The unveiling strategy of slack

Absrtact: If using a word to describe the newest unicorn member, enterprise Collaboration tool Slack, that is: fire. On the first day of the line, 8,000 companies registered, the introduction of less than 3 months on the financing of more than 40 million U.S. dollars, the establishment of less than 2 years, the valuation has more than 1 billion U.S. dollars. Founder S

If you use a word to describe the newest unicorn member, enterprise Collaboration tool Slack, that is: "Fire". On the first day of the line, 8,000 companies registered, the introduction of less than 3 months on the financing of more than 40 million U.S. dollars, the establishment of less than 2 years, the valuation has more than 1 billion U.S. dollars. Founder Stewart Butterfield (also the founder of Flickr) has shared his entrepreneurial sentiment in the 36 Krypton Insight video interview (one or two, iii), which focuses on business, but Slack's fire, in addition to its excellent business, Largely thanks to successful publishing strategies (using the media, building concepts, listening actively, setting benchmarks, staying focused), the following article comes from the Round Review, who prepares articles that tell stories, and also provides operational advice to entrepreneurs, which we compile as follows For the founders who are committed to creating excellent companies for reference.

In less than 2 years, it was used for more than 30,000 companies, valued at more than 1 billion dollars, and the reason people are interested in Slack's in-house collaboration tools is that the success was achieved without any major integrated marketing activity (slack even without a chief marketing officer). Stewart's summary is that taking customer feedback as the center is one of the keys.

In this article, Stewart discloses its blockbuster publishing strategy, explains the importance of product feature sequencing (and why others can be ignored), and shares the skills needed to instantly become a customer.

Slack's development began in the late 2012, is used for their own a large number of game services (the last game failed, but Slack has achieved success, is the so-called inadvertently inserted willow shade), in March 2013, the team feel the software is enough. But they are also aware that the Fund represents the needs of a team, but outside the myriad teams need something different. By the May, they felt they could absorb more users.

"We're trying to coax a friend from another company to try and give us feedback," Butterfield recalls: "We've probably found 6 or 10 companies in this way." "It includes property leasing management software cozy and music service Rdio.

As the team grows, the slack team immediately discovers that their product usage has become very different. "Especially Rdio, much bigger than us. They started out as a small front-end developer team that spent a while, then spread to the entire engineering team, with 120 people at the end of the entire company, "Butterfield said.

Looking at the product from a large team perspective, we suddenly find that it's pretty rough.

So slack started making a few changes to the product-and then repeated the process (looking for a new team trial).

"The pattern is to share slack with larger groups. Every time I feel ' oh, that good idea is not so good. ' We amplified the feedback from each phase by adding more teams, ' Butterfield said.

By the summer, slack had been polished to the point where they could receive a wider trial, so they released a preview in August 2013 (only 7 months after the start of development).

"Although this is a beta, we don't want to call it beta because people think our products are going to be unstable," Butterfield said. Instead, under impressive media bombing (essentially based on the team's previous experience-using all the resources on hand to advertise themselves), they are welcome to apply for an invitation to try slack. On the first day, 8000 people submitted their applications, and 2 weeks later, the numbers climbed to 15000.

Great experience: Don't underestimate the power of traditional media when publishing. This should be your core focus, starting a few months in advance and continuing for a few weeks before it is released. Use your influence. Work closely with PR team to find ways to recruit users. This can be the personality of the team, impress the customers who have been won, the prestigious investors and so on. But don't report the whole thing in 2 weeks before the release.

More importantly, the passage does not mean that the story is finished. In fact, according to Butterfield's estimate, media success accounted for only 20% of the secret. "The remaining 80% is due to the person who commented on the article. I almost never watch news websites-There are too many of them. But I will pay attention to what my friends choose and share. ”

Social media creates a fair arena, so no matter what kind of coverage you get, keep sharing it with social media. Attract interested people to join your network (those fans are more high-profile than others) in order to expand coverage. Don't be afraid to repeat. This only allows the intended user to remember you.

Teach users why they need your product

This is the second key to Slack's early experience: it's a critical phase of product development, regardless of what the beta version is called, and how it is released and operated. Squeeze all the bits and pieces of feedback.

Slack takes this stage very seriously and the preview lasts 6 months-a very long time for startups. But there is no elaborate strategy or pre-set timetable behind it. "We have received some feedback by the August 2013 release," Butterfield explained. But we still only do 7 months, and the product is quite complex. ”

For a company where most of the success stems from a focus on quality and responsiveness, the 6-month time is just the amount of time they need to learn from the next wave of users. In many ways, slack's beta phase is the same as the usual business phase.

We started to invite teams in batches to see what was going on. Then make some changes and see what happens and make some changes ...

The biggest challenge is learning how to sell a product to a team rather than a person. "For most companies, it's difficult to get the product to the point where it can convince someone to swap," Butterfield said. For example Dropbox: Someone who has tried on several devices, likes it, and then decides to spend a few bucks a month on it. "We have to convince a team and each team is different," he said. ”

It is important that each member of the slack team has a veto power when selecting the collaboration feature, and the user has it. "If a start-up engineer tries to slack and says, ' I hate this feature, I won't use it. ' ' That's not going to work. ”

In this model, Slack spends most of its time in the beta test to minimise risk. "We write materials to explain what it is used for, how it works, what you should do, and so on, but we also develop resources for team administrators," Slack-said. We want to convince the team to provide ammunition, "Butterfield said.

Slack is a shining track in this relatively young field, so the role of those munitions is as important as product training and market education. "Our users probably have 20–30% (only estimates) from other centralized group chat systems, such as hipchat, campfire or IRC," Butterfield said: "We asked the other percent if there was any tool used in internal communication, they answered ' No." ' But apparently they do. I just don't think of it as a class of software. ”

Butterfield digging deeper into what those companies used to discover is often a hodgepodge of things: "A lot of temporary mail, mailing lists." Some people in the team may use hangout, and some use text messages. It also works with Skype, or even Facebook groups and Google +. ”

So Butterfield set goals, to teach users that this is indeed a product category, knowledge they use worse, and slack will be a better choice. But he soon became aware that the app's list of benefits would not automatically bring sales.

"If you're going to build a sales team for your startup, you know you have to decide what CRM software to use, that's obvious." If you are a software development team, you must choose the source code control system. This is also a category. "If you're innovating in a nascent market, you have to take your product category awareness as an important component of your marketing strategy."

Compared to other startups that do business, it's really good to target a team rather than an entire company.

"For small organizations, teams and companies may be the same thing. But if the size of the organization is 15000 people, it may be the case of Adobe, a company with 9 slack pay team. "This proved to be a very useful loophole. They do not need lengthy procurement processes that are determined by CIOs or executives. "Middle-class leaders will say, ' This is cool, we have a team to try. ' If you like it, they can buy the money they want. ”

This bottom-up approach has finally become a key factor in the success of Slack's early development of the enterprise market.

"We lowered the threshold for accepting slack. Because there's no need to turn the whole company around without having to go through committee-level decisions, "Butterfield said. After 2 and 3 years of development, they have matured to be able to cope with the normalization of safety audits and service clause changes. "But at first it was a huge advantage that we skipped over. ”

So Butterfield and his co-founder used 6 months of private time to educate their users without any burdens, so that a larger group of audiences could understand their needs when the product was released. "From August 2013 to February 2014, our number of registrations reached 15000, and then here, as users continue to increase, gradually improve the experience of new users, until we feel that we have all the easy to pick out the fruit." ”

Let the positive tilt become your core competitiveness

Customers provide them with a lot of information, slack themselves even learn more. Butterfield and his co-founder are greedy readers of user feedback, who think the company's rapid development owes much to this skill. From the outset, slack ensures that users can respond to every email they receive and sees each turn as a good opportunity to consolidate loyalty and improve service. Along with listening to the growing user base, the slack team has also been improved accordingly.

"Sometimes you get feedback that contradicts your vision," Butterfield said. "You might try to get in a particular direction, and that direction may not be understood at first." So at the beginning, we really looked at our clients as testers and paid special attention to the teams that we knew should be able to use slack smoothly. ”

When key users tell us what is not, we fix it-right away.

Take Rdio, one of the Butterfield's biggest beta-test companies. Slack channel (channel) to discuss different topics. For a small group of people, the management and navigation of these channels is relatively easy. But if it's a Rdio team, everyone creates a channel, everyone (especially the new guy) doesn't know which channel to join. ”

Aware of this, the slack team quickly made minor changes, but the impact was huge: They added description fields to the channel list, and the number of channel users. "These are trivial examples in grand development programs, but they can lead to slack not being used by some teams." Feedback from beta testers is critical to discovering small negligence in product design. ”

Now, 1 years after the slack public release, that awe of user feedback has become part of the company's DNA. "We will take every means to get user feedback." In app we have a command that can be used to send feedback. We also have Help button users can use to submit support requests, "Butterfield said. They have made the most of their attention in Twitter's advice column, good or bad. "We'll probably get 8,000 Zendesk help requests and 10,000 tweets a month, and we'll all respond." ”

In the eyes of Butterfield, the heavy burden of customer service is Slack's most valuable asset-and he personally responds to half the information for a long time. "Especially at the beginning, I was the one with the most Twitter." Early in the day we merged the warranty and customer support into a group that we call the Customer Experience Group. They do everything from analyzing customer feedback to guiding the right people to fix bugs. ”

The group already had 3 people when the slack was released. Since then, this is still a key part of the company's investment. Now, the team has 18 people, and a 6-person team is responsible for 24/7 of Twitter processing. 6 people may sound a bit more, but Twitter is increasingly becoming one of the channels of customer feedback, and for Slack, it's a game-changing player.
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"We rely heavily on Twitter. Even if someone is unusually enthusiastic about a product, word of mouth can only reach a handful of people--but if someone sends Twitter to us, they will see hundreds and thousands of people. "As for the wall of love on Twitter, it's not all flattering, and a lot of it starts with problems to be solved."

Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If your customer service is better than others, the chances of recommending you are much higher.

Whatever form is taken, user feedback received must be processed, stored, and studied. "We are very picky about all of the information we receive, the way we read it, the data we send to us, and how we keep it," Butterfield said.

How many people ask about a feature and how many people want a new kind of integration that companies will track. The story of hard numbers is of course also important; user statistics and sales figures are always key indicators. But every day, your users are sharing a lot of qualitative data-and many companies either don't know how to act or forget. ”

It is not surprising that Slack's leadership has shared feedback with the right internal team as a key mission for Slack, a company dedicated to communication challenges. Twitter and help requests are stored on their own slack channel and searchable. The support team knows that they have a direct line with the product team.

"When you hear something new, it seems like a good idea, or it feels pretty good but not easy to implement, they publish it to a channel that talks about new features." This is a continuous, day-to-day work. There are 50 messages today, "Butterfield said.

Know your Magic numbers, understand the meaning of the indicators

Slack advocates qualitative feedback. But they also devote a lot of time to ensuring that quantitative indicators are consistent with qualitative judgments (Twitter feedback). Butterfield also shares a common view among founders that industry-standard numbers undoubtedly exist. But in the end, you're the only one who can really determine your company's magic numbers-the number that explains who really uses (and how to keep them going).

For slack, this number is 2000-2000 messages. "According to the last accumulated out of the case, who used no use, we are sure that any team, as long as it has exchanged more than 2000 messages, can say that it has really tried slack," Butterfield said, "for a team of about 50 people, this means the equivalent of 10 hours of message volume. For a typical 10-person team, that's probably a week's message volume. But what it touches is that, regardless of other factors, after 2000 messages, 93% of the customers are still using slack. ”

Slack's working mechanism is probably this: someone enters their e-mail address and receives a linked message. After filling out a simple form and submitting it, you can start the team collaboration. Of course, slack want to be able to work, users need to invite other team members to use the software, it is best to do some integration work, such as with Asana, Dropbox or MailChimp.

Most (more than 90%) of the people who fill in the form and submit them never invite others or start using the software.

This figure seems discouraging. In the slack on the establishment of about 220,000 teams inside, active only more than 30,000. "However, because each team has an average of about 8 or 9 members, our daily active users are close to 250,000." We have more active users than the number of teams on slack. We did lose a group of people, but those who stayed were the ones who really tried and stuck with it. ”

Now, you may not have ready-made metrics to accurately capture the company's development, but setting it up is absolutely part of your market strategy. "You have to figure out what the conversion rate means. What is the user retention rate that means? For every business, these numbers may be slightly different depending on the nature of the product and the people who use it, "Butterfield said.

As long as you have the number of gods, you can start using all kinds of innovative tools to drive users to the milestones-email reminders, and suggest that they take new action in their products. Because Slack knows that 2000 is its golden number, it can be iterated over the way that the customer crosses that line.

Strengthen and magnify your special place

Fundamentally, all qualitative and quantitative feedback is a product-to be able to play its best role to understand its core differentiation and unique opportunities. "For our founders, the stage of being conceited about developing things in their own way has passed," Butterfield said. "We set ourselves a very high standard, and if we don't, we won't be happy." ”

The first time the product was integrated, Butterfield and his co-founder repeated over and over again Paul Buchheit's already famous article, "It doesn't have to be a good product if it's great." "Buchheit is one of the founders of Gmail, and he has a simple theory: if you have a few things you can do very well, it doesn't matter what's left." ' Looking at Gmail in the first generation will find that it's actually very versatile, ' says Buchheit. But its searchable interface, threaded sessions, and 1G space that were unimaginable at the time were so impressive that the functionality that the product did not have bothered them.

Buchheit's words aroused strong resonance between Butterfield and his team.

We are not taking shortcuts, but trying to focus on the few things that are most important to our product vision.

For Slcak, the three most important features are:

Search: With Buchheit doing Gmail is very similar, slack team know that the value of their products is to help people quickly find what they are looking for. "When you're reading a document or having a conversation, you need the confidence that you don't have to worry about labeling or storing it--you can get it back anytime you want," Butterfield said. Google has set such a high standard that everyone has a specific expectation that it would be fatal to disappoint them.

Sync: One of the drivers of all the other internal platforms we're passionate about is that it's hard to go back to the same place once you've switched devices-for example, it's hard to get out of the desktop and continue from your phone. "Slack has developed what he calls the" Leave State Sync "feature from the start. Slack knows where each person leaves each session and then synchronizes their cursor positions in real time. This gives them real competitiveness in a market that already has a well-known player.

Simple File sharing: From quick pasting of pictures to file drag-and-drop ease of use, slack development with the attention of those small shortcuts and intuitive UI operations.

Butterfield points out that these are not necessarily check box features or new concepts to be hyped. It's not even what users think they're looking for in the solution. But when it comes to successful market entry strategies, perhaps the most important decision you can make is to develop a different product and make important changes for the audience you are pursuing.

"We had a lot of communication in choosing the three things to do the ultimate thing," Butterfield said, "and eventually we developed a slack around these three points." It may sound simple, but from a manageable perspective, narrowing the scope can be both a huge challenge and a huge benefit to the company. Suddenly you get the lead because you are the best at what really affects the user. ”