The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s..
Against all odds, Slack has emerged as the darling of enterprise chat.
The competitive deck appears nearly stacked against the startup, and it seems that every other month a new product launches from a major tech company that’s billed in the tech press as the next “Slack Killer.”
What Slack does isn’t actually all that original as startup ideas go. It merely provides an environment for teams to share information inside a chat client. Yet it has been able to ride a wave of popularity attracting users, capital and a set of worthy challengers.
Even as Slack makes IPO-sounding noises , competitors continue to saddle-up. Perhaps, then it’s the perfect moment to take a look at the enterprise chat space and what all of this activity means for Slack as it battles the giants of the tech world.
Since Slack launched four years ago it has raised over a half a billion dollars , pushing its valuation to $3.8 billion. What’s more, the company has gone from zero to 5 million daily active users in the same time period.
Those results have generated remarkably quick revenue growth. The company surpassed the $100 million revenue run rate mark last year, despite what appeared to be extremely stable per-seat revenue. That matters as the company rolled out its enterprise product earlier this year. Slack claims it will work for up to 500,000 employees, which should put to rest the criticism that the earlier version of product couldn’t scale, and could help increase the yearly revenue generated by each user.
If Slack can keep attracting new seats and increase revenue per user, it may manage another few years of hyper growth. Yet, even as the new version becomes key to its future revenue mix, the company managed to grow while maintaining its pricing position.
