A Slack Story Podcast

Earning Their Trust: The Early Days of Slack Through Customer Conversations In this narrative, James Sherrett recounts his experiences and observations from the initial customer interactions during Slack’s early days of summer and fall of 2013. He describes his role as a silent scribe during customer calls led by Stewart, where he took notes and shared them with the team. Through interviews and de...

How the Text-Based Game Zork Inspired the Creation of Slack In this episode, James Sherrett discusses how the classic text-based adventure game Zork influenced the development of Slack. By turning work into a role-playing game and drawing parallels between Zork and Slack, the team behind Slack incorporated game-like elements to improve user engagement and onboarding. A key feature, Slackbot, was m...

Slack's Launch Story: From Zero to Promising in Silicon Valley In this episode, James Sheret narrates the story of Slack's initial release to the world on August 12, 2013. Facing enormous pressure, the Slack team embarked on a 'burn down' mission to prepare for launch, coordinating through daily calls and task lists. With fewer than 200 users of their free product and zero revenue, they aimed to s...

Crafting Slack's Go-to-Market Strategy: Overcoming the 'Suck Hump' Computer says: This episode, based on James Sherrett's recount of Slack's journey, illustrates the challenges and strategies employed to market Slack without traditional promotional tactics. The narrative follows the internal discussions and the creation of the essay 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' by Stewart Butterfield, emphasizing...

Before we took the first step to introduce our product, we faced a big problem. How to answer the very first question everyone had: what is Slack? And then, if we got someone interested and keen to learn more, how to answer the immediate next questions: Why should anyone care? Who was Slack for? What did Slack do for them? How did Slack work? Thanks for reading A Slack Story! Subscribe for free to...

The first Slack Vancouver office had no plumbing so we washed our dishes in the bathroom sink. Hot water rarely reached that bathroom so we just boiled water in the office kettle when things got too grungy to wipe clean. Because washing the dishes was such a chore, each of the 3 of us (Stewart, JR and me) had our own set of cutlery that we kept on our respective desks. When one of us got fed up wi...

Stewart was running late. Either that, or I was at the wrong address. I checked the email: 1140 Homer Street, a glass door between a bar that was closed and the entrance to the courtyard of a high-end restaurant. Inside the glass door, I could see carpeted stairs running up to a second floor. The neighbourhood was called Yaletown and consisted of a few square blocks of renovated warehouses and nar...

Day 1 : 5:30 am in Vancouver. Get up, get moving. Get the taxi to the airport to the flight to San Francisco. All of it a bit bleary. Land midmorning into glorious sunshine. Hello, California! Get the taxi to the freeway to the office to get started. Onwards to meet the team and hopefully show them and myself that I had some clue about how to succeed with Slack. (Slack? Really Slack?) Arrive with...

New to A Slack Story? Check out: Introduction: what if the startup myth comes true One day, around 2018, back when I travelled a lot for my work at Slack, I read an article in the New York Times about the first woman to translate Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey into English from the original Greek. The translator’s name was Emily Wilson and her story of the process of translation stuck with me. The...

New to A Slack Story? Check out: Introduction: what if the startup myth comes true . Thanks for reading A Slack Story! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. On a bright spring morning in 2009 I stood outside the Forestry Sciences Centre at Vancouver’s University of British Columbia waiting for Stewart Butterfield to arrive. Inside the building, the MC of a conference I had h...

June 20, 2019 – 8 am in New York where the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is preparing to open. 6 am in Yellowstone where I wake from a restless sleep. It's the day Slack shares start to trade as WORK on public markets, and I’m on a family vacation with spotty wifi. So I'm up before the alarm. I check in. The orders I carefully set the night before to turn my speculative Slack shares into real US...