Building a company for tomorrow’s Slack users
Tl;dr I’m starting a Slack consulting firm called slash-hyphen. We’re excited about helping the next wave of users get the most out of Slack.
This year, if the last two years of growth are any indication, more than five million people will start using Slack. Students of Rogers’ product adoption life cycle will point out that these new users won’t look like the two million early adopters that started using Slack last year. The new cohort will be much less tech-savvy and much more corporate than the last wave.
Buckle up. Deploying Slack at big non-technical companies won’t look like deploying Slack at a tiny tech startup.
Slack is better with bots. One of the things that sets Slack apart is their outstanding platform. Slack is infinitely more powerful when you’re able to customize it to fit your workflow. While I’m a big fan of off-the-shelf tools like Howdy.ai & Meekan, not every need can be addressed with today’s SaaS Slack bots.
Whether it’s innovative data powered social media at the New York Times or tools for managing deployments at Github, the teams that use Slack most effectively have built custom integrations (or bots) on top of Slack. The thing is, not every organization has the resources to build out bespoke integrations.
Meanwhile, Slack transforms organizations. Moving to an always-on, chat powered office is a paradigm shift. Just like it took years for the workplace to adopt to email and word-processors, the transition to Slack won’t be effortless. Successful deployments will require thoughtful roll-outs from executives that hold the hands of their employees and set clear expectations.
Today, I’m excited to announce my new company, slash-hyphen. Slash-hyphen is the world’s first Slack consulting firm. We help the next generation of teams get the most out of Slack through custom bot development, training and deployment consulting. We’re excited about working closely with the team at Slack HQ to build out a next-generation services company for a next-generation workplace tool.
If you’re interested in talking Slack, I’d love to hear from you: alex@slash-hyphen.com
We’ll also be sharing out thoughts about the Slack powered workplace in a new fortnightly newsletter. If you’re interested in hearing more, sign up here.
