The use of bots made it easier for managers to relocate most of their operations to Slack.

In 2016, Slack debuted a flurry of new features to push it beyond the competition, including an app and bot ecosystem. Slack’s first few years were led by the app’s user experience, which was easier and modern compared to Hipchat or Campfire, the two other notable online chat tools used at the time. Slack reached unicorn startup status in 2014, and its value almost trebled the next year when it was valued at $2.8 billion. It grew at a rate of five to 10 percent a week in the first year. Slack had to stagger the launch, as it added more server capacity to meet demand.Īs Slack added more organisations, word of mouth accelerated demand, as many media organisations were the first to use the app and wrote positive reviews of it. It was an instant success, receiving 8,000 requests in the first day and 15,000 by the second week. Instead of meetings, e-mail threads and phone calls, everything could be done through one application.Īccording to Slack, using the app reduces emails by 32 percent and meetings by 27 percent.Īfter a year of privately testing the app, Slack launched publicly in February 2014. Originally beta testing the app with a few organisations, Butterfield saw the potential of Slack as an answer to the many disparate ways employees communicated. That failure inspired both to launch communication tools. Both were run by entrepreneurs who had made millions from their previous venture (Flickr and OpenFeint) and then released a video game to muted reception. It is worth noting the similarities between Slack’s founding and Discord.

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