The famous workplace chat app Slack is known for its project management capabilities. You might have heard its name in the news if you haven’t, maybe you haven’t used it yet. It is into those companies who wanted to build something else but ended up with something different. Sounds interesting? Let’s know the whole story behind why is Slack called Slack?
What is Slack?
It is a communication platform with over 12 million daily active users that makes an organization communicate more effectively and quickly. It organizes internal teams of an organization into separate sections for each. This becomes the organization’s single place for messaging, sharing files, and, of course searching them all. It has its own tools, but it also offers add-ins for other workplace tools as well.
Why Is Slack Called Slack?
Slack means “Searchable Log of All Conversation & Knowledge”. It is known to be a placeholder and the company launched it saying – “Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable and available wherever you go.”
It was launched in August 2013 but it wasn’t available for public use until 2014. There isn’t one person behind this company, there are actually 4 persons who founded this project management chat App. Stewart Butterfield (former co-founder of Flickr), Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachove developed this platform for internal use while they were creating something else.
The year was 2009. Butterfield actually wanted to build a web-based, massively multiplayer game called Glitch. It wasn’t his first time; he tried his luck in gaming in 2004 but failed. Despite the failure, he got Flicker out of it. Now, the same was going to repeat itself.
In 2010, Glitch got funds up to $5 million but it was still not available to play. It was planned to launch in late 2010 but it couldn’t. The company named Tiny Speck behind Glitch raised another $10.7 million in 2011 and launched Glitch later in the year after its beta testing. It didn’t perform as expected so Butterfield pulled the back to beta testing and was unable to launch it again. He gave the reason in an announcement in 2012 that
“Glitch has not attracted an audience large enough to sustain itself”.
So, Glitch was dead. However, the internal communication tool that helped the development of this failed game showed some potential. Something else was born again from a failed game. Tiny Speck launched this company in 2014.
Why Is It Called Slack?
It was previously codenamed as “linefeed” and then it was named Slack. Butterfield tweeted about how he got the “Slack” name.
It was the fastest-growing startup at its time because there was no competition. It was one of its kind. Butterfield stated that it will change the way people communicate. According to him, “Email will be cockroach of the internet”. He said,
“The world is in the very early stages of a 100-year shift in how people communicate, and we’re determined to push the boundaries,”
It currently has 12+ million daily active users. This is known to be worth more than $20 billion. It is being used by a large portion of the industry including the big players like Pinterest and Airbnb. It surely lives up to its name and now we know why it is called Slack?
