After Spotify, Slack, a popular corporate communications software in the tech world, also plans to go public directly instead of the traditional IPO model.

Communications software Slack plans to go public without an underwriter in the middle of this year, allowing investors to buy shares directly on the open market, saving underwriters' fees, according to Bloomberg. In the past, it was usually smaller companies that went public directly, while Slack accepted investment from 36 investors, including Softbank Corp., accumulating more than $1.2 billion, and the market expects Slack to be valued at more than $7 billion.

Slack is not involved in the daily work of domestic onlookers, so it's not surprising that Slack is a stranger.

Slack, the fastest-growing SaaS startup in history, has been doing one thing for six years to make work more interesting. At first, Slack was an in-house tool for a gaming company, but it grew faster than expected and soon became a popular chat and productivity tool in the world, and 77% of Fortune 100 companies now use it.

SlackGrowth history

2013The birth of Slack

Slack was born in a game company called Tiny Speck, which wanted to develop a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game. In order to improve productivity, the founding team wanted to make a communication tool for themselves, but when the product was launched, it found that the tool had very strong business potential and inadvertently changed the way many people communicate at work. Slack is valued at $1 billion in just eight months without spending a penny on traditional advertising or marketing.

In May 2013, Slack released its first beta version as a "preview version" and got its first 8000 users through invitation mode. A week later, more than 15000 people asked to join, which is similar to the way Spotify gets up early.

2014Year-2016: the official version is released, and the number of users is growing rapidly

The official version of Slack was released in February 2014, and in August, Tiny Speck was officially renamed Slack Technologies. Just 10 weeks after the launch, round C, led by Social Capital, raised $42.8 million. At the time, Slack had more than 60, 000 daily active users and 15000 paying users.

At that time, Slack attracted some heavyweights in the media and technology industries such as BuzzFeed, Heroku, Medium, Lonely Planet and SoundCloud as users, and their adoption contributed to the rapid spread of Slack's reputation and further accelerated growth. Just like your product has been crazily recommended by 36kr, Tiger and Titanium Media, can it not grow fast? This momentum is synchronized with round C financing, and Slack develops by leaps and bounds.

Source: Slack App

As of October 2014, 30, 000 teams sent more than 200 million messages via Slack each month. Led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, another $120 million was raised in D-round 's financing in October. Equally surprising is the growth rate of Slack and the rate of conversion of free users to paying users. As of the time of Slack's D-round financing, Slack had more than 73000 paying users, growing by more than 386% in just six months and earning more than $1 million a month.

By 2015, Slack's user experience team had 18 full-time employees, six of whom provided round-the-clock support on Twitter.

2016To build a robot ecosystem

Shortly after the official version was released in 2014, Slack tried robots. The founder found that he needed a way to take notes for later review, so he began to write a program to send his notes as messages to private channels only. This program has become Slack bot, which is one of the most popular and commonly used functions of Slack.

Source: Slack App

In March 2016, Slack raised another $200m, totaling $540 million, valuing it at $2.8 billion, and launched voice features at the same time.

Slack is unstoppable, with a 3.5-fold increase in users between round E and round F financing. As of April 2016, Slack had 2.7 million active users, 800000 paying users and 430 employees every day. Slack is being used by a growing number of teams and companies, including global business intelligence publisher Dow Jones, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. State Department. At the end of 2016, Slack introduced another new feature, video chat.

Slack's growth momentum continued until 2017, and in September of that year, the G round of financing led by Softbank Corp. was completed, raising US $250 million. In the same month, Slack introduced support for French, German and Spanish language options, further expanding its potential market beyond the English-speaking region.

When Alan Allen Shim became CFO in February 2018, he was valued at more than $5 billion and had raised nearly $800m in venture capital. It has more than 6 million active users and more than 50000 paying teams every day, and its listing is also on the agenda.

SlackWhy is it so successful?

Slack is a geek-style company that pursues product quality. If we sum up the reasons behind the rapid growth, we can sum up the following reasons:

1. It's a good time.Since 2012, people pay more and more attention to mail overload and inconvenience of office assistance. Slack initially eliminates too much email in the user's perception, so you can see the report "The Co-Founder Of Flickr Wants To Replace Email At The Office" (Business Insider). In addition, the growth of the number of smartphones and the rapid development of mobile applications also contribute to the development of slack.

two。 It works.Slack adheres to the PQLs (product-qualified leads) principle, so as a B2B product, it goes in the opposite direction, not relying on the sales team, but on word-of-mouth. Having one potential customer means having an entire company as a potential customer. Their idea is not product pusher but product educator, to make the best products.

Source: Slack App

3. Function friendly

For example, convenient channel
You can create channel for different project, channel for hobby, and channel for different technical topics (such as docker). Unlike a QQ group, if a QQ group is created, then others do not know it exists unless invited to join. If Slack's channel is not private's, then anyone can see it and anyone can join it. In this way, you won't miss the topic you are interested in.

Ultra-low communication cost
If you find a small flaw or suggestion in one of your products, you can put it up in the appropriate channel, and if necessary, you can also @ PM or technology. If there is no such convenient way, then only e-mail, QQ, face-to-face these several ways, easy to produce "a fart big thing is still so serious" such a feeling.

Strong third-party integration
Yes, as you can think of, Slack probably thought of it and did it. You can integrate various common third-party clients such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Trello, Github, and so on, and even subscribe to RSS feeds for unified output to a certain Channel.

Source: Slack App

The success of Slack has the trend of the times, and it is more based on the fine output and creation of the founding team according to the needs of users, constantly accepting feedback and adjustment, and pursuing the ultimate and more friendly product experience.

Why can't it be popularized in China?

1. Domestic habits Wechat, QQ type of IM, simply "passing messages" is enough to meet the needs of teamwork, many deep functions of Slack, no matter how powerful, for those who do not need is superfluous. Slack is more friendly to the technical team, the "rigid demand" of the ordinary team is not strong in the use scenario, and the one with large demand has already become a deep user.

2.Slack heavy users have been used in the early stage of the product, mainly foreign enterprises and programmers, but outside the core scope is restricted by the strong promotion of local enterprises, such as nailing, WeCom, the spread is not obvious. After the relationship network has been formed in Tencent products, the learning cost of the overall transfer is not easily accepted without strong superior requirements and transfer requirements.

3. The localization of ecological aggregation. The most attractive thing about Slack is that a large number of third-party extensions bring a high degree of playability, and the open API makes it an information aggregator, which is equivalent to standing on the shoulders of giants. The relevant domestic ecology is not very perfect, and the giants are not willing to gather their core traffic on the third-party platform.

4. Some well-known technical obstacles... ..

Conclusion:Slack has hired Goldman Sachs Group to lead IPO, and the prospectus has not yet been released, and specific financial data are not yet available. Although it is not familiar with in China, we might as well pay attention to Slack as an excellent company by investors. Wait for the prospectus to be released, and then do a detailed Operating matrix& financial analysis.