91–100 of 809 posts
The overall level of polish on similar apps has risen since then so that’s less of a differentiator, but I still refer to Slack as a great example of polish and consistency in product, with mostly great UX as well
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Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
Their moat is sticky? They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
Is 16B really too high of a valuation when Atlassian is double the market cap at 32B? Both have similar products (collaboration/productivity) and are extremely sticky.
Atlassian products are more mission-critical. Most companies actually need some tool that does what Jira or Bitbucket does. They don't really need Slack.
You don't think it's Mission Critical?
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I don't know about "well deserved". They did it by holding people's data hostage. It's one thing to make your messages unsearchable or otherwise available in the UI until your pay, but holding your data completely hostage until you pay up isn't exactly a noble way to go about things. Even Facebook isn't this obnoxious about getting you a copy of your message history.
Is that still the case? That there is no way to export message history? I'm trying to find a way to publish messages from my Slack channel to my website in real-time so that I can give visitors a look at what they are signing up for. Similar to how Pieter Levels has nomadlist.com/chat/ set up (if anyone knows how he does that, please let me know).
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Their moat is sticky enough and they know it. They can decide what verticals they want to compete it, but their company mission to make business-communication more effective is still as open a field as it was when they were founded. They may have to acquire their Instagram equivalent some time in the future, but I can easily imagine that their Enterprise Customers are here to stay.
Their moat is sticky? They were simply the first company to do hosted chat well enough that it didn't constantly piss people off. I wouldn't call that a sticky moat.
There is no chat/IM client on the market today that is superior to the pinnacle, which was circa-2000 AOL Instant Messenger. Every platform gets worse every year, except slack.
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40x still seems like an insane multiple.
Assuming they have a margin of 50%, their EBITDA multiple is 80. For comparison, Facebook had an EBITDA multiple of ~50 at IPO time.
The obligatory "but they have massive losses", > For the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, the company reported losses of $138.9 million on revenue of $400.6 million. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million the year prior. [1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/31/slack-first-quarter-financ... I don't understand valuations.
Doubling revenue without increasing losses is a great sign.
Congrats to them. I used to be an avid user (loved the way some integrations could help productivity), but since then moved on to Discord, which feels superior in every aspect, especially since it's free. I'm not sure how I feel about the valuation. I'd like to see how the user base, especially the ratio of paying users, has been growing. It feels likely that most of the companies that would have been easy to convert…
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obligatory "Dropbox is just a trivial ftp server plus SVN" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Dropbox took on a problem users have (how can I sync my files between multiple computers?) and provided a great solution to it. Slack takes a problem users have ("my coworkers keep bugging me with stupid questions") and makes the problem worse, because now your coworkers can see that you're online and demand instant answer :)