Slack wasn’t meant to be Slack

It was a side project.
An internal tool for a gaming company that FAILED.

Yet, it became a $27.7B SaaS giant.
Here’s how Slack accidentally won SaaS. 👇

1. The Gaming Company That Died, but Left a Billion-Dollar Product Behind
Stewart Butterfield co-founded Tiny Speck, a gaming startup working on Glitch, a multiplayer online game.

They spent years building it.
It flopped.

But inside Tiny Speck, the team had built a powerful internal chat tool—something no one thought much about.

Until they did.

2. The Pivot That Changed Everything

Butterfield noticed something interesting:
💡 Glitch was dead, but their internal chat tool was actually… GOOD.
💡 It solved real pain points—better communication, better collaboration.

So they did the craziest thing…
They shut down the game and went all in on the tool.
They called it Slack.

3. The Growth Playbook That Made Slack a Giant
Slack wasn’t just another chat tool. It had a brilliant go-to-market strategy:

🚀 Freemium model – Teams could start using it for free, then get hooked.
📈 Bottom-up adoption – One person invites their team → the entire company starts using it.
🔌 Seamless integrations – Google Drive, Trello, Zoom—Slack became the hub for all work.
😃 Killer UX – Fun, simple, emoji-rich, and FAST. Unlike old-school corporate tools.

It worked.
Within 2 weeks of launch: 15,000 users.
Within a year: 500,000+ daily active users.
In 2020: Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7B.
All because a failed gaming company built something useful.

4. The 4 SaaS Lessons You Can Steal From Slack
Solve your OWN problems first – Slack was born out of an internal need.
Viral loops > Ads – Make it so good that users bring in others.
Freemium, but with real value – Don’t hold features hostage; hook users first.
Integrate where users ALREADY work – Slack didn’t replace tools, it made them better.

SaaS is never about just “building a product.”
It’s about solving problems so well that people can’t ignore you.

Slack did it.
So can you.

If you’re building SaaS and need a team that understands how to scale, we should talk.