(But then no-one was looking for Post-it notes or GUIs either.) They definitely are not looking for Slack. They think they want something different (if they think they want anything at all). And only a vanishingly small number will have imagined it on their own.

How could they? They’ve never heard of it. However, almost all of them have no idea that they want Slack. That means we have something people want. We know that we have built something which is genuinely useful: almost any team which adopts Slack as their central application for communication would be significantly better off than they were before. It is presented verbatim, as written (including original pull-quotes), with two exceptions: the removal of an introductory section discussing launch logistics and replacement of a link which pointed to an internal company resource with the equivalent public link. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack’s ‘Preview Release’. The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack, on July 31st, 2013.

Stewart butterfield email