Slack Isn’t Just For Enterprise Anymore

Slack is so much more than “a messaging app for teams”.

If you’re like me, and 2 million other people, you chat on Slack every single day. You send emojis, use bots, and maybe even send a funny gif or two.

But what is everyone using Slack to do? Everyone just uses Slack to talk to their coworkers and meet deadlines, right?

Wrong! And we’ve only just now begun to understand how wrong.

There are actually thousands of Slack chats that have nothing to with companies — they are Slack chats for communities. Groups of people coming together in chats, not to talk about their companies, but to talk about fasting, Portland, marketing, and even how to build video games.

Why hasn’t anyone realized this yet? Because these Slack chats are incredibly difficult to find. There is no Slack chat destination where you can find all the coolest chats and communities.

So we created Hamster Pad to solve this problem. Hamster Pad is a social network built on top of Slack — we keep track of all the Slacks you’re in, we help you discover Slack chats, and we show you what Slack chats your friends are in. And that’s only the beginning of what we’re going to do.

We launched Hamster Pad yesterday. We never could have guessed how popular it was going to be.

Here are some stats from Hamster Pad’s first day in existence:

• People from around the world have added almost 200 Slack chats to Hamster Pad.
• There are already over 70,000 members in the Slack chats on Hamster Pad.

We have only just begun to scratch the surface of how people are using Slack, and we can’t wait to see what new communities pop up on Hamster Pad that we didn’t even know existed.

We have already started building the next set of Hamster Pad features, all focused on making your experience in community Slack chats more fun. If you have a feature request, send me an email at matt@hamsterpad.com (or hit me if you’d just like to chat!).

If you run a Slack community, head on over to Hamster Pad and add it. If you don’t have a Slack community yet, well, let’s see how long that lasts ❤

Read more about Hamster Pad on Product Hunt, TechCrunch, and Lifehacker.