No, It has nothing to do with Slack being the fastest growing startup. No, it has nothing to do with the fact that Slack went from product launch to IPO in just five years.
As a product CEO, I have nothing but good things to say about Slack. Where do I start? Let's begin with its business model.
Zero Regulatory Risk
Slack has zero regulatory risks.
How many "disruptive" startups can you say have zero regulatory risk?
Airbnb has plenty of lawsuits and regulatory takedowns around the world as they challenge the concept of home and short-term leasing.
Or Uber, with their belief that any cars can be a taxi; challenging age-old regulations on taxis.
Or Bird, littering the streets with broken electric scooters.
Or Cryptocurrency startups challenging incumbent financial and securities regulations.
More often or not, if you are disruptive, you are disrupting a regulation. And Slack has no regulatory risk against it. Think of the amount of time and resources they have freed up not worrying about this.
A dumb product with the stickiest mechanics
Anyone can build a chat app. There are so many Slack clones. Internally, we have talked about moving out of Slack for the longest time, and yet today, I commissioned a task for my intern to build a Slackbot. Slack is super sticky.
Because Slack understood chat is a commodity, but the application ecosystem is not. So it has invested a ton of resources into encouraging extensive integrations with Slack.
And once you have enough integrations, moving out is too large a chore.