![]() ![]() In 2015, Slack was worth almost $3 billion, with more than 750,000 users actively using the platform. The influx of users was just a taste of what was about to come. The more that we got over time, the more we improved the new-user experience.” Steward Butterfield, First Round Review (14) “From August 2013 to February 2014, we went through the initial 15,000 sign-ups. Sure enough, two weeks after the launch, Slack reached 15,000 sign-ups. (13) While Slack was technically still in beta, Butterfield didn’t want to turn away teams who might want to try it out. Within 24 hours of the launch, the new collaboration tool had over 8,000 sign-ups. Slack interface on desktop and mobile in 2015 (12) Tiny Speck was officially renamed to Slack Technologies and launched to the public in 2014. ![]() The Birth of Slack Technologies (2014–2015)įrom the ashes of a failed game rose the app that would revolutionize the workplace. With the business intel in place, it was time for the next step. Tiny Speck continued inviting more and bigger teams to gain a better insight into how different organizations communicate. They first used it with a small group of front-end developers then spread it to the whole engineering group and then to all 120 people in the company ” Steward Butterfield, First Round Review (11) After all, a team of three would have different needs compared to a team of ten or more. The team started reaching out to their friends at other companies and asked if they wanted to try it out. Before long, Butterfield knew that in order to improve the product even further, they needed more users, so Tiny Speck set out to find them. The best thing about owning their own tool was that the team could tweak it whenever they felt they needed something more. They needed a tool that can be fully asynchronous, one where they can log out and log in, and the messages left for them would be waiting.Īnd that’s how the idea for Slack was born. The team realized they could create something better and tailor it to their needs and working style. So, what did the group of savvy developers do? They built their own communication tool from scratch. They used the popular Internet Relay Chat ( IRC) to communicate, at least for a while.Įventually, Tiny Speck decided that IRC couldn’t meet all their communication needs. When Tiny Speck was working on Glitch, the team was spread across different states. It turned out that he had something else up his sleeve, a major pivot about to unfold. ![]() When Butterfield tweeted that Glitch was dead, he emphasized that Tiny Speck was anything but. ![]() Others suspected that relying on Flash was a mistake. (7) Within three years, it was clear that Glitch was not going to be a hit. While Butterfield and his team received a total of $10.7 million in funding, the development stalled. Players could focus on crafting, accomplishing tasks, and collaborating on quests with other people. Glitch was a casual, 2-D browser-based multiplayer game. The vision? Collaborative gameplay that didn’t dabble in violence. He hoped that Glitch could become a successful and populous online world that would be different from all other copycat titles available at the time. The Glitch Era (2009–2012)īutterflied’s new team, Tiny Speck, set out to create a multiplayer online role-playing game (notice a pattern?) called Glitch. With Flickr out of the picture, it was time for Glitch. The prototype launched in 2002 but the project failed to raise necessary financial support and it was eventually shut down. The original “Flickr game” was meant to be a massive multiplayer online game (MMO) with an Inception-esque title Game Neverending. The decision didn’t come out of the blue since Flickr itself had started the same way. Following the acquisition, Butterfield decided to move into the entertainment industry and develop a game. ![]()
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