Slack turns one year old today. In its short but fascinating history, the startup has managed the remarkable feat of actually getting people excited about enterprise communication software. The company has more than 500,000 daily active users, and it’s adding tens of thousands more every each week.
“That’s our primary metric,” founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield tells Quartz. “If you’re not using Slack every single day, you’re not really using it.”
The chart above shows the peak number of daily active users every week in the last year. Minus the big drop off around the holidays, the company has been quickly gaining steam since August—around the time Wired published a big profile. Slack relies primarily on word-of-mouth marketing, helping keep costs low.
Impressive stats, and I really like the metric that they have chosen to represent their growth. Not ‘registered users’ or ‘organisation domains represented’ but real users that are actually using the platform as it is intended to be used. ((And given Slack is not traditional enterprise software, they’re not indicating licences bundled with renewals for other products either))
I access Slack from my Mac and multiple mobile devices every single day, using it for the team that runs Social Connections, plus multiple other communities. I have to say, no other tool I’ve used in the past year has had such a dramatic impact on my own personal productivity. As I mentioned in my IBMConnectED post, I’m surprised that IBM hasn’t tried to counter the rise of Slack in any direct way.
However, other enterprise vendors have taken this on, and whilst I can see Slack continuing its impressive rise, it will be interesting to see how that chart continues over the next 6-12 months.
