So, what is Slack?
Creating 5 options to answer the question: What is Slack? Learning about each option. The MAYA principle. Finding our tone and market.
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?
The brainstorming we had done in SF at the f2f on Day 1 felt like good foundational work to me. Some ideas had started to emerge. We started to understand our problem better. But I felt like we still didn’t have a really solid solution for how to position Slack to someone starting with a fresh perspective. How to start from zero?
And how could we know if our answers to the question of What is Slack? actually worked?
We had a lot riding on whether we could accurately convey the positioning and value proposition. The product could be as amazing as possible but if we couldn’t get people to try it we would have another failure.
The stakes were high. Our survival depended on getting our positioning right.
Testing variants
To test our ideas and get some real evidence of whether they worked, we designed a pretty simple scenario. We’d try different options for answering What is Slack? and let people tell us with their actions and feedback if any of our options worked for them.
From all the ideas Stewart and I discussed we whittled our options down to 5 different concepts. Then we built 5 different landing pages focused on those concepts. Let’s call each of the 5 options a variant.
Each variant of the landing page had its own headline and positioning copy. Each was distinct enough that we felt by testing them we’d have some insight into what was going to work.
We’d measure the number of visitors and their conversion to signing up. Then we’d ask some starting questions to gather more information. That was the shape of our plan, very much drawn from principles of lean startup methodology.
To get rolling, we offered a simple call to action incentive — get $100 credit for signing up. Then to get some traffic to our variants we used Google AdWords (now Google Ads). Those ads you see on Google in response to your search? Those are AdWords in action. We created some small traffic acquisition campaigns to target broad but topical keywords.
We started to send traffic to the landing page variants, in a random order, trying to keep the traffic quality uniform so we didn’t bias any specific variant. We measured each stage of the process — clicks, visits, repeat visits, etc.
We got more confident in our process as it ran. We ramped up our traffic acquisition and found our first significant insight — a ceiling to topical keywords. Interesting! A limit existed to how many people we could invite into our process because a limit existed on how many people were doing searches on our topics. That turned out to be a good thing to know.
As the traffic started to flow, our informed guesses started to have some tangential proof against them. We started to see more patterns emerge.
That’s all pretty abstract, so I thought it would be handy to show the actual 5 variants of the landing pages. They’re below in pretty much their original state.
Landing Page 1: Team communication
Landing Page 2: Kill email
Landing Page 3: Better decisions
Landing Page 4: Infinite brain
Landing Page 5: Less busy
At the bottom of each variant of the web page was the same call to action.
When people completed the email address and company name form above by clicking the Join Now button, we presented a Thank You page. On the Thank You we added a short survey. We figured, these were interested folks who could tell us a lot that we wanted to know. Why not?
The survey was optional and provided a small extra incentive ($100 more credits) that only showed up after it was finished. We didn’t want to create pecking pigeons in a Skinner box trying to max out their credits.
Then a second Thank You page showed up with the extra $100 credit. Surprise!
This let us make a fun joke and set the tone for Slack. We were friendly. We were fun. We were going to be launching with a paid product sometime in the future. But getting in wasn’t a sure thing! So there was a bit of the “line outside the nightclub” effect we were trying to create.
So what did we learn?
If you just want to skip ahead to the answer, go for it. I’m not here to give you mandatory homework. But we could play a little game.
Here is it. If you want to try for a richer experience and to learn a bit more from Slack’s story, scroll back up. Spend a few minutes and make a few notes on your own about what you think worked from the 5 landing page variants above. What was the top performer? The bottom performer? How come?
Bonus marks for really considering the copy in the survey and landing page. Each bit of the work above got lots of scrutiny and consideration and I believe offers some good lessons. The results below will keep.
In the meantime, here are some options we considered for Slack’s logo at the time. These are to keep you busy or just to encourage you to think about the landing page variants and how they might or might not have worked:
Okay, enough stalling.
Results of our tests
First up, people responded pretty well to each of the 5 landing page variants. There were no duds that were much, much worse than the rest and that we could disqualify immediately. Hmm.
So maybe our test wasn’t a solid test of differentiation? Or maybe each of our variants had some merit and attractiveness for people? Hmm again.
Questions like these are pretty hard to answer even when you have lots of time and money and data. We had limited amounts of each of those resources. We wanted to check our work, get some proof and refine our approach. We couldn’t do deep or long research. This would have to do. We decided not to let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
So, the headline results from our landing page variants tests:
Lowest performing was Landing Page 4: Your searchable, infinite brain. I liked the variant and the promise and I could also see why it didn’t work – too abstract to quickly understand and a step or two removed from the core pain we were trying to address. And what was an infinite brain anyway? Weird!
Top performing, by a thin margin, was also the most inflammatory variant, Landing Page 2: Kill 75% of your email in 3 days. It was specific and hit a nerve. It had a tangible promise. It had an enemy (email) that everyone knew and no one loved. It worked to get people to sign up.
But if we moved ahead with that Kill Email positioning, where could we actually go with that promise and target?
Sure it was great to make an enemy of email and to share that enemy with everyone who had ever used a computer connected to the web. It was great to name our enemy and be willing and ready to take it on. But did we just want to stand as a negative against something? We did not.
It also begged the question that if our product was successful and reduced someone’s email by 75%, then what? What state of nirvana had we provided? We wanted to stand for something, not just against something. We wanted to run towards a promise in the future, not away from a pain in the past.
Plus, our second place variant scored very similarly and we liked it too — Landing Page 5: Be less busy. The origin of this variant was pretty much verbatim from Stewart, with a few tweaks for brevity and clarity.
And spoiler: it ended up being the copy we used on the single-page website we launched for our preview release a few weeks later, on August 12, 2013.
What we actually learned
To dig a bit deeper, with the context of our results, what did we actually learn? We got out of the building. So what?
Here are 3 of the things that informed our approach to launching Slack, beyond the simple results we measured on the landing page variants.
Seeking an elusive answer – It proved very hard to satisfactorily answer the question: What is Slack? It was hard at the very outset and it proved consistently hard to answer throughout the company’s history. It’s messaging. It’s a replacement for email. It’s a way of working together. It’s all your tools in one place. It’s a collaboration hub. At the time it was each of those things, and yet it was more than any of them alone.
Going for a feeling – By elevating the positioning from an answer to the questions of What is Slack? to promising a feeling Slack would deliver (Be less busy) we felt like we could appeal to a bigger, unaddressed need in people. Did they want feature X, Y and Z or did they want a feeling of calm control in their work? Intuitively we knew that feelings drove the most value for people. As a side benefit, we could work our way around the What is Slack? question to try to answer a more aspirational question: how does Slack make me feel?
Finding a sweet spot – We definitely worked within the MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable. Our initial target audience were going to be tech nerds and developers like us. We wanted to provide them with a solid dose of a familiar experience they could quickly get started using, mixed with new, advanced features they wanted. “A luxury, once enjoyed, becomes a necessity,” famously noted C Northcote Parkinson, and we wanted Slack to be a necessity.
And beyond those 3 things we learned about competition. Our audience knew messaging from consumer chat applications like MSN Messenger, AOL IM and Skype and often used them for work amongst their teams. A few work-oriented messaging apps had started to show up: HipChat and FlowDock and Campfire. Each was fine and they were well adopted by tech nerds, but they seemed somewhat interchangeable.
They also positioned themselves almost exclusively through feature lists. Look at all this stuff this product can do! Look at all these specs and feature names! File sharing, mobile apps, etc., etc. We believed very clearly that while we needed features, 90% of the user experience was simple messaging, and making that really amazing made the biggest difference.
In addition, we learned about who was (and was not) seeking us. In running the AdWords campaign to find traffic for our variants test, we started to get some tangible experience marketing Slack before we actually had to market Slack. And Google provided incredibly valuable insight into aggregated market intent.
It showed us that search volume for keywords around product categories like group chat, business chat and company messaging was pretty much zero. No one was looking for the natural name for our product category. File sharing and file security had some droplets of interest but didn’t fit our product.
How about the function Slack might serve? There was search volume around role-specific areas like project management, software development and internal communications, but these were oceans of intent that included role-specific software, consultants for hire, service providers, educators and more. Perhaps our people bobbed about there, but it was too broad for Slack to swim in.
Where we thought we fit in, somewhere between the rivers of software collaboration and team communication, also felt too broad. We weren’t agile software providers, though you could certainly use Slack for an agile software methodology.
At the time of our launch, a well-trod tactic for startups was to harness existing demand and intent through search engine marketing. Unfortunately, this tactic was not going to work for us. Our market was too broad to accurately target, or too narrow to reach any scale.
It could have spelled doom that no one was searching for Slack (or Slack-like products). That certainly struck me at the time. But we chose to think the opposite. No one was searching for Slack (or Slack-like products) because they didn’t yet know a better option existed. We had to show them something better could be possible.
We knew from the existing customers already using Slack that they believed something better could be possible. They had actually tried our rough product, after all. Hope existed. And that insight from actual users made me a believer that we could find a market too, despite the evidence that seemed to spell doom. Our customers’ feedback confirmed our faith that how software teams worked together wasn’t a non-existent product category, it was instead an undiscovered product category.
And yes, I do mean specifically, “how software teams worked together” because that was the scope of our ambition at the time.
Stewart made a guesstimate of all the software teams on earth and sized the market as $100-million. Pretty big, right? If we could capture all those teams as customers, that could create a sizeable business for us. We hoped. We knew so little!
So what next? Now we knew our challenge. We knew our positioning. To stand out we had to be different. Perhaps an unorthodox tactic to get the word out? Seems about right.
Up next: How horseback riding and software development met, and why we didn’t sell saddles at Slack.