Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…And the number of integrations that you can do, you’re cap to 10 integrations, third party integrations on the free tier, other important stuff. The main thing is that they allow people and teams to come on for free and get real work value out of the full product without having to pay. That is just super, super critical and nobody was thinking about enterprise monetization in this way at the time. Honestly, I fully believe it is because of the background of Stewart and the team that they brought this approach to the market. Even Atlassian but certainly not Microsoft or anywhere else was going to think about freemium tier. This is how we structure a productivity application. This is another good thing we’ve seen across a lot of episodes. For a lot of this disruptive innovation, you need to smash together the learnings and best practices from one corner of the world into a different corner of the world that is not used to thinking about things that way and to be able to say, “What would it look like if a team of idealistic game designers built productivity? ” Of course it’s going to look different than a shop like Atlassian, that’s only ever built enterprise collaboration software. Of course, yes in the business model which I think you’re right. I hadn’t thought about it before but in this classic question of why did Slack win when HipChat was already a thing. There’s UI reasons why Slack appealed to non-engineering teams. Atlassian always said, “Anyone can use HipChat.” That was more lip service than it was actual product work, but Slack was truly, from day one, designed to be something that anybody in the organization could use and not just engineering teams. I think it’s also for other teams within organizations that weren’t used to this category of software using anything like this. The way they structured the freemium model made it accessible for those organizations to try to use it. Even if Slack were designed to the pixel the same way but you had to pay for more than five people to use it, there’s no way that the New York Times newsroom would’ve tried that. They were really thoughtful about this. In the story from the beginning, they were creating a category. When you’re creating a category, you need to take this approach.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.