This article originally appeared on The IMPACT Blog.

“Did you Google it?” — “You should tweet that.” — “I’ve gotta instagram this!”

You know you’ve made it when your brand name and terms are no longer just jargon, but everyday actions like these. For IMPACT (and over 500,000 other users) “slack it” has become one such action and it should come as no surprise.

Since its initial release in 2013, Slack, an office communication software, has skyrocketed to fame, revolutionizing team collaboration and earning a $2.8 billion valuation in an unprecedented amount of time.

In addition to this, in April 2015, co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, confirmed that the SaaS company had also raised $160 million from investors purely for its rainy day fund, but how did they do it?

How do they continue to win over users and investors alike? How are they becoming one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies of all time?

Let’s take a look at four of the key factors that have helped catapult Slack to where it is today.

Better Testing, Not Beta

Before releasing the first iteration of their product to the general public, the Slack team shared it with their friends at other organizations for testing.

Seeing how the product performed in the wild, with different teams of different sizes, gave Slack better insight into what the product needed before launching it to the general public (or in this case, even before going into beta.)

In August 2013, the company announced their version of a beta test, which they called a “preview release.” With the help of press blitz, they invited and signed up 15,000 users for this preview.

“From August 2013 to February 2014, we went through those initial 15,000 sign-ups….and incrementally improved the new-user experience until we felt like we had gotten all the low-hanging fruit,” explains founder Stewart Butterfield.

Unlike many tech companies that release their product to the public then iterate, Slack took the time to do as much testing and gather as much feedback as possible before their SaaS reached the hands of the consumer.

They aimed for not only conversion rate optimization, but overall customer satisfaction.

Actively Listening

Expanding upon their “delight” efforts, Slack won over its audience by truly listening to what their users had to say and opening several channels to reach them.

Users could not only reply to every email the Slack team sent, they could also easily and quickly reach the company through Twitter as well as the in-app help feature and feedback form.

As Butterfield shares, “We will take user feedback any way we can get it.”

“In the app, we include a command that people can use to send us feedback [and] we have a help button that people can use to submit support tickets….If you put that all together, we probably get 8,000 Zendesk help tickets and 10,000 tweets per month, and we respond to all of them.”

Not only does the team respond to every one of these comments, they actively track them.

All feedback is tagged, coded, and categorized. They monitor feature requests and the frequency of certain pain points among other things, and then use this data to iterate and improve the application.

Overall, Slack made a conscious effort to humanize their brand and show their users that they are dedicated to better serving them, both personally and through their product.

Continue reading here…