Slack

SLACK” stands for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge” which is a beautiful way of explaining exactly what Slack does for an organization.

In case you are short on time, read the summary whimsical below & then jump to the Conclusion 🧠

Slack’s Co-Founder Steward Butterfield had previously sold Flickr to Yahoo for $25M in 2005 within a year of founding the company. Steward had initially set out to build a videogame called “Glitch” which shut down in 2012. 

lack emerged from the ashes of Glitch - it was the internal communication tool used by Glitch staff & Glitch users

Some initial encouragement from friends convinced Steward & team to repurpose the tool for external use - it was launched on Product Hunt & got MAD traction. Slack was acquired in 2021 by Salesforce for $27bn - it had gone public in 2019 via a Direct Listing 

Slack’s acquisition by Salesforce comes at a time when MS Teams as surpassed Slack’s MAU by almost x10. 

MS Teams is bundled into the MS Suite offering. Salesforce has similarly bundled Slack into its Customer360 platform and has positioned the same as “Slack First Sales” 

Slack should have ~ 100,000 free accounts (i.e. organizations) in India who are using the FREE plan

(600K free accounts per above source & India is the 3rd largest market)

Slack’s readiness for ELG (Event Led Growth) 🤔

Slack organized a major “Future of Digital Work” event in April 2022

 in Bangalore and Mumbai where their Co-Founder Steward was present.

I distinctly recall being spammed by e-mail campaigns (since I was a paying Slack customer) and paid promotions across newsletters (such as Inc42) 

Below is an example e-mail campaign from Slack:

Given the above, I think it would be fair to say that Slack can invest in ELG (and, is already in fact investing in ELG in India).

In India, Slack has a FREE to PAID conversion problem to solve

 i.e. it has a large pipeline at the “in consideration” stage which needs to be converted into paying users.

Although Slack users are concentrated in metropolitan cities such as Bangalore, Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad & Chennai (due to the Tech ecosystem) - it would be advisable to host a virtual event.

Based on a few conversations with peers, I was able to establish that 

Slack has ~ 3 major competitors in India w.r.t workplace collaboration:

Note: In community / hobby / interest based collaboration - Slack does face competition from Discord but that is NOT relevant for the this ELG objective of FREE to PAID conversion since we are focusing on workplace collaboration.

Ideal Attendee Profile (IAP) 👩🏾‍💼

Broadly, Slack would have ~3 IAPs for this event:

EACH of the above IAPs would be affiliated with organizations who meet the following criteria: