Online enterprise communication platform
Noticed their internal tool showing pull: Realized employees loved using this one chat feature they built, and went all in.
Massively multiplayer online game called Glitch
Realized it wasn't ever going to become a big business
https://techcrunch.com/2011/09/27/tiny-specks-glitch-goes-live-for-everyone-at-10am-pst-today/ https://buildingslack.com/day-1/
“We came to the conclusion that Glitch was never going to be the kind of business that would have justified the $17.2 million in venture capital investment [that we raised]. It might have been a neat project for a half-dozen people if we had spent a million dollars to get there, but by the end of 2012, there were 45 people working on it, we had spent many millions of dollars, and it just wasn’t ever going to scale. So we decided to shut it down without knowing what we were going to do next. The company still had millions of dollars left in the bank, and one of the possibilities was to return that money to the shareholders and call it a day, maybe start something else up. But because we had that money, we had the flexibility to shut it down in what we felt like was a humane way. We spent a long time working on reference letters for the employees who built the website, essentially to make sure that they all got jobs. We also gave users the choice to get a refund for everything they had spent, to let us keep the money, or donate it to charity. We kind of had our hands full for a little while in shutting the game down, and while we did that, we were thinking about what we might want to do next. There were all kinds of ideas. It took us a little while to settle on the idea that would become Slack. That was really born out of the style of communication that developed while we were working on the game. We used an older technology called IRC, and because IRC is very limited, over the years we added the little features here and there that we wanted. For example, in IRC, if you’re not online at the same time as me, I can’t send you a message. I have to wait until you are also connected. So one of the first things we did was build a way of archiving messages so that you could catch up when you came back online, and in those archives we wanted to be able to search them, so we added search, and so on. There was no good iPhone client, so we made an HTML5 front end for our archive viewer. This interesting dynamic happened. By the time we shut down the game, again there were 45 people at the company, we had been in operation for three and a half years, and we had a companywide email list. After more than three years, it only had 50 messages on it, so about one every three weeks. That wasn’t a deliberate decision, that wasn’t ideologically driven. But it just happened that everyone paid attention to IRC, and the more people paid attention to it, the more information we routed to it; and the more information we routed to it, the more people paid attention to it. So eventually, everything from database alerts to daily sales figures were being pumped into IRC. Every time someone uploaded a file to the file server, that would be posted into IRC. While we weren’t successful in making the game, we were very efficient in being unsuccessful to make the game.” —Stewart Butterfield, founder and former CEO, via Business Insider
9 months
Their internal analyics tech