The Founders' List: Slack's Internal Memo 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' (Famous Memos) - podcast episode cover

The Founders' List: Slack's Internal Memo 'We Don't Sell Saddles Here' (Famous Memos)

Oct 08, 202014 minEp. 46
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This is Kristin O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and this is the founder list. Audible versions of essays from technology's most leaders selected by the founder community. This memo titled We don't sell saddles here was sent from Stewart Butterfield to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of slack, on July 31 2013. It had been a little under 7 months since development Morgan. It was 2 weeks before the launch of Slack's preview release, read by NFX. Build something people want.

We know that we've built something which is genuinely useful. Almost any team which adopts slack as their central application for communication will be significantly better off than they were before. That means we have something people want. However, almost all of them have no idea that they want slack. How could they? They've never heard of it. And only a vanishingly small number will have imagined it on their own.

They think they want something different if they think they want anything at all. They definitely are not looking for slack. But then no one was looking for post it notes or GUIs either. Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people's working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of slack into their terms.

A good part of that is just marketing, but even the best slogans, ads, landing pages, PR campaigns, etcetera, will fall down if they're not supported by the experience people have when they hit our site, when they sign up for an account, when they first begin using the product, and when they start using it day in, day out. Therefore, understanding what people think they want and then translating the value of slack into their terms is something we all work on.

It is the sum of the exercise of all of our crafts. We do it with copy accompanying sign up forms with fast loading pages with good welcome emails with comprehensive and accurate search with purposeful loading screens and with thoughtfully implemented and well functioning features of all kinds. Marketing from both ends.

Much has been written about product market fit in the last few years, probably as a result of the popularity of the lean startup movement, though the idea has been around much longer. The term refers to the degree to which a product could be successful given sufficient promotion, appropriate pricing, adequate customer support, and so on, Before you find that fit, all the pushing in the world won't get you up the hill.

In a classic post on Mark Andreson's old blog, he calls getting to product market fit the only thing that matters for start and offers a way of thinking about the life of the startup that divides it into 2 distinct phases before product market fit and after. Once the product fits the market, a company is able to step on the gas spending to promote a product that will actually sell.

The things you need to do before are very different from the things you need to do after, generally test and iterate versus scale and optimize. We are right in the middle of that 1st phase. It seems we're doing Beller, and there are many encouraging signs, but we're definitely still in the 1st phase, and it is very very hard to tell how far we have to go to cross over into the promised land. The last 10% is 90% of the work, etcetera.

So we should be working carefully from both the product end and the market end, doing a better and better job of providing what people want, whether they know it or not, and communicating the above more and more effectively so that they know they want it. In the best case, there's a dialectic at play here.

The product itself and the way people use it should suggest new ways of articulating the value and refinements to how we communicate the value should lead to principles which clarify decision making around product features and design. Our position is different than the one many new companies find themselves in. We're not battling out in a large, well defined market with clear incumbents, which is why we can't get away with other group chat products or poisonous slack is toasted.

Pete the fact that there are a handful of direct competitors and a muddled history of superficially similar tools, we're setting out to define a new Morgan, and that means we can't limit ourselves to tweaking the product. We need to tweak the market too. Beller the innovation, not the product. The best, maybe the only real direct measure of innovation is change in human behavior. In fact, it's 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 has ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so. By that measure, slack is a real and large innovation, It is not as eye catching as self driving cars or implantable chips.

It's not basic research y kind of stuff, but for organizations that adopted, There will be a dramatic shift in how time is spent, how communications happen, and how the James archives are utilized. There'll be changes in how team members relate to one another and hopefully significant changes in productivity. We're unlikely to be able to sell a group chat system very well.

There are just not enough people shopping for group chat systems And as pointed out elsewhere, our current fax machine works just fine. What we are selling is not the software product, the set of all the features in their implementation because there are just not many buyers for this software product. People buy software to address a need they already know they have or perform some specific tasks they need to perform Beller that is tracking sales contacts or editing video.

However, if we're selling a reduction in the cost of communication or 0 effort knowledge management or making better decisions faster or All your team communication instantly searchable available wherever you go or 75% less email or some other valuable result of adopting slack We will find many more buyers. That's why what we're selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we're able to build and ship and the means for us to get our cut.

We're selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives We're selling better organizations, better teams. That's a good thing for people to buy, and it is a much better thing for us to sell in the long run. We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams. To see why, consider the hypothetical acne saddle company. They could just sell saddles.

And if so, They'd probably be selling on the basis of things like the quality of the leather they use or the fancy adornments their saddles include. They could be selling on the range of styles and sizes available or on durability or on price, or they could sell horseback riding. Being successful at selling horseback riding means they grow the market for their product while giving the perfect context for talking about their saddles.

It lets them position themselves as the leader and affords them different kinds of marketing promotion opportunities For example, sponsoring school programs to promote riding to kids, working on land conservation or trail maps. It lets them think big and potentially be big. This isn't a new idea. There are many brands whose marketing activities or positioning has them selling something other than and usually larger than their product.

Harley Davidson sells motorcycle riding, but it specially sells freedom and independence. Most luxury brands sell something that comes down to being better than you are, richer, better looking, more attractive to those you find desirable, etcetera, my favorite recent example is a Lululemon. When they started, there was not a large market for Morgan specific athletic wear and accessories.

They sold yoga like crazy, helping people find yoga studios near their homes, hosting free classes, sponsorships, and scholarships, local ambassadors and training, etcetera. And as a result, they sold just under $1,400,000,000 worth of yoga specific athletic wear and accessories in their most recent fiscal year. But going back to the acne saddle company, the better analogy to what we are doing now is to imagine them selling horseback riding about 4000 years ago.

It is almost inevitable that centralized internal communication systems will gradually replace email for most organizations over the next 10 to 20 years, and we should do what we can to accelerate the trend and own it. We are at the beginning of a transition. We have an opportunity to both define the category and push hard for the whole market's growth. We'd be crazy not to take it because the best possible way to find product market fit is to define your own market.

Who do we want our customers to become? A few months ago, I read a fairly mediocre ebook called Who do you want your customers to become? It was mediocre because it was nearly seventy pages when it could have been 20. Not because the ideas were bad. In fact, the core ideas of the piece are fascinating, and I think very useful to us as we think about the next year or so of slack.

A central thesis is that all products are asking things of their customers to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way, and usually that means changing what one does or how one does it. It often means changing how one thinks of oneself. We are asking a lot from our customers.

We are asking them to spend hours a day in a new and unfamiliar application to give up on years or even decades of experience using email for work communication and abandon all kinds of ad hoc workflows that have developed around their use of email. We are asking them to switch a model of communication, which defaults to public, is an almost impossibly large task. Almost.

To get people to say yes to a request that large, we need to 1, offer them a reward, big enough to justify their effort, and 2, Do an exceptional near perfect job of execution. The best way to imagine the reward is thinking about who we want our customers to become. We want them to become relaxed, productive workers, who have the confidence that comes from knowing that any bit of information which might be valuable to them is only a Currier away.

We want them to become masters of their own information and not slaves overwhelmed by the never ending flow. We want them to feel less frustrated by a lack of visibility into what is going on with their team, and we want them to become people who communicate purposefully knowing that each question they ask is actually building value for the whole team.

This is what we have to be able to offer them, and it is the aim and purpose of all the work we're doing We need to make them understand what's at the end of the rainbow if they go with slack, and then we have to work our asses off in order to ensure they get there. How do we do it? We do it really, really good. The reason for saying we do an exceptional near perfect job of execution is this, When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws.

But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower That's why it's especially important for us to build a beautiful, elegant, and considerate piece of software. Every bit of grace refinement and thoughtfulness on our part will pull people along. Every petty irritation will stop them and give the impression that it is not worth it. That means we have to find all those petty irritations and quash them.

We need to look at our own work from the perspective of a new potential customer and actually see what's there. Does it make sense? Can you predict what's going to happen when you click that button or open that menu? Is there sufficient feedback to know if the click or tap worked? Is it fast enough? If I read the email on my phone and click the link, is it broken? It's 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 rough edge off until this product is as smooth as lacquered mahogany. Each of you knows really good. Each of you is able to see when things are not done well.

Certainly, we all complain enough about other people's software, and we all know how important first impressions are in our own judgments. That is exactly how others will evaluate us. 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 product before they take off for the long weekend. Putting yourself in their mind means looking at slack the way you look at some random piece of software in which you have no investment and no special Flint interest, look at it hard, and find the things that do not work. Be harsh in the interest of being excellent. Why? 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. That's convenient since there's also no point doing it if it is not really, really good. Life's too short to do mediocre work, and it is definitely too short to build shitty things. To do this well, we need to take a holistic approach and not just think about a long list of individual tasks we're supposed to get through in a given week.

We get zero points for just getting a feature out the door if it is not actually contributing to making the experience better for users or helping them to understand slack or helping us understand them. None of the work we are doing to develop the product is an end in itself. It all must be squarely aimed at the larger purpose.

Consider the teams you see in action at great restaurants and the totality of their effort, the room, the vibe, the timing, the presentation, the attention, the anticipation of your needs and, of course, the food itself. Nothing can be off. There is a great nobility in being of service to others. And well run restaurants or hotels or software companies serve with a quality that is measured by its attention to detail. This is a perfect model for us to emulate.

Ensuring that the pieces all come together is not someone else's job. It is your job, no matter what your title is, and no matter what role you play. The pursuit of that purpose should permeate everything we do, but slack is a bit more complicated than a restaurant, at least in some ways. Since it's new and less familiar, we're less able to fall back on well established best practices. That means we need to listen, watch, and analyze carefully.

We'll need to build tools to capture user's behavior and reactions. And then we'll need to take all that information and our best instincts and be continuously improving. We are an exceptional software development team, but we now also need to be an Flint development team. That's why in the first section of this doc, I said, build a customer base rather than gain market share.

The nature of the task is different, and we will work together to understand, anticipate, and better serve the people who trust us with their James communications, one customer at a time. The answer to why is this because why else would you even wanna be alive but to do things as well as you can? Now Let's do this.

For more audio essays from the people who've built companies like Instacart, Facebook, Trello, HubSpot, and Dropbox, visit the founder list at nfx.com, or subscribe to the nfx podcast at podcast.nfx.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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