Slack (worth $27.7B) started out as a FAILED game called Glitch🤯

In 2009, Butterfield & team created a game that..didn't go anywhere,

They trashed the entire game and kept one function.

Today, they’re one of the most popular tools for businesses of all sizes.

Here are top 6 lessons to take away from their story.

✳️1/Innovation happens sometimes unexpectedly

• Email is crowded and opaque, 'Chat’ at work made conversations more fluid. Slack’s founders saw that and applied it.

• A seemingly unrelated tool, that offered much more value when applied to the right situation.

✳️2/Customer interactions are an opportunity to market

Slack didn't hire a CMO till almost a year after its launch.

They treated customer interactions as marketing opportunities.

• Twitter - Direct, mass feedback from customers (these eventually manifested positive word-of-mouth )

• Email - Quick response to requests and fixes.

• Only after they were sure that they had P/M fit, they went knee-deep into the trenches to promote their product.

✳️3/Adapt to evolving trends and environments

Slack made the best out of the pandemic.

• They saw 43% boost in revenue ($902M) and $292M in profits.

• Slack made feature updates to make remote working seamless.

• Don’t sleep on trends relevant to you, act fast and adapt.

✳️4/ Be guided by a ‘magic number’

• The number was 2,000. 2,000 messages was the tipping point in which they knew that a customer ‘really used’ Slack.

• Thereafter, those customers tend to be sticky and continue to be customers. - Plenty of their marketing and product efforts that followed were focused on getting customers past the 2,000 line.

✳️5/ Build a product that makes people want to stay

• Slack found its unique niche in work collaboration and became an everyday necessity for work. They stuck to their preview release for more than six months (a century in Startupland)

• The feedback they got helped them build a remarkable product that simply worked so well for users.

✳️6/ Employ a Beachhead strategy vs going head-on

• Instead of immediately trying to capture whole enterprises as clients, Slack went after teams.

• This meant less draggy committee-style purchase decisions and faster uptake of the product.

• As they improved it over time, other teams within organisations in sales, and software development started to use them too.

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Tons of smart moves they’ve made that we can all learn from.

What would you add?