Let’s Slack it. Together.
If you haven’t really noticed, the past couple of years have been big for cloud/internet based productivity tools. It’s a $58 billion market today. The reasons could be growth of tech entrepreneurship and most organizations moving towards a BYOD culture. The three major areas where most of these productivity tools have impacted is communication, co-ordination and collaboration.
Technology has changed the way we work. Today, we have tools that help you be more productive individually or as a team.
The Story of Slack
This is a huge market. There are plenty of those useful productivity tools one can use to work better. But Slack, out of all these is a clear winner. The company initially known as Tiny Speck was working on flash based online games with developers around the country. The team slowly became more interested in IRC — the 80’s era communication tool they used to reduce email noise. Slack was started as a side project to have a better communication tool than the ones they were using. Development began in 2012 and they had a private beta by August 2013. After launching in February 2014, with 15000 daily active users, Slack grew to about 1.7m daily active users by the end of 2015 making it one of the fastest startup to reach a $2 billion valuation. Slack has one of the highest per user valuation of $2545 among tech companies.
It’s not just the exponential growth of Slack that makes it a winner. The users love slack! The slack wall of love on twitter is flooded with tweets from happy users around the world. Another thing about Slack is that it is used by communities to provide wider interactions across geographies and timezones even though it’s primary usage is workforce productivity. According to The Next Web, “You can find a Slack team for talking about design, startups, music, whiskey and basically anything else imaginable..”. Slack in a way is quietly, unintentionally killing all other chat platforms based on IRC. All this is making Slack something more than a workplace communication tool to something like a platform where one can get updates of things they follow and interact with like minded users around the world. It’s a platform for collaboration, sharing ideas, interactions and much more!
That’s not it. Towards the end of 2015, Slack launched ‘The Slack Platform’ with a new API, the Slack App Directory(like an app store) and an $80m fund. With this, Slack allowed developers to build apps with a set of integrations, bots etc. With bots or software robots, Slack brought the worlds of productivity and Artificial Intelligence together. The slackbot has always been there and a few others like Howdy, Nikabot and Meekan were the first few to have been build on the original Slack API. Slack worked closely with Howdy(startup focused on building chat based Slack apps) to come up with something called a botkit — an open source framework that enables developers to build basic integrations as well as their own bots on the Slack platform. With this, Slack has created an ecosystem where it’s a platform supporting apps with an app store making way for start ups to come up with new, innovative solutions for productivity using AI and machine learning technologies in the form of Slack apps and bots. And like Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder and CEO said “the more apps we get people to install, the more likely they are to keep using Slack.”, Slack is just growing big everyday.
Engazify on Slack
We at Engazify have been working to solve the problem of lack of appreciation and recognitions in teams. Today, teams have a hundred different things to focus on — tech development, customers, user base, investors, etc. Sometimes, amongst all this, teams tend to loose focus on themselves. A happy, motivated team is the most critical factor for success. On slack, we noticed that there are teams working from the same work space, there are teams that collaborate remotely etc. Recognition and appreciation for such teams is vital for their productivity. The best place for this to happen is Slack, where these teams meet to work together everyday. It’s simple. We like Slack and believe it can help teams work better. We want to make it even better.
Engazify is on a mission to help build happier and motivated teams!
Engazify takes a lot of inspiration from Slack’s growth story and want to be a part of it. With our mission to empower teams with the right recognition and appreciation strategies, we’re taking our platform to the next level with Slack. We’re building an Artificial Intelligence enabled ‘Engazify bot’ to help recognize and appreciate efforts by your teammates. It’s like a friend, a teammate whose job is to capture all team wins and keep your team motivated and happy all the way.
Excited? Sign up here.
We’re excited to have you with us on this journey of building next generation products. Your inputs are essential for us to build something better you. It would be great if you could answer a few questions to help us understand you better.
