There are products that had a stronger leg up to become a SLACK competitor or the SLACK.
The had the foundation, the infrastructure, and the people to make it happen.
But if you look at many of these applications, they were either;
- High-Investment – trying it out wasn’t an easy sell, you needed to invest time and money to make it happens.
- Closed Loops – Download software, have a big crazy profile of useless information and make it complicated to interact with different groups of people.
- Integration – want to show your work from Google Docs? What about Office365? Maybe download to Dropbox, OneDrive or Drive? All? None? Something? Anything?
The lessons in product design and development have changed;
- Companies/Organizations have limited time and money to put into costly trials. Make it quick, make it simple and reduce the time investment in getting up and running.
- If people cannot connect, they cannot use it – open propagation is key, when your app is based on user adoption, you better make it open to users. Word of Mouth in technology still carries weight and still spreads like Wildfire. We don’t email our recommendations, we talk to each other.
- Are you a Google guy? Maybe an Office365 lover? Great – you need to have integrations to both. I use Microsoft for some, Google for others, etc, etc, As Apple as shown, it’s not the device or software product that sells the goods, it’s the ecosystem, focus on one platform and you’ve alienated all the rest.
Reduce time to adoption and growth, make it easy for users to onboard with anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere and open the playing field to everyone involved, not just your friends and family.
Want to build the next SLACK or competitor to SLACK? Start there.
