Slack as a playground for new products
As part of its million of daily users, we love Slack. The polished interface and the integrations have made it an essential part of our workflow. The integrations allow you to centralise information from the tools you use in a Slack channel, so that you don’t have to be switching between apps or constantly check your email — once you get used to that, Slack is really hard to replace.
Slack is also allowing its users to build their own integrations, which makes it even more useful and creates a playground for new products. That benefits both Slack and the developers who build them, let’s look into why that is.
Unexpected integrations
The number of integrations built by the Slack community is increasing incredibly fast, given Slack launched less than two years ago. This is happening thanks to Slack’s efforts to provide a flexible API and because its most engaged users are developers or related to technology in some way. They have the skills to hack away and come up with a fix for their own problem in a couple of days, and who knows? Maybe it will solve someone else’s problem too!
These are a few examples of products built around Slack. If you want to discover more, have a look at Slackbotlist, by Angela Cois.
Roomino
Roomino is a travel booking platform for Slack teams, enabling travelers to search for hotels within Slack and share their travel activities with their team. This is a great example of what’s possible within Slack, allowing you do more without leaving the tool you’re using at that moment.
Tatsu
Tatsu conducts standup meetings on Slack, helping remote-working teams have these meetings asynchronously. Tatsu will just operate in a dedicated channel and ask every team member about their past and present workload and any issues standing in their way. Once Tatsu is done, it sends you the meeting log by email.
AskNestor
AskNestor is an assistant for your Slack team. It can recommend restaurants, book Uber rides, tell you how much money your company is making on Stripe or book events on your calendar. It seems AskNestor will also include other services to enable teams to track their performance and productivity.
Slackline
Slackline allows you to create shared channels across Slack teams, so you can use Slack to easily communicate with clients, partners or investors. It started as a side project built by Ernesto Jimenez and me and it’s been growing since we launched back in December. Slackline got us thinking and now we are working on making cross-company collaboration as seamless as working inside the same company.
Mutual help
Obviously, this is a great opportunity for developers who use Slack and want it to stay. Slack is providing them with new problems, and a chance to solve them by building.
How is this helping Slack? This playground keeps users excited about the product and gets them to spend even more time on Slack. This is helping Slack’s growth, and it’s been important from the beginning, since the teams who build the integrations help spread the word.
This is a symbiotic relationship. On one hand, users can build and explore thanks to the new possibilities brought by Slack. On the other, thanks to users who value good products and want to improve what’s around them, Slack is expanding its reach to other uses cases and increasing its customer retention.
What comes next?
How will this playground evolve? How much will it grow? The most predictable outcome would be for the number of products around Slack to increase as new needs arise, and for the existing products to evolve too. Hopefully, Slack will release more powerful and flexible APIs that will allow these products to offer better integration with Slack and thus a better user experience.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this. If you’re developing a product around Slack, even better! Join our Slackline community channel for the #slack-playground.
