Slack.
How a startup’s second effort is often its best effort.
Slack is the real-time team messaging app that officially opened its doors to the world yesterday. It’s the brainchild of Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and his talented Tiny Speck team. And it’s proof-positive that often a startup is defined by its second (or third or fourth) product, not its first.
Before Instagram, there was Burbn. Before Slack, there was Glitch, a massively multiplayer game that was laden with beautifully designed graphics and rich interaction. It was wildly successful with a select group of people, but never enough to get the traction needed to sustain an investment-funded startup.
So Tiny Speck closed the doors on Glitch and released its entire library of art assets to the public.
I was privy to all this through Myles Grant, one of Tiny Speck’s lead engineers. Myles has been doing side work on Authentic Jobs nearly since its inception. If you’ve used any part of the site, you’ve encountered his work.
I watched as Myles left Flickr and subsequently joined Stewart and other former Flickr cohorts at Tiny Speck. For a while I had no idea what they were up to until Myles broke the news to me about Glitch long before it was public. From time to time Myles would keep our team briefed on the progress his team was making, doing double duty as Tiny Speck engineer by day and Authentic Jobs engineer by night.
And then I watched as Myles broke the news about Glitch’s impending closure, and how he and the rest of Stewart’s team wondered what was next for everyone. Layoffs and restructuring were inevitable. Closing the startup, on the other hand, was not.
After an extended hiatus and numerous planning retreats, I would eventually learn from Myles about their next effort. “You mean like Campfire?” was my first response.
“Sorta, but totally diff,” was his response. (Not really, but basically.)
“Remote” Software
There’s an interesting misperception in the tech world regarding differences between remote teams and in-office teams. The two are viewed as completely disparate. The methods for managing a remote team are unquestionably different from managing an in-office team, some say.
I disagree. Unless your desk is situated next to the person with whom you’re collaborating, chances are your in-house team functions a lot like my remote team.
See, we use Basecamp extensively to manage our products. If you’re in-house, I bet you do, too. We use Skype for video chats. I bet you do, too. (Or Google Hangouts or similar.) We use a ridiculous amount of email. Regrettably, you do too.
The missing link has been real-time communication. We used Skype’s text chat for a while. We tried Campfire a few times, but it never stuck. Both are limited in what they can do. This is where Slack comes in.
Slack, first and foremost, offers real-time team chat. Secondly, it’s a centralized hub that integrates with a growing list of services. This decreases the number of places we have to check on a regular basis, such as GitHub commit logs and replies to our company Twitter account. (Thankfully, it also decreases the amount of notification email for all of those things.)
This article might sound like a paid advertisement for Slack. It is not. But frankly, I don’t care. I think it’s an outstanding product that fills a very real void for our small, entirely remote company. And of course, I’m partial to the fact that Myles is responsible for some of its fantasticness. (Chances are, it’ll be outstanding for your big or small in-house team, too. Rdio, Foursquare, and Adobe use it, to name a few.)
But the aspect I appreciate most about Slack is the team behind it. After their initial effort failed to gain traction, Tiny Speck picked up the pieces, pivoted in an entirely new direction, and is now well on its way to a successful product offering.
That’s incredibly inspiring.
