (of 7) had used HipChat as a simple persistent chat app, sandboxed away from the rest of the company. Now we are on Teams with not only Ops guys, but also HR, marketing, and so on. It's fine at being sort of an organizational tool, but we dearly miss having our own private chat-only app that we can make use of as we want/need. Partly this is contextual to our organization, but the way we use Teams now feels far more formalized, and not in a good way.

Re: Slack S-1

#249

Post by praneshp »

will_brown wrote: post #176
freewilly1040 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well there people who disagree and would like to invest in them. Why should your opinion be forced on them?

There are people who want to invest in ICOs, Ponzi schemes...others want to rape, murder...why should anyone’s opinions be forced on these people?

4/26/2019: Peak HN was reached at a record 9:58 AM PDT

Re: Slack S-1

#250

Post by huac »

Naga wrote: post #182
robhunter wrote: post #150

I think historical accounting practices and standards are not great at evaluating SaaS businesses. We came up with the concept of depreciation/amortization as a way to better match up expenses with revenues in a given time frame. I think we need a similar mechanism for allocating sales & marketing costs. My company spends about $1,000/year on Slack. We likely will in perpetuity, as long as we/Slack exists. Slack spen…

I don't think that Slack's business model is that different from other companies, from a marketing perspective. Sure, they acquired you as a customer in 2014 and don't need to spend anymore on marketing, but other companies spend huge amounts for marketing in the first few years and then spend less over time (think: you picked a detergent brand and keep using it without further marketing, for example). I actually thi…

i don't have a subscription to laundry detergent, nothing stops me from buying a different brand in 6 months, whereas slack has contracts with my company, and has switching costs (we'd lose our message history).
Post reply on HN