Slack
Where work happens
Slide-by-Slide Breakdown
The Problem
🔴 ProblemWork communication is broken. Email is slow, cluttered, and lacks context. Information silos between teams. Searching for past decisions is impossible. 28% of work time is spent managing email. New employees can't access institutional knowledge. Tools don't talk to each other.
'28% of time on email' quantified a pain everyone feels but rarely measures.
The Insight
💡 SolutionCommunication should be organized by topic, not by person. Channels replace email threads — persistent, searchable, contextual. All your tools integrated in one place. Searchable archive of every decision and conversation. Open by default — transparency builds better teams.
The channel paradigm was the key innovation — organizing communication by context, not sender.
Traction (8 months since launch)
📈 Traction500K daily active users. 60K paid teams. 30% day-1 to day-30 retention (best in SaaS). Users send 300M+ messages per month. Average user active 10+ hours per day (app is always open). 93% of teams that try Slack continue using it.
'10+ hours per day' showed Slack wasn't just a tool — it was the work environment itself.
Product
🛠️ ProductChannels: Organized conversations by project, team, or topic. Direct Messages: Private 1:1 or group conversations. Search: Find any message, file, or decision from the entire history. Integrations: 80+ apps connected (GitHub, Jira, Google Drive, etc.). Threads: Keep discussions organized within channels. File sharing: Drag-and-drop with preview.
The integration ecosystem was already substantial at pitch time — showed platform potential.
Why Teams Love Slack
⭐ Social Proof"Slack has reduced our internal email by 75%" — Rdio. "We can't imagine working without it" — Lonely Planet. NPS: 53 (world-class for enterprise software). Organic spread: Teams adopt bottom-up, then buy top-down. 8,000 new teams per week joining organically.
Enterprise NPS of 53 is extraordinary. Bottom-up adoption meant zero sales cost.
Market Opportunity
🌍 MarketEnterprise communication market: $30B+. 3 billion knowledge workers worldwide. Email costs businesses $1.8T/year in productivity loss. Every company with 10+ employees is a potential customer. Adjacent: project management ($5B), file sharing ($3B).
The '$1.8T in email productivity loss' made the opportunity feel urgent and massive.
Business Model
💰 Business ModelFree: Unlimited users, 10K message archive. Standard: $6.67/user/month (unlimited archive + integrations). Plus: $12.50/user/month (compliance, SSO, 99.99% uptime). Current ARR: $12M. Growing 4x year-over-year. Net revenue retention: 170%. LTV/CAC: 11x.
170% net revenue retention meant existing customers were growing faster than any churn. Incredible metric.
Network Effects
🏰 MoatWithin a company: More people on Slack → more value for everyone. Between companies: Shared Channels let companies collaborate (vendor-client, agency-brand). App ecosystem: More integrations → more value → more users → more developers building integrations. Data moat: Years of searchable institutional knowledge can't be migrated.
Multi-layer network effects: internal, inter-company, and developer ecosystem.
Go-to-Market
🚀 Go-to-Market100% bottom-up adoption today. One person tries Slack → invites team → team invites department → department convinces company. Free tier is the sales team. Adding enterprise sales layer for $100K+ deals. Self-serve handles everything under $100K/year.
The bottom-up GTM was both the growth engine AND a cost advantage vs traditional enterprise sales.
Team
👥 TeamStewart Butterfield (CEO) — Co-founded Flickr (acquired by Yahoo). Cal Henderson (CTO) — Built Flickr's infrastructure, authored 'Building Scalable Web Sites'. Eric Costello (VP Engineering) — Flickr founding team. Team of 45: 30 engineers, battle-tested from Flickr. Slack was born from their game company's internal tool (Tiny Speck).
Flickr founding team reunited. They'd built one of the web's most beloved products before.
Pitch Analysis
Overall Score
Exceptional pitch — near-perfect execution
✅ Strengths
- Explosive traction (500K DAU in 8 months)
- 170% net revenue retention (best-in-class)
- Multi-layer network effects
- Zero-cost bottom-up acquisition
- Proven founding team (Flickr)
⚠️ Weaknesses
- Microsoft Teams looming (bundled with Office 365)
- Security/compliance gaps for regulated industries
- Message overload concerns at scale
📚 Key Lessons
Slack showed that the best enterprise products don't feel like enterprise software. By making work communication enjoyable and spreading bottom-up, they bypassed traditional enterprise sales cycles entirely. Their 170% net revenue retention proved that once teams adopt Slack, they only use it more.
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