Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
I see a common pattern among utility providing IT companies, that despite the core functionality can be supported by tens of people, it goes ahead and hires thousand anyways, which give raise to features that are neither core nor that anyone wanted. The company then go under as the business can’t generate enough revenue to feed the thousands of developer and management that has been brought in.
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
This is a problem with the current financing model of tech in NA; the product didn't arise strictly from user-sourced revenue growth, but from the hopes and dreams of investors who are attracted to the user growth. Revenue sourced from user demand is tied to features users almost certainly want, whereas investors want features that will continue growth. That's not always useful to existing users.
I don’t think they’re panicking about the stock price — why should they? They have plenty of runway and shouldn’t need to raise capital any time soon. I’d worry about their stock price at $10 or $5. At $20+, they’re still trading at large multiples above revenue.
Recently I found a bug in Slack, and I was communicating with their support over it. They asked me to check on the web in addition to the electron app. Now, the number of people who actually care enough to do this are a very small minority, but they are also very significant because they're happy to give Slack free QA. And as a member of this small minority that will reproduce a bug on multiple platforms and communicate back, I can say this seems pretty hostile to me and anyone else willing to pay money to do free QA for them.
peterlk|6 years ago
Look at their stock price. I bet there are a lot of tense board meetings happening right now. Culture flows from the top down, and if executives are panicking about the stock price, it makes sense that they'd lose focus. I mean, if you had stock at slack, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cutting costs and following the money instead of shipping an excellent product.
Aperocky|6 years ago
If you have a good app, keep it that way by not increasing bloat, both technically and organizationally.
hn_throwaway_99|6 years ago
1. Successful software product that is beloved by its core users goes public.
2. The valuation expectations when the company goes public are based on widely optimistic growth projections where the company grows beyond its 'natural' user base (remember 'Twitter is the new Facebook' back in the day?)
3. In order to meet those widely optimistic, unrealistic projections, the company tries a whole host of "throw against the wall and see what sticks" features to attract users outside their core. This has the effect of pissing off their core users while not really attracting many new users in any case.
4. Eventually (hopefully) the company realizes it's not going to be the next world dominating superpower, learns to be content with just hundreds of millions of users instead of billions, and gets back to focusing on making its core users happy.
Maybe can also be called the Snap-Way??
dleslie|6 years ago
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