This series of articles goes into detail how Slack was born out of the chat function of a video game.

Coming from the game Glitch, a team around Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov founded Slack by turning the game’s chat function into a dedicated product.

The initial vision from their slide deck was “all your team communication in one place, available equally well on your computer, phone & tablet, synced so you can always pick up where you left off, and everything available through one unified search”.

They mainly tried to solve the old email problem: Emails were splattered across organisations, everybody receiving their own unique copy. Replying or “Reply all” ended in long mail threads which quickly became incomprehensible.

Features like CC, BCC and the need to get at least a little formal with a greeting and a subject line would hinder flawless communication as well.

Thus the team decided to solve all of those problems via Slack. New employees could quickly get an overview due to all messages and channels being archived. A global search function pushed efficiency and the ability to create integrations for Slack quickly let Slack become the central brain of an organisation. Or as it is written in the article: “Slack would become your organizational brain, complete with a searchable archive of all your company knowledge”.

The article goes also into detail over the initial pricing ideas and the timeline they set for themselves in 2013:

Prototype • End of January “Good enough for us to use full time”

Alpha • End of February “Good enough for some trusted friends to try”

Private Beta • Mid-April “Good enough to be tried by some people we don’t know”

Open Beta • End of May “Good enough to be tried by the general public, with appropriate disclaimers”

Production • ??? “Good enough to charge money for”

After describing their first team members and their backgrounds in other startups like Flickr, the article ends with the description of the technology stack they’ve used.

Rather than using what they had already coded in their game, they rebuilt the code from scratch for a solid foundation.

They relied on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), as it was already an industry standard so they could focus on building the product rather than fighting the framework. Instead of writing and creating comprehensive design docs, they chose to build prototypes to quickly see if their ideas work in the real world.

This is another great and inspiring startup story . I really recommend you to read it: https://buildingslack.com/day-1