The Billion-Dollar Accident
Stewart Butterfield was trying to build a massive multiplayer online game called *Glitch*. Despite raising millions and building beautiful artwork, the game failed to gain traction. The company was dying.
But during the development of *Glitch*, the team was frustrated with email and IRC, so they built a tiny internal tool to chat with each other, share files, and search old messages. When they finally decided to shut the game down, they realized that their internal chat tool was actually the most valuable thing they had ever built.
"We didn't set out to build a communication platform. We just built the tool we desperately needed to survive, and it turned out every other company needed it too."
The Post-Mortem: How They Actually Scaled
* Solving an Intense Internal Pain: Because they built it for themselves, they hyper-optimized the friction points of enterprise communication. * The Bottom-Up Revolution: Instead of selling to CEOs (top-down), Slack allowed any employee to create a free team (bottom-up). Teams adopted it virally, and eventually, the IT department was forced to pay for it. * Personality in SaaS: Slack made enterprise software feel like a consumer app. It was colorful, fast, and fun—a stark contrast to Microsoft Lync or Lotus Notes.
Slack's Bottom-Up Adoption Curve
How free teams eventually converted to massive enterprise contracts.
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