"The number grew from 10K on day 1 to 20k in couple of weeks - hinting that something big could cook up with this tool Slack (which was an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge during the days of game development)"

"Signal 1 → User experience is the sales guy"

"Signal 2 → Free to use/pay to enhance"

"Signal 3 → Value goes up with time"

"As more users join company slack account and team’s channels, the more the value of slack platform goes up."

"Also, the fact that Slack allows you to access past history of conversations/decisions along with integrations with 3rd party tools, the value of keeping historic records goes up with time as well."

"Signal 4→ Advocacy spread across the network"

"In January of 2017, Slack announced Enterprise Grid to go after the big fishes - the enterprise companies."

"With this launch, Slack went on the offence with the likes of Microsoft and announced that it would make it easier for big business customers to move to its collaboration app."

"But if you are wondering, why are we dragging Microsoft into this? It is because Microsoft earlier in the same week had announced some statistics about Microsoft teams, claiming over 30,000 companies have tried out Microsoft Teams in its beta form."

"With Enterprise Grid, Slack started allowing different functions in a company to have its own version of Slack but still allowed them to have ‘shared channels’ where teams from different functions could still work together."

"Building a platform and focusing on the scalability of it allowed Slack to tackle the enterprise - and there are great lessons from Slack’s platform play."

"But when you think of enterprise, you don’t think of easy-to-use tools ... it’s enterprise software but it has consumer sensibility, it’s fun."

"Slack realized that users needed to automate routine tasks (such as convert a chat into a reminder or a to-do list in their favorite to-do app) but they might not be coders or technical savvy enough. Hence, all slack workflows ended up being no-codes, powered by templates."

"A good success criteria for a platform is how the users of the platform never have to worry about how the platform was coded/built but can concentrate on how to apply the platform capabilities to build something meaningful."

"Slack built a community for all developers/builders/designers to come together and discuss the present and the future of the Slack platform."

"The community can also act as a safety net against decisions that only deal with short-term platform changes that may not make sense in mid to long term."

"3. Allow re-usability of components and APIs"

"A big pain point for platform product teams is the lack of documentation of each service/API - this leads to lack of knowledge transfer for new joiners and leads to knowledge being available in brains of very few selected individuals … which creates a business risk."

"Slack solved this by ensuring that not only its teams document, but also make the APIs available to wider community so that other developers can utilize the APIs to solve more complex problems for their organizations."

"Hence, 3rd party partnerships are important but at the same time the robustness of integration is key. Ensure that platform grows with ecosystem partnerships but without creating performance issues."

"Slack learnt its performance bottlenecks and growth needs while dealing with smaller clients but eventually developed a robust platform that now can address 80% of fortune top 100 companies."