A Product Requirements Document by Amarjeet Ghatak | Product Manager | [email protected] | LinkedIn | May 2023

What is Slack?

Slack is the productivity platform that empowers everyone with no-code automation and AI, makes search and knowledge sharing seamless, and keeps teams connected and engaged. Around the world, Slack is the platform that companies trust and people love to use.

Key facts about Slack

• Year launched: 2009, Vancouver, Canada
• More than 12 million people use Slack every day.
• 65% of the companies on the Fortune 100 list have active subscriptions to Slack.
• Slack’s retention rate for paying customers is a whopping 98%.
• The number of Slack employees increased by 27% in 2021—it’s now 2,500.
• Slack generated $901 million from March 2020 to April 2021.
• Sales teams can get up to 296% ROI from Slack.
• “Power-users” on Slack send 1,000 messages per day.
• The average user sends 200 messages per week via Slack.
• 9 hours is the time period an average user of Slack is signed in for.
• The messaging app’s market cap equalled $26.51 billion in 2021.
• Slack offers integrations with 2,000+ other tools.
• Salesforce acquired Slack for a stately $27.7 billion in 2021.

Context

Slack’s value proposition was to be the modern email: to allow users to communicate with each other more quickly and concisely while allowing for better transparency and relevance. And Slack took off, becoming the fastest-growing enterprise application in history. But as Slack made workplace conversations easier, quicker and more transparent, there was a lot more information available, and instead of being overwhelmed by 50 emails employees were now overwhelmed with 100 Slack messages instead.

This created a very interesting paradox.