Stewart Butterfield (Founder of Slack) Entrepreneurial Insights
by Joe · 48 things on NewTwos
- Listen obsessively to user feedback from day one to shape product-market fit.
- Build for teams, not individuals. Understand group dynamics and get consensus.
- Start with a small market pain point, don't boil the ocean. Expand scope over time.
- Drive viral adoption by making freemium extremely generous and frictionless to upgrade.
- Delight people with well-designed, emotionally engaging experiences even in enterprise software.
- Pivot boldly and repeatedly until you find product-market fit. Previous failures can lead to success.
- Early Growth Tactics
- Slack grew from 0 to $1 billion in valuation in just 8 months, without spending any money on marketing.
- Slack pioneered the freemium model for enterprise software, allowing teams to use it for free up to a certain size. This fueled rapid adoption.
- Slack focused obsessively on ease of use, interface design, and integrations to make collaboration seamless.
- By late 2014, Slack had over 500,000 daily active users. It now has over 10 million daily active users.
- Slack prioritized security and reliability early on to gain business customers' trust.
- Word-of-mouth growth fueled by delivering an exceptional product experience
- Create a high-quality, easy to use product from the start, focusing on reliability, security, and integration capabilities.
- In 2020, Slack was acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion.
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- Slack’s Product Development Philosophy
- Focus on solving real user needs
- Build products that address actual problems or frustrations experienced by users. Don't get caught up in theoretical problems.
- Prioritize simplicity and ease of use
- Create intuitive, easy to use products focused on seamless user experience rather than extensive features.
- Build for your users, not competitors
- Focus on improving users' experience rather than reacting to competitors. Users don't care about matching feature lists.
- Iterate rapidly based on user feedback
- Release constant iterations and improvements fueled by user data, feedback and requests. Move quickly.
- Balance quality with speed
- Ship MVP quality products quickly, but maintain high bar for quality, security and reliability. Don't compromise too much on quality for speed.
- Organize development into nimble teams
- Small, empowered product teams maintain agility to iterate and innovate quickly as needs change.
- Plan for scale
- Anticipate future growth and build products that can scale up smoothly. But scale incrementally matched to user demand.
- Focus on delighting users
- Build exceptional product experiences that improve lives. This will drive growth.
- Slack Hiring & Team Culture Tips
- Hire slowly and carefully
- Stewart emphasizes being very selective and taking time to evaluate candidates, rather than rushing to fill roles. He notes hiring is like a "two-way interview", allowing candidates to evaluate Slack's culture.
- Seek out learners who match the culture
- Beyond purely technical skills, Stewart looks for curious, lifelong learners who fit Slack's organizational culture. Cultural fit is considered more important than skills or experience.
- Empower teams with autonomy and accountability
- Slack structures its teams to have a high degree of autonomy and independence. Teams are given ownership of solving challenges that arise within their realm.
- Use compensation to reinforce desired behaviors
- Slack structures compensation and promotions to reward behaviors that exemplify its cultural values like empathy, transparency and user focus.
- Develop managers into coaches and mentors
- Manager roles at Slack evolve into more coaching and mentoring rather than traditional top-down management. Managers focus on supporting employee growth vs directing work.
- Maintain open, transparent communication
- Frequent all-hands meetings, open Q&A, and close contact across teams reinforces transparency in communication across the company.