Noah Weiss: prediction

Transcript context

…Maybe one last question along these lines, people look at Slack as maybe the first major product-led growth success story and they always look at Slack of like, "Oh, we just want to grow Slack. Let's see what they did." For people that are studying Slack's journey and success, what do you think Slack did right early on that maybe people don't recognize or don't appreciate enough that founders today should be thinking about more so versus just like let's just make a freemium product. Right. I mean, I think, maybe the most telling thing is when Slack started, certainly when I joined still, I don't think a word or acronym product-led growth existed. It wasn't like we were really good at taking this playbook and applying it. I think it was more that whole term of art became a thing as maybe many other freemium SaaS products took off. Not to be repetitive. But I think the core of it really was building a product that customers loved enough that they would put their own social capital on the line to get their coworkers on board 5 to 50 people." At the time the biggest company I imagined using Slack was 50 people because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that, maybe it'll become pandemonium. Obviously, that was the initial, I think real, real strong product market fit. But the other bit which then was what powered the enterprise business was teams of 5 to 50 people who worked at larger companies. I think what wound up happening was that you would have teams that was independently at a company like IBM or Disney or Capital One or whoever it might be, or Comcast discovering Slack using it for themselves because they thought it would just make their working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive, and maybe not even know that anyone else at the company was using Slack. Then by the time we then scaled our enterprise sales team, I mean, truly the exercise initially was just take customer domain, sort by number of active users and call them in the order of that which is, "Hey, by the way, you have a couple thousand people actually using Slack at your company. Do you want to think about a broader deployment or controls or analytics?" I think that was it. That's consumer great experience that customers love enough to get their coworkers on and pay for themselves. Then at enterprise companies like having a bunch of different flowers sprouting so that eventually you could roll up an enterprise-wide deal and then was all the tactics. But I think that that was where it started. The way you described it at the beginning of make a product that people want to share with their colleagues reminds me of a ... I was just listening to an interview with Seth Godin who's this marketing legend. I think he has a new book. He is on every podcast. He had this really great quote that the products that win are ones that you want to tell your friends about. It's a really simple concept. Basically, it's like it's word of mouth is how you have to win. But I think that's so true and every successful company I talk to ends up being like, "We just want to build something people want to share with their friends," even if it's growing in some other way, SEO paid feels like that's always at the root of it is you just want to tell your friends about it because you love it. Slack I think is a great example of that.…

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