The user psychology of the swipe

Slack, despite being 15 years old this year, continues to grow at an impressive rate.

After being acquired by Salesforce in a $27.7 billion ‘megadeal’ in 2021, paid customers were up 39% year on year in 2022. Not to mention, power payers were up 45% (customers paying more than $1 million per year).

What’s more, Slack has a net dollar retention rate of 122%…

This means that if someone pays $100 in year one, they will pay $122 the next year. Be it through adding more users, upgrading plans, other upsells.

This growth is largely down to the way the business is built, using strong network effects and a product-led growth pricing model:

Slack allows users in for free, gets them to invite their team, then ultimately motivates them to pay when people they can’t see old messages (realising they should have documented better in the first place).

Hence their explosive and sustainable growth over the years.

But it’s not all good. Personally, I’ve had a bumpy road with Slack over the past four years.

Slack started at a saviour for work, so much cleaner than any email UI I’d used before.

But it has now become the bane of my life.

I have 101 Slack channels across 8 workspaces, and that’s not including DMs. Every day there’s SO many red dots for the tidal wave of unread messages. It’s distracting. It’s stressful.

Ironically their slogan is: the productivity platform.

Far from it. It feels like The Distract Platform sometimes.

Helping people to focus whilst also allowing them to stay on top of what’s going on is the biggest challenge for Slack. And it’s a really hard challenge to solve.