My gut feeling, without doing much proper analysis, is that further growth will come not so much from adding more paying users as selling more services to the existing, extremely locked in, userbase.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.
I'm biased because I like Slack, although I haven't tried Discord so I'm only comparing it with the usual competitors that are terrible, but it does feel very sticky to me. It's replaced email for my JIRA and Google Drive notifications, it's replaced Google Hangouts for most of my team chat and 1:1 video calls. And I'm not even using all the plugins many of my colleagues are using yet.
They really seem to have gotten a lot of Google Wave ideas to catch on and have even kept some IRC bits. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Congrats to the team on this massive valuation. Makes a lot more sense to me than Snapchat at $19B...
Another area it's very sticky is 'SlackOps' - i.e. putting your devops commands and notifications into Slack.
Having done this at my previous startup it's very, very nice (in my opinion), but also, enough setup work that even supposing you were tempted to change to another platform you'd be reluctant to.
I wish you luck! This is a pretty smart wave to ride, I think. Having gone the DIY route setting up my own bots backed by lambdas etc, which was a fair amount of work, I will definitely say there's an obvious market opportunity here for an easy 'set up in a few clicks' solution that hooks into a bunch of the obvious services (CI, cloud, kubectl, etc).
I’m starting to see Slack show up in all sorts of places far beyond software development teams. Accounting firms, non profits, and even a home inspector I worked with... I can’t imagine they’re even close full market penetration.
No me neither, totally agree. Both are channels for growth. I just mean I see the expanding existing users channel dwarfing the acquiring new customers channel in terms of speed of growth. At this point I see it being significantly easier for them to 2x an average user's subscription through more services than 2x their entire userbase.
I use Slack frequently in about 20 different open source, interest-based, educational and hobbyist communities. I also use it frequently as part of small teams set up for various projects.
This is why being able to aggregate multiple channels into a single window would be a huge win. Right now you have to flip between multiple "tabs" to find anything.
It's a platform - I can see a world where almost everything in the workplace is embedded into Slack or integrated with it. They can take their cut of all of that.