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We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
That’s why what we’re selling is organizational transformation.
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
what is sublime selling? creative flourishing
our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour.In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their ti... See more
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
Our position is different than the one many new companies find themselves in: we are not battling it out in a large, well-defined market with clear incumbents (which is why we can’t get away with “Other group chat products are poisonous. Slack is toasted.”). Despite the fact that there are a handful of direct competitors and a muddled history of su... See more
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
tweak the market
Putting yourself in the mind of someone who is coming to Slack for the first time — especially a real someone, who is being made to try this thing by their boss, who is already a bit hangry because they didn’t have time for breakfast, and who is anxious about finishing off a project before they take off for the long weekend — putting yourself in th... See more
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
first mile mindset
It is almost inevitable that centralized internal communication systems will gradually replace email for most organizations over the next 10-20 years and we should do what we can to accelerate the trend and “own it”.
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
lol but did this happen?
There’s no point doing this to be small. We should go big, if only because there are a lot of people in the world who deserve Slack. Going big also means that it will have to be really, really good. But that’s convenient, since there’s also no point doing it if it is not really, really good. Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitel... See more
Stewart Butterfield • We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
It is always harder to do this with one’s own product: we skip over the bad parts knowing that we plan to fix it later. We already know the model we’re using and the terms we use to describe it. It is very difficult to approach Slack with beginner’s mind. But we have to, all of us, and we have to do it every day, over and over and polish every roug... See more