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Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

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Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#51

Post by ch4s3 »

optimusclimb wrote: post #18
ch4s3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the consensus seems to be that Atlassian ruined HipChat. I'm not sure if that's true, but everyone I know that switch lists that as a top reason.

Been using HipChat for almost 3 years (so I believe, pre Atlassian, and post.) It seems well suited to purpose, and works fine for me. The only gripes I have are minor (for instance, their iOS offering has this infuriating behavior that it will notify you for direct messages, and throw up the old red dot on the app icon, but then provide no ability to see where the message came from when you open the app.) In light o…

The search actually feels really nice. I'm mostly indifferent to them on the web, but Slack native and on iOS is a bit nicer.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#52

Post by k-mcgrady »

SandB0x wrote: post #24

Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox. > Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay privat…

I didn't quite get it too. I've started using it solo (haven't added any of the team) and there are a few cool features. One is that there is an integration that will automatically post new App Store reviews on our product to a room. I don't need to check that myself. I also integrated with our crash reporting tool so that reports go to a room and I'm notified without clogging up my email. I've also integrated with BitBucket and new commits get posted to a room which I can see being useful when I add team members. I haven't seen these integrations in other products (HipChat which we use currently).

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#53

Post by espitia »

nnoitra wrote: post #49

How are companies like this valued so much, it's just a fancy chat computer program. I don't understand the economics behind this.

Like this: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-...

On a serious note: Remember it is a private financing round. VCs and parties involved calculate based on current metrics future value of company. So, although it may or may not be accurate, it is literally putting a value based on other metrics. For all we know, it could all collapse in a year from now or a lion's share of businesses around the world will be using Slack as their main comms. platform in 10 and thus $2.6B wouldn't sound so bad.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#54

Post by feverishaaron »

For those that are confused about the value of Slack – It's not just about text chat. It's about comprehensive search and combatting organizational forgetfulness and knowledge drain. If we put it on Slack, it's archived "forever" and a team member a few years from now can start with a Slack search before re-inventing the wheel.

This is especially evident with the integrations. If just the relevant slice of data is fed into Slack, it's easier to digest than running a full report in another tool. And it's now part of the corporate history. So finding patterns of endemic problems becomes much easier.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#55

Post by ozten »

bqe wrote: post #10
gooseus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember hearing about it, using it and loving it all in the span of a few hours /days. Then within a month every other team I talked to was also using it... blew HipChat right out of the water. I would attribute it to the amazing UX and well thought out feature-set. Integrations and per-channel notifications were both essential features and easy to find and figure out how to use. I also wouldn't discount the…

Could you expand on why it's so much better than HipChat? I haven't used Slack yet, but I'm interested in trying it out. It sounds like it's the same thing as HipChat.

Search in Slack is much better.

Support for multiple organizations.

I think document support is better, but my HipChat workflow doesn't use many docs, so I could be wrong.

All in all, I think the Slack team studied core user flows and made polished solutions, whereas HipChat sort of does but is painful. An example would be reading scrollback or searching in HipChat. It is dead slow and clunky.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#56

Post by RaphiePS »

My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click.

Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX philosophy, of anticipating and cleverly solving tiny little annoyances, that make it a really pleasurable product to use.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#58

Post by manigandham »

SandB0x wrote: post #24

Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox. > Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay privat…

It's just chat. We've had chat services for a long time, although the options for biz/corporate/enterprise have traditionally sucked.

There is a lot of efficiency gained since emails can often be heavy and include lots of extra wording, signatures, greetings, etc. There are plenty of conversations that just move faster through a lightweight chat system.

Lots of companies were using MSN, Skype, Lync, Gmail, IRC, etc to do chat before and now there's finally a better crop of tools like HipChat, FlowDock, Slack and others. They all offer various abilities above just chat messaging like APIs and integrations to get notified about various other things all in the same place.

Is Slack a nice tool? Yes, it's finally a chat system that works for actual business needs.

Is Slack worth this much and better than everyone else? Not sure, the other ones mentioned are pretty good too and there are still lots of missing features with all of them. $2.8B seems very inflated, but then again this is Silicon Valley at work.

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#59

Post by SandB0x »

andreasklinger wrote: post #39
SandB0x wrote: post #24

Do platforms like Slack really offer a great benefit to a business? Maybe I'm being cynical, but it seems that if you had a dysfunctional organisation then this is not a silver bullet, and if you had a well functioning organisation you would manage just fine with old fashioned tools like email and Dropbox. > Support for private groups and 1:1 direct messaging gives you complete flexibility. Private things stay privat…

- Imho email doesnt scale - it's always in silos - even if you send to multiples - Email just creates more email. In communication methods like slack you can communicate stuff public for people to see if they want - but dont need to

Thanks, and to the other responders, appreciate your views too.

I can see the issue with scaling. There was a great video about the problems of email when Google Wave came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDu2A3WzQpo . So if this service lets people drop in and out of a conversation with ease then I can see the benefit.

> Email just creates more email.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Email is not intrinsically bad. You can write one line chat-like responses and you can write formal letters. I can that moving your communication to a website with a different look and feel might make people behave differently though.

However I am now curious to give Slack a try...

Re: Slack Raises $160M Series E at $2.8B Valuation

#60

Post by nostrademons »

RaphiePS wrote: post #56

My favorite thing about Slack is how they've thought of all the little things. My go-to example is that when they send you a notification email, it includes links to silence further emails with a single click. Obviously, this isn't a big "feature." It's not going to show up on their marketing materials. Nobody will ever say "hey, you should try out Slack because they let you silence emails." But it's this sort of UX…

Isn't this a legal requirement?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscrib...

Technically the law is only that you have to honor them within 10 days, but I've seen a bunch of sites with one-click unsubscribe nowadays.

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